T34: The Queen of Tanks Decisive Weapons


T34: The Queen of Tanks

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Dawn, July 12th 1943.

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Near Kursk, on the Russian Steppes, 500 Soviet tanks prepared to charge their German enemies.

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The T-34 tank is about to change the course of history.

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The Red Army's T-34 was a war winner.

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It represents for the Russians achievement, sacrifice, heroism, diligence -

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all the qualities which they called forth from themselves in order to win this war.

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For four years, Hitler's panzers have reigned supreme on the battlefields of Europe.

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But in the T-34, they meet their match.

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They just rolled over us. I thought it was the end of my life.

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The Soviet Union had fought its way back from the brink of extinction.

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At Kursk, it would turn the tide of war in the east.

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This is the story of the tank that led the fightback.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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In the summer of 1941,

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Western Europe lay at the feet of Hitler's all-conquering armies.

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Poland, Belgium, Holland, France: all humbled in lightning campaigns.

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The lexicon of war had a new word - blitzkrieg.

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Blitzkrieg combined planes, artillery and infantry.

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Central to the strategy were tanks:

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the German panzers.

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Blitzkrieg worked as the term itself expresses -

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lightning war, war at high speed.

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The tank provided both firepower and mobility.

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That combination was crucial.

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The panzer corps attacked in huge numbers on narrow fronts.

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The massive panzer onslaughts gave rise to a new phenomenon -

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tank terror.

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Panzers were invincible and unstoppable.

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Europe was theirs.

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Henry Mettelman was a young panzer driver in occupied France.

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It became a kind of habit to believe it almost.

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Where Germans attack, they succeed.

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In one of the speeches Hitler said,

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"Wo der Deutsches Soldat seinen fuss hinsetzt, da geht keine andere hin."

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Where the German soldier puts his foot down, no other can go there.

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In spring 1941, Germany aimed its panzers at the biggest target yet - the Soviet Union.

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It was to be Hitler's biggest prize.

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The Red Army was the world's largest force - two million men.

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But the Army, like the country, was dominated by Joseph Stalin.

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Throughout the '30s, he had purged the Red Army of its best generals

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and signed a peace pact with Hitler.

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In 1941, Stalin dismissed warnings that Hitler planned to invade.

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Stalin's policy in a nutshell was this -

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to postpone the possibility or the prospect of war as long as possible.

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He refused to institute mobilisation, even when the evidence of the Germans' imminent attack was there.

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And so on June 22nd 1941, Operation Barbarossa began.

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Hitler's largest blitzkrieg met an unprepared Red Army.

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The plan was simple - to reach Moscow in six weeks and destroy the Communist state.

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The panzers went on their crusade.

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The Nazis, they had the ability to bring some holiness into it all.

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That we are fighting a holy war

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and it is the duty of us to defend Europe against threat.

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I, personally...I did believe it!

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To my shame, I honestly believed that not only were we the greatest nation on earth, the Herrenrasse,

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but it was also our God-given duty to defend Europe against the threat.

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The surprise was total.

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The Soviet forces were overwhelmed.

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Hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers died or were taken captive.

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It was a catastrophe for the Red Army.

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There wasn't enough of anything - no adequate trained reserves, no tanks, NO tanks,

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no ammunition, no artillery, no air cover, no manpower.

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It is a gigantic story of deficit.

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-MORSE CODE BLEEPS

-It seemed nothing could halt the panzers' drive on Moscow.

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But unknown to German intelligence,

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a secretly developed weapon was about to make its entrance.

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The T-34 tank.

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For the first time, it was German soldiers experiencing tank terror.

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The first sighting was 17 days after the start of Barbarossa,

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when a single T-34 appeared

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and began attacking a German armoured column

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and before it was through, it cut a nine-mile swath of destruction,

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before, finally, the Germans got a 100mm gun behind it and destroyed it.

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But it destroyed roughly 40 armoured vehicles.

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I pulled up with my tank next to it

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and I looked at the T-34 and I looked at my...

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what you'd call a cigarette box as compared,

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and I thought, "If I have to confront that tank,

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"I haven't got a chance!"

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Russian engineers had worked in secrecy on the T-34 for six years.

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The Germans were caught unawares.

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Wartime T-34s can be seen in a tank park outside Moscow,

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where they were first tested.

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This is what gave the Germans such a fright in July 1941.

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This particular model is a 1943, 76mm gun-armed, early variant.

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It was this tank's predecessor that met the Germans on the battlefield.

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What surprised the German gunners is the shells they were using -

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the standard 37mm and 50mm shells - would bounce off this tank's armour.

