Zubov, Dmitry Stalin's "Wonder Tank"

The Truth behind Hitler's Nemesis. The Soviet T-34 Tank

The Soviet T-34 tank is undoubtedly one of the most famous symbols of the Red Army and its fight against the Third Reich in the Second World War. It is therefore not surprising that over the years a considerable number of books and films have been dedicated to Stalin's so-called miracle tank. Many historians, especially in Russia, summarily refer to the T-34 as the best tank of the war. In doing so, they often refer to the authoritative opinion of Heinz Guderian and other German generals. Von Kleist, for example, is said to have once described the T-34 as the best tank in the world. But was this really the case, as Dmitry Zubov attempts to investigate in this book? The reality of the summer of 1941, after Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, showed that it took the Wehrmacht only a few months to turn Stalin's tank fleet into little more than a pile of scrap metal. Despite this unfavourable start to combat operations, the myth of the invincibility of the T-34 was already emerging. Dmitry Zubov argues that this development was driven in part by the Soviet propaganda machine, but also by the enemy itself. In the course of the fighting, the Germans became increasingly entangled in endless operations to protect their flanks from the mythical counterattacks of Stalin's Red Army, which by this time had already lost most of its fighting power. However, in order to conceal the consequences of Hitler's incompetent leadership, German generals had to explain the collapse of Operation Barbarossa with the incredible resilience of Soviet soldiers, the appalling Russian winter and, finally, the enormous superiority of the T-34 tank, to quote Guderian. Hitler's commanders argued that these factors had ruined their excellent plans. These facts motivated the author to investigate the true history of the development, production and combat use of Stalin's miracle tank. Beneath the numerous layers of Soviet secrecy, myths, propaganda and outright lies, he uncovered a bitter reality. The T-34 tank was not a masterpiece of Soviet engineering, but in reality a design based on plans that the Soviets had borrowed from Western designers. Stalin's miracle tank was manufactured in incredible haste by unskilled workers and was often an easy target for German tanks and anti-tank guns, becoming a battlefield grave for its Soviet crews.