T-34: Mythical Weapon
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Title and Publisher: | T-34: Mythical Weapon by Robert Michulec and Miroslaw Zientarzewski; English Language Version published by Air Connection, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada 2006 in conjunction with Armageddon Books |
ISBN: | 0-9781091-0-4 |
Media and Contents: | 520 pp. with both color and B&W illustrations, drawings and 1/35 scale plans |
Price: | USD$95.00 available online from http://www.airconnection.on.ca |
Review Type: | FirstRead |
Advantages: | Very comprehensive coverage of nearly all of the wartime models of the T-34 tank and its tank variants; excellent set of plans and photos covering the details of the different versions of the tank by model and by factory; indispensable modeler's aid to the T-34 |
Disadvantages: | Historical section suffers badly from the author's biases, subjective analyses and lack of overall knowledge of the Soviet tank industry in the 1930s and 1940s |
Recommendation: | Highly Recommended (less the historical section) |
FirstRead
Nobody thought back in 1971 that
when R. P. Hunnicutt published his book "Pershing" at the then
unheard-of price of $20 a copy that both he and his writing format
would eventually stretch to ten books and a complete history of
American armored vehicles. These ten volumes have since been
recognized as the "gold standard" for objective analysis of specific
subjects, and are considered to be the best "one-stop" histories of
their subjects. True, they are not perfect and modelers will always
find some complaint about missing items or a lack of coverage of
others, but overall they are the reference standard for historical
analysis of armored vehicles.
The same can be said to a great degree about the series of "Panzer
Tracts" books from researchers Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle, which
cover German vehicles to the same relatively objective level of
detail.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and relative freedom of the
Russian Press, for years many modelers and historians have been
hoping to see the same level of coverage and presentation for many
of the Soviet tanks. Thus far some excellent histories have begun to
appear from the factories that built these tanks, such as the "Malyshev"
factory in Kharkov, birthplace of the T-34, and the Ural Railway
Wagon Factory in Nizhniy Tagil that built that tank, the T-54/T-55,
and T-72 tanks. But these are factory histories and present the
factories's viewpoints, which are somewhat colored by the pride
taken in their products.
When this book was announced some time ago, the hopes of many
historians and modelers is that this book would be the "Hunnicutt"
version of the T-34's history and as such very useful to all
concerned. Now that it has been printed and is available, upon
reading it the sad fact is that such is not the case; while the
modelers win big on the book, the historians will have to wait for
another attempt from another author.
What the book does provide is the following material. The first 260
pages cover the history of the tank and its development; the next 86
pages cover the T-34 in Polish service; then come 96 pages on detail
photographs of the various T-34s from any of the six factories which
built the tank; then 58 pages of 1/35 scale plans and drawings of
the tank in detail, including "stripped down" hulls, turrets and
entire vehicles; and lastly 20 pages of color photographs of museum
tanks and color broadsides of WWII Soviet vehicles.
As a professional Russian linguist for 33 years I am a bit put off
by the fact that the transliterations from Russian are all done
using Polish transliteration and not standard English ones, as
accepted by most universities and the US Government, which can make
tracing some items back very difficult. Some are easy, e.g. the
Polish "cz" for the Cyrillic character for "ch" or Polish "c" for
Cyrillic "ts", but most are not. But this is understandable
considering that the book was written in Polish, so it just has to
be accepted from the first. (I do wish that they would be careful on
some things though; the UZTM factory [Uralskiy Zavod dlya
Tyazhyelogo Mashinostroyeniya or Ural Factory for Heavy Machinery
Construction) keeps getting transposed as UTZM. Oh well.)
The book is presented in European A4 size format, and literally
stuffed to the gills with around 1,000 photographs of the tank in
action. While many of the photos are ex-German showing destroyed
T-34s rather than factory shots of the tanks, from a modeler's
standpoint they show details of service vehicles and not "parade
ground" ones as well as markings. As many are destroyed, it also
shows some sections of the tank not usually visible.
The detail shots are very useful as they sort out which tanks were
built by what factories and when. It does fall into the same trap of
the popular "Modeler's Guide to the Sherman Tank" by Pete Harlem in
which arbitrary terms are used to describe the different parts of
the tanks. while each component of the T-34 had a factory drawing
(indicated by a 34.xx.xxx or 135.xx.xxx identification number) most
of these are not yet available to researchers so the author has come
up with his own generic terms. (As a case in point, recent
information from Russian researchers on the KV-1 tank shows the
turret was considered "parts group 57" and all turrets for that tank
had a number ending in 57, e.g. 57, 157, 257, or 957.)
The plans by Witold Hazuka are incredibly detailed, and should solve
many problems faced by modelers who are trying to replicate a
specific factory's tank in a specific time frame. They by themselves
are worth the "entry price" for this book.
For anyone specifically interested in Polish T-34s and their
operational history, the book covers it in amazing detail, down to
serial numbers and which units received which tanks.
But the book falls down badly when it comes to the history of the
T-34 and the amazing path it had to follow to even get into
production, let alone "roll with the punches" to adapt to wartime
needs.