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There's a heavily sloped arrangement of armour on the hull and turret.

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The tank was built like that in front.

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If you hit it like that,

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your shooting just went off.

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You had no chance to penetrate it.

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The T-34's sloping armour was revolutionary, but that wasn't all.

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Russian designers had scoured the globe for the best ideas -

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the speed and mobility of American tank design, ironically dismissed by the US military as too eccentric.

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The great thing about the tracks on the T-34 was their sheer width.

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For a tank weighing 34 tons, it had very wide tracks, with waffle plates

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which allowed the tank to traverse over snow and soft ground

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that German tanks would sink into.

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The T-34's mobility and armour made it a rapier even for novice drivers.

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Alexandr Fadin was 17 when he drove his first T-34.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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The T-34 had a 76mm gun -

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in 1941, by far the biggest gun mounted on a tank.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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Spent shell cases drop into the back of the turret and fall to the floor.

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So shells fall about inside the tank while your other hand tries to bring in new shells.

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Tank to tank, the T-34 could crush the panzer.

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But in 1941, the Soviet Union had fewer than 1,000 frontline T-34s.

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All were committed to a desperate fight for the Soviet capital.

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As winter fell in 1941, the German advance on Moscow had been halted.

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The long war began. Tank factories and workshops were the battleground.

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The German army in 1941 not only caught the Russians unawares,

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but made inroads into the industrial heartland of western Russia.

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The only alternative was to move all these factories.

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It was the largest ever industrial migration - over a thousand factories bodily uprooted,

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put onto railway trucks and sent into the eastern hinterland.

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Faced with certain destruction, tank factories moved to a new base hidden behind the Ural mountains.

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The giant tank factory, Chelyabinsk, came to be called Tankograd -

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the tank-building city.

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It was more - several cities in fact.

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Here in Tankograd, the Soviets set out to rebuild their tank army from scratch,

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drawing on their largest single resource.

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'Throughout the USSR, thousands of meetings were held at the outset of the war,

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'to call upon every woman to make herself available for war.

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'Thousands of Soviet women stand steadfast at the front.

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'Defence is not enough.

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'Hit back - that's the answer.'

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Ekatarina Petlyuk was one of the first women to train in the T-34.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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There were altogether some 800,000 women serving in operational combat roles in the Red Army.

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Women in the tank forces were as important as they were in the artillery regiments.

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They had an important part to play.

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They were not there simply for show or for propaganda purposes.

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They were there to fight.

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Berte Mendeleeva was an instructor

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in one of the tank schools that had sprung up to mould the new army.

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It was in the heart of Tankograd.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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The school had no textbooks.

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What it has was an endless supply of men and women...and T-34s.

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A new Red Tank Army was taking shape.

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They'd see their tanks being built through the whole production process.

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As the tanks were being built, they were given tactical training. It was on-the-job training with the tank.

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So as the tank rolled forward on flat cars to the battlefront,

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trained crews went with them.

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Throughout 1942, T-34s poured out of Tankograd

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and were sent straight to the front line.

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Inside Tankograd, life had only one purpose -

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to turn out more tanks.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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'Here, in the calm and quiet, sleeps young Ivan,

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'while his mother works as a welder in the hubbub of a tank factory.'

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Women and children on starvation rations slaved to turn out T-34s.

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Most Russians realised if they didn't work, they would die.

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They would die in a horrible way -

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under German occupation or maybe even under Soviet coercion.

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So it was work or die.

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Meeting production targets became more than a duty: it became a way of life.

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High producers became Soviet heroes.

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The effort was gruelling,

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but it worked.

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In Tankograd, T-34 production times had been slashed in half.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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Ever more T-34s rolled off the assembly line -

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15,000 in 1943 alone.

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German soldiers in the front line realised what they were up against.

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We always had been told the Russians are no good.

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They are not great fighters. Their weaponry is not as good as ours.

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We are technologically the superior nation.

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In many ways, that was true.

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But like the T-34 and other weapons, they were the weapons of simplicity.

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You just could use a tank for what you wanted to use it for -

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not for beautiful manoeuvres.

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In that, they were superbly effective.

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The troops, when they were visited by the technical representatives,

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urged the German technical community and the German staff

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to get a hold of a captured T-34,

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copy it, and produce it as quickly as they could.

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However, that was far from what happened.

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The German technical community was too arrogant to believe

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that these Russians had produced a tank SO advanced

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that there was no need to carry the technology any further.

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Just duplicate and produce the tank.

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Instead, the Germans designed a series of complex, sophisticated and difficult-to-produce tanks.

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The new generation of German tanks were designed to counter the T-34.

