‘Only the USSR exploited the genius of American tank designer Walter Christie, whose inventions underwrote World War II’s best tank, the Soviet T-34.’

This sentence appears in a case study titled U.S. Intelligence and Soviet Armor, written by Major General Paul F. Gorman and published in 1985. This was far from a universal sentiment at the time, and one was just as likely to read that the T-34 was the worst tank in the world. After all, what good could it be if thousands of them failed to stop the Germans before they got all the way to Moscow? Either way, the history of the T-34 tank was still being painted in broad strokes even 45 years after the tank rolled off the assembly line. The complicated truth about the tank was still hidden from the world behind the Iron Curtain. While many recognized how important this tank was to the Soviet war effort, there was simply no source of information available for a more nuanced perspective.

The situation on the other side of the Iron Curtain was not much better. While there were detailed studies of the tank’s design and performance, they were meant for future generations of staff officers and tank designers, not for the general public. A rank and file Soviet citizen would not have access to much more than his American counterpart: basic performance characteristics and memoirs of former tankers and commanders that rarely touched on in-depth technical topics. Even if they wanted to share these details, they would likely run afoul of government censors. After all, the T-34-85 was still in service for decades after the war and even went through a modernization as late as 1960.

The collapse of the USSR opened the floodgates of free press. The saying “nature abhors a vacuum” has never been more true, and even though the documents pertaining to the development and use of the T-34 were still technically classified, this didn’t stop anyone from writing about it. Foreign currency opened a lot of doors during the turbulent 1990s and classified documents became available to domestic and foreign historians for the first time. Unfortunately, access was sporadic and even well researched publications based on these documents drowned in a sea of sensationalist pulp aimed at making a quick ruble.

It took over 65 years from the moment the T-34 tank first went into battle before official records of these battles became available to the general public. This wave of declassifications didn’t just include Soviet records, but also captured German ones stored in Fond 500 of the Central Archives of the Ministry of Defence. Photocopier after photocopier was worked to death in dusty reading halls in the Moscow suburb of Podolsk as historians rushed to finally a true picture of the tank’s debut, its triumphs and disasters, and the fates of those who developed and operated these machines.

I was not a part of that generation of historians, but I grew up glued to these glimpses into a world that was forbidden to all but a select few not so long ago. Even the first cheap black and white magazines barely above Samizdat carbon copies in quality made it obvious how much work lay ahead. While many publications still focused only on the technical aspects of the tank and relegated its operational history to a summary just a few pages long, there were those that went the extra mile and dived into why the same tank that German divisions simply ran past in June 1941 suddenly became such a huge problem for them a few months later.

While many still try to push the simplistic narratives from decades ago to this day, the story of the T-34 in World War II is a complex one. So complex, in fact, that even though my first book was about the T-34 tank I decided to leave out the topic entirely. Years later, an opportunity arose to do it justice as a part of Osprey’s Duel series.

It didn’t take long to settle on an opponent. Much like the T-34, Germany’s PzKpfw III was intended to be the main medium tank of its army, but production difficulties meant that these tanks were relatively rare during the campaigns in Poland and France. The Germans eagerly used even the early unreliable variants and there was no shortage of experience to process. With years to work out the kinks before Operation Barbarossa kicked off, the design of the PZKpfw III settled and it could be produced by the thousands. This made for an interesting foil for the T-34, which was a much newer and less refined design in 1941, not yet in widespread service following barely a year in production.

The comparison itself is not new. There is no shortage of books or articles that simply compare the gun calibre and armour thickness of the PzKpfw III and the T-34 and conclude that the more powerful weapon and thicker armour of the latter combined with the superior ‘kill-to-death ratio’ of the former mean that the T-34 suffered from some kind of irredeemable design defect. As I mentioned above, however, the situation is a complicated and nuanced one.

The earlyPzKpfw III tank with bulletproof armour, a 37mm gun, and a tremendously unreliable suspension and running gear took years to evolve into the tanks that lined up on the Soviet–German border on 22 June 1941. The T-34 design had just a year to mature. To make things worse, while new PzKpfw III tanks went on the campaign trail, where their performance could be studied and the design improved as a result, new T-34 tanks ended up in a garage (or, more often than not, under a tarpaulin in an open field). Red Army commanders knew that these were rare and valuable tanks without widely available spare parts. If they wore a tank out in training, it would be years before they could expect a replacement to be delivered. As a result, most T-34 crews trained on pre-war light tanks or even tankettes, rather than the machines they would end up driving into battle. That is, if they had time to train at all. Expansion of the Red Army to meet the growing German threat only began in 1939, meaning that new cohorts had proportionally fewer officers and NCOs to train them than before. The fresh cohort beginning their conscription terms in 1941 also had the disadvantage of not serving alongside more experienced soldiers who would have enjoyed a more favourable instructor-to-student ratio and could make up for a shortage of NCOs to some degree. This ratio would correct itself in time, but this would take years, time that the Red Army simply did not have.

In these conditions, it is not surprising that Soviet industry struggled to sustain the number of T-34 tanks on the battlefield while the number of German medium tanks only grew. Despite increasingly favourable odds from the standpoint of matériel, however, the German war machine first slipped and then stalled altogether. Panzer III vs T-34: Eastern Front 1941 explores how this was possible through the lens of a duel between the two armies’ main medium tanks.