T34-85

Sure, as unpleasant as it sounds.

 

Check your PM's!

 

That's a great video, and supports my evolving thesis that NOBODY made really good tanks during WW2.

Edit: thinking about it, that black oxide might be deliberate, but something must have gone wrong to promote those cracks.

 

WW2 tanks generally I think were good/crap - enormous technological strides, but pretty much every one had a significant achilles heel.

As for the armour, it might also have been the case that the Soviets finished their armour with a bit of face hardening, which might account for the blacking AND the cracks. I'll make a mental note to sniff this out.

 

I assume the plates weren't already cracked before they were fitted, and the only way RHA would crack in situ would be if it really was terrible quality. But the only external causes of cracking I can think of would be the welding process, which again suggests poor quality RHA, or a dab of hardening - most likely flame hardening as you suggest.

All the British armoured and scout cars produced with 14mm "cemented plate" had cracking issues, which were never really solved, except by substitution with RHA. I think in every unit with Humber Armoured Cars, there was always one out of action with cracked plates.

 

Thinking about it, why would anybody face harden a roof plate? Even the Germans only hardened their frontal plates. That roof plate has to be terrible quality RHA. Odds on the glacis plate is too.

 

The last nation with working T34-85's was as I recall Laos and they gifted one to the Russian Army, which was used as the only tank on Army Day / Victory day Parade in Moscow in 2022.

 

Currently reading The T-34 Goes to War by Ulanov and Shein, which was a surprisingly decent book put out by World of Tanks. In its appendices it has a 15 May 1941 secret memo from Deputy People's Commissar of Medium Machine Building of the USSR A. Goreglyad on improvements made to the T-34, part of which reads, "A great deal of work has been done to reduce cracking, as a result of which the percentage of hulls with fractures was down from 90% in October 1940 to 50% in March 1941. A particularly sharp reduction was noted in the sides: there were 68 fractures in October 1940, and there have been none at all since January."

A senior engineer from Section 1, Branch 3, Armor Directorate of the Army responded: "The percentage of hulls with fractures has been reduced, but weld quality remains low."

 

I thought they had sorted out the important production issues by the time the T-34/85 came out. From my memory of browsing the Tank Arcihives site, by 1944 the T-34/85 was in the same category as the Cromwell and M4A3 in terms of engine reliability and durability. There's also an article there in which the Soviet testers are criticizing late war German armour in comparison to their own. I took this to mean that Soviet armour was by that time of high quality, and maybe officially it was, but you can't really argue with the evidence from tank restorers who state that plate cracking is fairly common.

I was of the opinion until I saw that Aqua Testing video that the T-34/85 and IS-2 were, on balance, the best tanks of the war, but now I'm not so sure.