Was wondering how Soviet AA guns fared against their counterparts in both the axis powers, and the other allied nations. Were they as groundbreaking as the T-34, or just shoddily made death-traps typical of Russian vehicles of the period?
WWII no one really had good SPAAGs. The concept came about late in the war and they weren't manufactured in any great number. Just looking at wikipedia it looks like Americans and Brits mostly built truck/halftrack mounts, while the Soviets used light tank chassis and the Germans built theirs on Panzer IV chassis. With their heavier build and enclosed turrets the German models certainly look the most formidable but I have no idea about actual performance, and as rare as they were I'm not confident there's any such material...
Well, the German Wirbelwind was at least very useful against infantry and unarmored vehicles (quad 2cm flak can do quite a number on an unarmored opponent). The Kugelblitz was rather advanced - in theory - but the war was over before it could be used.
Soviet did not put much work in SPAAG. There first real attempt were on a T-54 chassis. In WWII a truck with a gun(ranging from Maxim MG to a 85mm cannons) was the closest we get to a SPAAG. Most of there AAA were towed. Late in war soviet air power had supremacy treat from the air was small.
Actually, their first real attempt was the T-90 (no, not that T-90), although that was just a modification of the existing T-70 design and never actually saw service. After that was the ZSU-37, but by the time it saw service the Germans had already lost the air war on all fronts and it was rapidly recognized as obsolete... only 75 combat models were every manufactured.
I would like to point out that the T-34 was a shoddily made deathtrap also. Roughly 45000 out of 55000 T34s built were destroyed, and when a T-34 was destroyed on average one crewman survived.
Does that "destroyed" number also count T-34's which were knocked out but were able to be repaired and sent back into battle? Because the Soviets ended World War 2 with 25,000 tanks*... yet only had somewhere around 5,000 tanks of other models (mostly IS-2s of which a rough grand total of 3,800 were manufactured), so that means there is a gap of 10,000 tanks there... *And yes that is just in tanks, not counting armored cars, SPGs, or tank destroyers.
Yeah double (or triple or quadruple) counting is rife in vehicle loss statistics for WWII. May go dig up Bellamy's quote on it later. Also frankly the loss rates of a given design are, in a vacuum, no commentary whatsoever on a design's sturdiness. They could have lost every single T34 ever produced for good and it still wouldn't actually tell you that it was a poor design. Just that it operated in an environment that killed contemporary armor.
On average when a German or American tank was knocked out, one crewman died(1.5 for earlier sherman models), when a Russian tank was knocked out, one crewman survived.
Wasn't that mostly due to using less stabilized explosives for their ammunition? I recall hearing that around here. I'm interested in how the statistic was arrived at, though; in reality crew survival on the whole depends heavily on who wins the battle and gets to search for survivors.
Doesn't mean it was shoddy; just means there wasn't as much emphasis placed on crew survival. The conditions of the loss are also important - if it takes place on the defensive and you get overrun, or on offensive and you have to withdraw, you're going to have more losses. But if you're part of a successful offensive, your chances are much better. Also if your opponents aren't machinegunning you as you bail out. A lot of different factors in play.
Destroyed=Irrepairably damaged T34s survival rate was low because the fuel tanks were in the crew compartment. At the typical impact velocities in WWII, diesel will burn just as well as gas.
Then where are the additional 10,000 tanks the Red Army possessed? I repeat myself: the Soviets at the end of the war had 25,000 tanks (just tanks, not AFVs in general) of which roughly 5,000 were not T-34s. If the Soviets indeed only had 10,000 T-34s by the end of the war then that leaves with ~15,000 tanks... yet Soviet records clearly said they had 25,000 tanks.
Well, there are also Lend and Lease, older stuff that somehow survived and new designs. Though even that shouldn´t be able to fill up the numbers.
What is the source of your numbers and the break out by type? Are you saying that there were 1200 or so tanks that were not T-34s and IS-2 at the end of the war? Out of 12,000 lend lease and 8000 T-70 light tanks? 10,000 T-26s were built and the survivors were last used in August Storm. I've seen the numbers of remaining USSR tanks as low as 18-22,000, not 25,000. Others on the web state that there were only 6,000 surviving T-34s @EoWII.
The question is how many of those survived And if that post beneath mine is meant for me Andras, no source and nothing, it was merely a suggestion with the admittance that even that wouldn´t be able to fill out the number. I realy don´t see how you can get a statement out of it
Not you SixPack, the guy above your post, Obsessed Nuker. You posted while I was researching with the reply window open. I'll edit a quote into it.
