The Tank Museum
Published 5 Sept 2025The T-34 is a symbol of Soviet resistance, industrial power, and triumph against fascism. But in 1941, this wasn’t the tank the Red Army really wanted because they had plans for something even better. So it might not have been the tank they wanted – but it was the tank they had.
The T-34/76 was a bit of a mixed bag. It had some superb strengths – such as the Kharkiv V-2 engine, sloped armour and the Christie suspension systems. But other traits, such as the cramped turret and a dodgy gearbox, left a lot to be desired. The T-34M was designed to improve on these shortcomings … but Operation Barbarossa would see an end to this aspiration.
When the German Army invaded in 1941, the Soviets were caught well and truly on the back foot. Improving the imperfect T-34 was no longer a priority and quantity was prioritised over everything else.
The next attempt to improve the T-34 was the T-43. It took on many of the upgrades intended for the T-34M – including torsion bar suspension, thicker armour and a larger turret. The one thing it needed was a bigger gun – especially now that Panthers had made their debut at The Battle of Kursk. However, it was realised that production of a new vehicle would impact the production of T-34s, which were still desperately needed.
Soviet pragmatism kicked in. Instead of creating a whole new tank, they combined the tried and tested hull of the T-34, and married them up with the improved turret and larger gun of the later T-43s. This would become the iconic T-34/85 – one of the most important tanks in history.
For a tank they didn’t exactly want but got stuck with, the T-34 story turned out pretty well for the Soviets. This “not-quite-right design” from 1940 has gone on to leave an unexpected legacy as a tank that played a major role in winning World War Two. With such a legacy, it’s interesting to consider that under different circumstances, the T-34 as we know it could have been a mere footnote in Soviet tank design.
00:00 | Introduction
00:41 | Not the Tank They Wanted?
04:15 | Kharkiv V-2: Chelpan’s Engine
05:39 | Koshkin’s Tank
08:49 | T-34M – A Better T-34
10:37 | Desperate Times, Desperate Measures
12:48 | Quantity is Quality
15:24 | T-43: Another, Better T-34
17:29 | T-34/85
20:11 | An Unintended Legacy
(more…)
January 4, 2026
September 14, 2025
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August 17, 2025
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January 21, 2025
October 2, 2024
QotD: Alternative history Operation Barbarossa
Trying to predict specific events is of course a mug’s game, but the trend lines are easy to spot. The danger is the nearly irresistible temptation to retcon psychological events into political decisions.
Knowing full well how dumb it is to bring up World War II on the Internet, consider that a pretty reasonable case can be constructed for Operation Barbarossa. Having purged all their competent, experienced officers, the Red Army had just gotten their clocks cleaned by the Finns in the Winter War. Yeah, the Soviets “won” in the end, but with that disparity of forces, there’s pretty much no possible “win” that doesn’t look like a loss … and the Soviets, to put it mildly, were nowhere near that best-case scenario. Moreover, even if you took the show trials for exactly that — kangaroo courts — their very existence showed there was a deep rift at the very top of the Soviet leadership. Anyone, not just Hitler, could be forgiven for thinking that the Soviet Union would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.1
It works the other way, too. If we accept the “Suvorov Thesis”, that Hitler only attacked Stalin because Stalin was gearing up to attack Hitler, then we can easily construct a similar case from The Boss’s perspective: The Wehrmacht can’t play defense. The one time they came up against anything approaching a real opponent with technological parity (the Battle of Britain), it was at best a bloody draw, more than likely a stinging defeat. And the Hitler regime was reeling, internally. No show trials for der Führer, but Rudolf Hess, who was at least the number three man in the Reich and at the time Hitler’s heir apparent, had just defected to the British. Anyone, not just Stalin, could be forgiven for thinking that the Third Reich would collapse under one big sledgehammer blow.
See what I mean? Both of those cases are quite plausible, and fit with most known historical facts … and yet, they’re retcons. “Rationalizations” might even be a better word, because the thing is, even though those arguments are “logical”, and might indeed have been convincing to important people at the time, that’s not why Hitler did what he did, or why Stalin would’ve done what he would’ve done under the Suvorov Thesis. No, the truth is simpler, and much more horrifying: They would’ve done it anyway, because that’s who they were.