First off, it needs to be stated that the T-34 was a product of the
Soviet military-industrial complex during the height of the Soviet
Union's rise to power. The author is a Pole. Ignoring the history of
just the 20th Century, the Poles and the Russians fought with each
other on and off for over 400 years. Each one would take turns
dominating the other, and the Ukrainians likewise were involved
(recall that the euphemistic term for the invasion of Poland by the
USSR in 1939 was the "liberation of the western Ukraine" and you see
the point.) The bottom line is that even today there is little love
lost between Poles and Russians, even with a shared Slavic heritage.
Mr Michulec has unfortunately allowed these old biases to color his
views of the T-34 and to take cheap shots at both the tank and its
designers at every opportunity. These show up both consciously in
his writing and in the selection of as many photos of destroyed
T-34s with Germans gleefully posing with the tanks as he can seem to
locate.
Among many of the problems he has with his history is presenting as
evenhanded a picture as possible. One thing is a lack of knowledge
of the fact that both the Germans and Soviets considered tank losses
as combat losses and "non-returning losses" (Soviet term.) What this
means is that if a unit sends 50 tanks into combat, 30 are lost but
25 are later repaired and returned to service, the losses reported
out are only 5 tanks. The other side, who knocked them out on the
battlefield, will claim 30 tanks destroyed. (Tom Jentz has noted
this with the Tiger I, as one of the true mysteries about that tank
is how many troops and other weapons systems were lost recovering
them under fire to be repaired.)
Not understanding this fact causes Mr Michulec to call actual Soviet
heroes like Mikhail Katukov of the 1st Guards Tank Corps a liar and
somebody guilty of lying to his superiors. In point of fact, Katukov
was considered one of the best Soviet tank corps commanders and
later on one of the prime reasons that the T-34 became the main
Soviet combat tank and the KV-1 was not. Katukov was the only Soviet
commander of the early part of the war who could stand up to Zhosif
Kotin, the KV-1's designer and a "connected" chap who had married
Kliment Voroshilov's goddaughter, hence ensuring the KV (which Kotin
named for Voroshilov) would be produced and honored as a "war
winning weapon", that it was a piece of junk and got more Soviet
soldiers killed than it saved. Some basic research would have shown
this, but Mr Michulec chose to "cherry pick" facts to suit his view
of things and not look at either the political or physical
conditions of the time.
Recent information out of Russia confirms the suspicion of some
western analysts that all things in the Soviet Union were really
more dependent upon cliques and groups of "connected" people –
referred to by Russian writers as "clans" – and that had a greater
impact on the progress of their industry and army than anything
else. The T-34 came out of a fight between the "Leningrad" clan,
headed by Kotin, and the arising of the "Kharkov" clan under Mikhail
Koshkin, who had been sent to Kharkov after the purges in 1937 to
bend that factory to follow guidance from Leningrad.
There is not sufficient room in a simple book review to recount the
entire history of the T-34, but Mr Michulec missed most of the
pertinent facts that the "Leningrad" clan made four distinct
attempts to bury the T-34 or fling it on the dustheap of history,
all of which failed. Part of the reason was the intercession of V.
A. Malyshev, who became the Peoples Commissar for Medium Industrial
Production (a euphemism for tank production) and became a champion
of the T-34 as a forward looking vehicle unlike the clumsy and
overwrought KV-1.
While Mr Michulec raves about the T-34M tank design, which became
stillborn on 22 June 1941 when the Germans invaded, he seems to have
failed to grasp the fact this design was being forced on the
"Kharkov" clan by Kotin's cronies; scale up the drawings of the
Leningrad-designed T-50 light tank by about 30% and overlay them on
the T-34M and the origins of the vehicle's design are very apparent.
The T-34 did have a great number of failings, many due to its
production and design flaws and others due to the failure of the
Soviet high command to recognize the need for two simple but
critical items, namely a radio set in every tank and a dedicated
commander to both observe the battlefield and direct the tank's
operations. The T-34 did not get the former until much later in the
war, and did not get the latter until the advent of the main
production models of the T-34-85 in early 1944. It suffered from
being cramped inside, dark, possessed of poor visibility of the
battlefield, having production of variable quality, and poorly
trained crews and command staff. The gunsights were boresighted for
only 750 meters so any gunnery over that distance was pure luck. It
took quite a bit of work to fix most of these problems or at least
get to the point where they were acceptable problems.
While any of these subjects deserve fair treatment, that is not what
they received from Mr Michulec, which is unfortunate. He did seem to
have access to a great deal of good material, some new, and also
cites many of the same books I possess and have read in Russian on
the history of Soviet armored vehicles. He could have produced a
good book about the somewhat convoluted history of the tank and its
method of staggering to greatness (so to speak) but instead he has
launched a petty diatribe against it, with many items of innuendo
and personal beliefs subjectively overlaid on its history.
Overall, while I seriously think few modelers will read the
historical section other than to check out the wealth of
photographs, it is a shame that the book will not be the "Hunnicutt's
history of the T-34." For that we must still wait.
Recommended.
Thanks to Steve Zaloga for the review copy.
Text and Images by Cookie Sewell
Page Created 11 February, 2007
Page Last Updated
10 February, 2007