At least part of the Russian tank survivability thing was due to tactics. To say the Russians used ONLY frontal assaults and wave attacks isn't true, their tactics developed quite a bit over the war; but when your leader is encouraging your top generals to race each other to Berlin, damn the losses, and you're facing an army where every kid has a Panzerfaust, along with very hard hitting Panthers and Tigers mixed in, both of which could take apart a T-34 without issue, losses will be high. As to the AA issue, it was something the Russians had of course, but was of limited value- as it should be; by the time they became a force worth counting, the Russians and Allies overall had air superiority and Luftwaffe raids were more a nuisance than a danger. Whereas Germany developed several more useful models- because they had lost air superiority. Necessity is the mother of invention after all.
But that reasoning only applied to the commanders of the 1s Ukrainian and 1st Belorussian fronts. Those were the only ones aimed at Berlin. By 1945 there were at least 7 other fronts actice. And the T-34-85 could take on any of the German tanks, which by 1945 were becoming quite rare. Rare was the panzer division that even had half of its nominal tank strength. And the majority of them wasn't even deployed against 1st Ukrainian and 1st Belorussian fronts. 6th SS Panzer army, the last major German tank force of the war was deployed in Hungary, and Hitler believing the main Soviet attack falling onto Prague first further stripped the forces along the Oder-Neisse from their panzers.
The numbers aren't broken up by type but... http://www.dupuyinstitute.org/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000005.html I admit that I mostly used guesswork when it came to how many tanks that were not T-34s were left by the end of the war, but I don't think its an unreasonable number given that the T-34 and IS-2 were the only two tanks in mass production in January of 1945. I actually haven't been able to find any sources that break the numbers up by tank type... Of course, this source does say tank losses which is even more vague then destroyed. EDIT: And re-reading, the man does in fact include Soviet SPGs in that number, but not German ones (apparently). Going to have to run about and find some more numbers... Yeah, and how many of those survived to 1945? The Soviets in 1941 alone lost ~20,000 tanks... of which the vast majority were T-26s. Thats possible, although the latter number still leaves a discrepancy. I really doubt the authenticity of that source. EDIT2: Okay, according to wikipedia the researcher in question (Stephen Zaloga) estimates that ~55% of Soviet tank strength at war's end was T-34s. Thus, even assuming he includes SPGs and tank destroyers in his 25,000 figure, that means there were just shy of 14,000 T-34s in May of 1945. However, according to wiki a more recent Russian source (from 2001 in a book The Unknown T-34) thinks the number was even higher, although specific are not given. Nope, we've already veered off topic.
The first post in the dupuy link shows a remaining EoW tank str of 21,000. That includes the entire year of production for 1945. If you ignore half of 1945's production that is 18,850 on hand, it should actually be less because that includes all of May and June (~18,150) If 55% of that is T34s (9980), then when I posted that 45,000 out of 55,000 T34s were destroyed the numbers work out with 10,000 left.
I don't think the tank production of 1945 is for the entire year. According to this[1] wikipedia page, total tank production for 1945 was 14,160 (of which 12,110 were T-34-85s). That would make the production rate roughly 1,180 tanks per month... or 4,720 for the first four months of 1945. That is sufficiently close to the number in the Dupuy link which is 4,384. So Zaloga was obviously only counting the first four months of tank production[2], thus we can count the full number of tanks manufactured 1945 in the Dupuy link. With that in mind, the calculation should be the following: 25,500 (approx Soviet Tank Inventory, Jan. 1 1945[2]) - 8,700 (approx Soviet tank losses to May 1 1945) + 4,384 (approx Soviet tank production to May 1 1945) = 21,184. Fifty-five percent of 21,184 is 11,651. That is indeed rather close to 10,000 although not as close as your cited 9,980 number. [1]Embedding link tool isn't working: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_combat_vehicle_production_during_World_War_II [2]My mistake on this in the last post when I said this was as-of-May 1945. EDIT: And now it occurs to me that this really has no bearing on whether the T-34 actually was a deathtrap or not. I mean consider: how many German Tiger-I Tanks were manufactured (1,347) and how many were destroyed (???) by the end of the war? I'm willing to bet the percentage of survivors is less then the T-34 (which is ~20%). Does the even smaller percentage of survivors mean the Tiger-I is even more of a death trap then the T-34?