That’s what the Castle Wolfenstein people got right about the Nazis. Same deal with that Amazon show (which was interesting for a season) The Man in the High Castle. In the real world, there’s no possible way the Nazis could’ve invaded the USA, no matter how it turned out on the Eastern Front …
… but in the real world they would’ve tried nonetheless, somehow, because that’s just who they were. Everything Stalin, Khrushchev, et al did during the Cold War here in the real world, Hitler, Heydrich, and the gang would’ve done in the Castle Wolfenstein world where the Battles of Stalingrad and Kursk went the other way.2 They couldn’t have done any different, without being different people, and while it’s fun to speculate on questions like “who would’ve been the Nazi Gorbachev, who self-destructed the Reich by attempting however you say ‘perestroika‘ in German”, it’s not really germane.
Severian, “The Man in the High Chair”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-05.
1. And Soviet losses were stupendous, utterly mind-boggling, in the first few months of Barbarossa. Tanks and planes destroyed in their tens of thousands, prisoners captured in millions. Even as it became clear that OKW had underestimated Red Army strength by orders of magnitude, it was still almost inconceivable that they had anything left to fight with. Just one more push …
2. This is actually the world of a fun novel, Robert Harris’s Fatherland.
August 15, 2024
Yet another revisionist history of World War II
In the latest anonymous review at Astral Codex Ten, the book to be considered is How the War Was Won by Phillips Payson O’Brien:
To a first approximation, there are a million books about World War II. Why should you care about How the War Was Won (hereinafter “HtWWW”) by Phillips Payson O’Brien?
- It provides a new, transformative view of the conflict by focusing on production of key goods and what affected that production instead of the ups and downs of battles at the front.
- That particular lens used can (and should) be applied outside of just World War II, and you can get a feel for how that might be done by reading HtWWW.
- I have lectured about World War II and read many, many books about it. I have never texted friends more excerpts of a book than this one.
I have some criticisms of HtWWW, but if the criticisms dissuade you from reading the book, I will have failed. These complaints are like tut-tutting Einstein’s penmanship.
The Wikipedia-Level Story of World War II (and O’Brien’s Counterargument)
To understand why O’Brien’s argument is so novel, you need to know the modern-day conventional understanding of the story of World War II. Here is my summary of the conventional narrative of World War II:
- Germany conquered Poland and France. It tried to bomb the UK into submission/maybe enable an invasion. That effort failed when Germany was defeated in the Battle of Britain, thanks largely to the plucky efforts of British airmen (memorably summarized by Winston Churchill: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.)
- Stymied in the West, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, won a bunch of crushing victories, but then got turned back at the gates of Moscow. The Soviets moved all of their factories east of the Ural Mountains and produced a vast tide of T-34 tanks that overpowered the Germans.
- The Germans suffered a catastrophic defeat at Stalingrad and a bloody strategic defeat at Kursk, after which the Soviets relentlessly pounded Germany to defeat.
- The US and the UK sent a lot of material help and eventually fought the Germans too, most notably in the D-Day invasion and the Battle of the Bulge. However, most of the fighting was done by the Soviets.
- It is very difficult to say how important the aerial bombing campaigns of the Western Allies were in defeating Germany. The Germans moved much of their production underground, insulating them from truly disastrous effects.
- The U.S. mostly fought alone against Japan, which won a series of impressive early victories (e.g., Pearl Harbor, the conquest of Singapore) until the decisive Battle of Midway, after which the vastly larger US industrial base outproduced Japan into oblivion.
- The US bombed the Japanese into submission by destroying Japanese cities, ultimately by dropping atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By examining where the Axis focused their productive capacities and how the Allies disrupted those capacities, O’Brien challenges virtually every part of that narrative:
- The Battle of Britain was not a close-run thing. The fact that British fighter planes were flying over their own territory meant their attrition rate of pilots and aircraft were far lower than the Germans’.
- American and British bombing mattered far more to the war’s outcome than the battles of the Eastern Front, which consumed a much smaller portion of German expenditures.
- American and British airpower made German battlefield victories on the Western Front virtually impossible and dramatically limited the force Germany could bring to bear in the East.
- Japan (really, Japan plus the giant empire it conquered at the beginning of the war) was an industrial behemoth to rival the Soviet Union. However, the destruction of the Japanese merchant fleet by American air and sea forces wrecked Japan’s economy.
