Having considered the advantages and disadvantages of the T-34 pre-war production and the first war years, we expectedly came to the following: the "thirty-four" was a tank with a very powerful and effective tank cannon for its time and anti-cannon armor, which, although it did not guarantee absolute invulnerability, excellent protected from the main 37-mm anti-tank gun of the Wehrmacht. But at the same time, the T-34 had an insufficient crew, only 4 people instead of 5, which excessively overloaded the tank commander, who was forced to simultaneously act as a gunner. Its chassis was unreliable and required a very high qualification of the driver. But even if there was one, the T-34 of the beginning of the war still did not have the technical reliability to solve its main task - actions in the operational rear of the enemy front to a depth of 300 km.
Did the Red Army understand the shortcomings of the T-34? Undoubtedly. As a matter of fact, already decree No. 443ss "On the adoption of tanks, armored vehicles, artillery tractors and their production in 1940 by the Red Army." of December 19, 1939, according to which the T-34 was put into service, already contained a list of changes that should have been made to the design of the tank before the start of its mass production. The same document established the plan for the production of "thirty-fours" for 1940 - 220 units.
Interestingly, the T-34 was put into service even before the start of military trials, which were planned to begin on January 25, 1940, but in fact they only started on February 13. Of course, during the tests, the deficiencies noticed multiplied. During the "run-in" of prototypes, carried out in February 1940, it became clear that the car would not be ready for the government show scheduled for March of the same year. The first copies of the T-34 did not have time to complete the mandatory test program with a mileage of 2,000 km. Then it was decided to send 2 experimental tanks from Kharkov to Moscow on their own in order to "wind up the counter", but during this run the suspension faced significant problems: for example, one of the cars in Belgorod had the main clutch "torn off".
Some historians claim that this was the fault of the driver, but generally speaking, the tanks were driven by test drivers with exceptional driving experience, who, among other things, had already driven hundreds of kilometers on the T-34 before the start of the run. Consequently, the error looks doubtful, and if it was still an error, then it testifies to the extreme complexity of control: it is clear that one should not expect the qualifications of testers from the combat mechanics.
The cars arrived in Moscow on March 17, 1940, and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin liked them, although the shortcomings of the machines were not a secret for him. They were insistently pointed out to him and to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, who was present there, by the Deputy People's Commissar of Defense G. I. Kulik and D. G. Pavlov. The latter generally said: "We will pay dearly for the production of insufficiently combat-ready vehicles." However, I. V. Stalin ordered to provide plant No. 183 with all the necessary assistance in correcting the shortcomings of the T-34 and no measures were taken to postpone its serial production. On the contrary, according to further orders, the T-34 production plan for 1940 was constantly increased, first to 300, and then, at the beginning of June 1940, to 600 vehicles.
Thus, we see a very strange at first glance picture - an openly undeveloped tank is first put into service, and then it is put into production. How reasonable was such a decision? Based on the realities familiar to us - of course, not at all.
But in those years … The first thing I would like to draw your attention to is that World War II was in full swing in Europe. True, in March 1940 there was still a period of calm, since Poland had already fallen, and the invasion of France had not yet begun, but the sides were obviously accumulating forces and preparing for battle. There were absolutely no preconditions for a peaceful, political solution to the conflict. Well, on June 7, when a decree was issued that increased the serial production of the T-34 to 600 vehicles by the end of the year, the French army was already clearly defeated and agonized, that is, it became clear that the conflict in the West had not dragged on, and that now only the Red Army stands between the Wehrmacht and absolute military domination on the continent.
The second important aspect is the readiness of the domestic industry to produce thirty-fours. We must not forget that for this our factories had to make a very big leap into the future, and the point is this. Until recently, the T-28 medium tank was the heaviest domestic tank (not counting the very small-scale T-35 monster). It was a very difficult machine to manufacture, so its production was launched at a single Kirov plant (formerly Putilovsky). At that time, this enterprise had the best production facilities, and the qualifications of Putilov workers were, perhaps, the highest among factories of a similar profile in the USSR. By the time the T-28 began production, the plant, in addition to other products, had been producing tractors for 9 years.