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Hitler himself demanded ever larger and heavier designs,

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culminating in the 55-ton Tiger...

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nearly twice the weight of the T-34.

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The Tiger was the tank Hitler believed would smash the Red Army

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and break the deadlock in the east.

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But the fine engineering required by the new tank,

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slowed down overall tank output.

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Germany fell behind in the numbers game.

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In 1943, it produced 6,000 tanks.

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Hitler was eager to get them into battle.

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A bulge in the front line around the town of Kursk

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was targeted for a fresh blitzkrieg.

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The 250-mile Kursk salient was the stage for a titanic confrontation -

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as much between two production philosophies as between two armies.

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The Battle of Kursk, in early July 1943,

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was the largest armoured engagement in World War II,

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indeed, perhaps the largest armoured engagement ever.

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For the first time, the Red Army had a prepared strategic defensive,

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which meant building up the largest strategic reserve ever in World War II on the eastern front,

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mobilising their armour, building up massive defensive lines and waiting for the German assault.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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This was a different Red Army from 1941.

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They understood the enemy. They were ready and trained.

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The T-34 was the weapon they needed.

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Stalin committed over 3,500 tanks to the front line.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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The Russians set huge, massive and deep mine fields

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and prepared what amounted to a killing zone

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for the Germans to go through.

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The Germans, on the other hand, had massed much of their best armour -

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about 2,500 tanks - into this salient,

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and prepared to just burst through as they had on many occasions before.

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The uneasy peace around Kursk was broken at dawn on the 5th July 1943.

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A rain of high explosives announced the blitzkrieg.

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But from the outset it was clear -

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the Soviet defences were formidable.

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The Russians had put up barbed-wire barriers, rolls of barbed wire.

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Somehow my tank caught some of them,

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and I shouted back to my commandant that I could not steer any more.

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We had equipment, tools, on the tank and he said,

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"Stay here and jump out and we'll stay in position."

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They were in the turret and still shooting.

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I went underneath and I saw Russian tanks moving around from where I was.

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That sound was a horrible sound.

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There was a T-34 something like 50 yards away.

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There was a feeling in me...

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It can blow up any time! And it did.

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And I felt the heat of the flame of my tank

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and that, too, is a horrible feeling.

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You look at it and try to get away from the flame because it's so hot.

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You realise your mates are in there and you realise they haven't got a chance in hell to get out of that.

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They are your good friends.

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For seven days, the Germans pounded the Russian lines.

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Hitler had over 2,000 tanks there.

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Eventually, the panzers breached Russian defences near Prokhorovka.

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It was a highly critical situation

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because the Germans had in fact succeeded in making a breakthrough and Prokhorovka was vital.

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So what the Russians had to do at all costs was to stop a breakthrough.

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How they stopped it was by throwing in a tank army.

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The Red Army now had more tanks than the Germans.

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The T-34s rolled forward to confront the mighty Tigers.

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Hopelessly outgunned by the Tigers,

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the T-34s had no choice but to charge.

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To penetrate the Tigers' armour, T-34s had to get in close.

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It was a lethal battle. Yet it wasn't only unusual in the scale,

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but also the ferocity of fighting.

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The tanks charged at one another

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and fought at point-blank range.

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The idea of taking prisoners was absurd.

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It was a fight to the death.

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The battle raged for 12 hours.

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Over 700 German and Russian tanks

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lay smouldering over an eight-mile front.

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Hitler's last blitzkrieg was smashed by the T-34.

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The result was simple.

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After Kursk, in 1943, the German army was condemned to retreat.

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The German army never advanced again in the east.

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Within weeks of the Battle of Kursk,

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a Soviet counteroffensive began.

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T-34s spearheaded the attacks that retook Russian cities one by one.

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Now, Russian guns fired in celebration.

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IN RUSSIAN:

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For two years, the T-34s harried the retreating Germans.

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On April 30th 1945, Adolf Hitler heard the T-34s roll into Berlin.

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Hours later, he took his own life.

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For the Russians, the T-34 was a war-winning weapon.

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It was superb in battle but it represents much more.

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It represents the fact that they won a stupendous victory over fascism.

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That it was so well handled by their troops, is a source of pride in the capability of their Army.

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The fact that it was there, in so many thousands and thousands,

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is a tribute to the diligence,

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to the devotion, to the patriotism, to the self-sacrifice,

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not only of the soldiers, but of the population as a whole.

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It represents triumph in enormous adversity -

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adversity we've never even imagined.

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Subtitles by Marie Campbell BBC Scotland - 1996

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THEY SING IN RUSSIAN

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