- The firebombing of Japanese cities and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had an ambiguous strategic effect. American air power played a much more important role in severing Japan from the natural resources it had conquered in the early part of the war.
June 23, 2023
From Operation Barbarossa in 1941 to the disinformation and cover-up over the origins of the Wuhan Coronavirus
Chris Bray outlines the utterly amazing situation between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on the eve of Hitler launching Operation Barbarossa — where Stalin refused to believe that Hitler would attack Russia despite overwhelming evidence from many sources — to the parallel situation over Covid:
Several sources quite specifically reported to the Soviet government that the Germans would invade around dawn on June 22. Their reports can be found in the Soviet archives in a “folder of dubious and misleading reports”. Then, shortly before dawn on June 22, Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Military leaders on the border called in reports of the invasion, and the people they talked to in Moscow declined to believe them. Soviet border troops held their fire, seeing Germans while being ordered to understand that no true invasion could possibly be underway. Stalin knew better, and contradicting Josef Stalin was known to be a fatal mistake. Achieving an entirely avoidable surprise, the Germans destroyed much of the Soviet air force on the ground, parked wingtip-to-wingtip for the convenience of the invader’s bombers.
[…]
An invasion that could have been met with brutal severity from the first moment instead achieved considerable initial success against a supine nation because the Soviet leader, and the chain of subordinates beneath him who were forced to adopt his conception of facts and truth, assumed that things they didn’t wish to believe constituted disinformation. Millions of lives were wasted for that illusion. A society that categorizes inconvenient truths in this way is committing a form of suicide, hiding from hard facts that demand acknowledgment.
Now: In 2021, the lab leak theory was a disgusting lie with “racist roots”.
In June of 2023, the, uh, first people who got sick with Covid turn out to have been, uh, scientists at the lab in Wuhan. BUT THEY PROBABLY HAD SOME BAT SOUP AT THE WET MARKET, IS WHY, or something.
Stupid conspiracy theorists, you people are such MORONS, do you actually bel— okay, that one’s true too.
We’ve somehow developed an industry of professional information barriers, dimwitted parasitical human garbage whose sole function in life is to prevent understanding by pasting “disinformation” stickers on things that you’re not supposed to know.
January 7, 2023
September 1, 2021
August 25, 2021
June 19, 2021
“Defence of Moscow” – Autumn 1941- Sabaton History 103
Sabaton History
Published 17 Jun 2021While it is legendary, there is a lot of confusion and a lot of myths about Operation Typhoon, the German drive on Moscow in the fall of 1941, and Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union that summer. Today I talk about the first 5.5 months of Barbarossa, and then Joakim and I discuss covers and covers of covers.
Support Sabaton History on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sabatonhistory
Listen to “Defence Of Moscow”: https://music.sabaton.net/DefenceOfMo…
Watch the Official Music Video of “Defence Of Moscow” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7K4v…
Listen to Sabaton on Spotify: http://smarturl.it/SabatonSpotify
Official Sabaton Merchandise Shop: http://bit.ly/SabatonOfficialShopHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Markus Linke and Indy Neidell
Directed by: Astrid Deinhard and Wieke Kapteijns
Produced by: Pär Sundström, Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Executive Producers: Pär Sundström, Joakim Brodén, Tomas Sunmo, Indy Neidell, Astrid Deinhard, and Spartacus Olsson
Community Manager: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Editor: Karolina Dołęga
Sound Editor: Marek Kaminski
Maps by: Eastory – https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory
Archive: Reuters/Screenocean – https://www.screenocean.comColorizations by:
– Mikołaj Uchmann
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/Sources:
– National Archives Nara
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe NARA
– Bundesarchiv
– New York Public Library
– Train tracks icon by Danishicon from the Noun Project
– Picture of singer Loona courtesy of Sandstein https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ca…
– Imperial War Museums: HU 75543, PST 4712
– Australian War MemorialAll music by: Sabaton
RADIO TAPOK – Битва за Москву (В стиле Sabaton / ИзиРок / – Defence Of Moscow)An OnLion Entertainment GmbH and Raging Beaver Publishing AB co-Production.
© Raging Beaver Publishing AB, 2021 – all rights reserved.