Nevertheless, the production of the T-28 faced enormous difficulties, which can be roughly divided into 2 groups. The first was based on design flaws, which is why many changes were made to it during mass production. The second group could be called production problems, and they concerned not only the Kirov plant itself, but also many of its subcontractors who participated in the production of the latest combat vehicle at that time. So, it took a very long time to eradicate all these problems, which was measured not even in months, but in years.
It was planned that the Kirovsky plant would launch mass production of the T-28 in 1933, but in fact it was possible only in 1934, and the first domestic medium tank was saved from numerous childhood diseases only by 1936.
So, according to the plans of 1940, it was supposed to deploy the production of T-34 at two plants: the Kharkov machine-building (No. 183) and the Stalingrad Tractor Plant named after V. I. Dzerzhinsky (STZ). Plant No. 183 was in the best position, as before that it produced BT-7 tanks, but STZ only produced tractors and tracked tractors. But the fact is that the BT-7, as you know, was just a light tank, which had almost half the mass of the T-34 and a carburetor engine instead of a diesel engine (however, the BT-7M, produced in 1940, was equipped with all the same diesel V-2). In other words, plant No. 183 and STZ obviously faced a long and difficult path of "stuffing cones" in mastering the production of the T-34, and it was obvious that the sooner they got down to business, the sooner the Red Army would receive full-fledged combat vehicles. It was impossible to use the Kirov plant for the production of thirty-fours, since it had its own "super task" - to move from the production of medium T-28s to heavy KV-1s.
In other words, in 1940, the leadership of the Red Army, industry and the country faced, in general, approximately the same tasks as in the distant already 1933 with the release of the T-28: there was a frankly crude project, in the absence of a proven technological chain of its production at the head manufacturers. Naturally, the chains of industrial cooperation also existed only on paper, because the serial production of parts, assemblies, and aggregates at subsidiary enterprises also had yet to be mastered. But in 1933 the war was not on the threshold of the USSR, and in 1940 the situation was completely different.
Of course, it would be possible to follow the "correct" path - not to take the T-34 into service until the tank is completely satisfactory to the military, and only after that start its serial production. Just what then would we get in the end? By the time Nazi Germany attacked the USSR, in this case, absolutely nothing would have been ready for putting the T-34 into production, and the same Kharkov No. 183 would have continued to rivet the spent BT-7s. But would that be better?
After all, the BT-7 possessed most of the disadvantages of the T-34, while not having its merits. The T-34 had a crew of 4, and that was not enough? There were three of them in BT-7. A small, cramped tower? It was no better for the BT-7. Bad visibility from the car? Fully related to BT. Lack of a commander's cupola? So it never was on BT-7. But the BT-7 still did not have a powerful 76, 2-mm cannon, or anti-cannon armor, and both were extremely useful in battle. The only thing that the BT-7, perhaps, surpassed the T-34 of the pre-war production with, was in technical reliability, but it is very difficult to say whether this superiority was realized in the first battles of the Great Patriotic War, where our mechanized corps lost huge masses of BT-7. And there was this advantage, perhaps, only in older BT-7s, because BT-7Ms most likely had similar problems with T-34s with their diesel engine.
In other words, the T-34, of course, in 1940 was not yet finished by the designers. But even in this form, it was more valuable for the Red Army than the light tanks that preceded it, which were produced by Plant No. 183, and for STZ, by and large, no matter what tank you start to master, it's all one thing new, and there were a lot of "bigwigs" guaranteed. In view of the above, sending the T-34 into mass production made a lot of sense: the minus of this decision was that the Red Army would receive "raw" tanks for the first time, plus - that the same Red Army would receive full-fledged, high-quality T-34s. much earlier in terms of time than in any other options, in which the launch of the car in the series was postponed.
Of course, it was possible not to put the T-34 into series, assemble, almost by hand, a pilot batch of a couple of dozen vehicles and send it to military trials, find design flaws, fix them, make a new batch, etc. But in this case, the "thirty-four" would hardly have started mass production before the start of the war, and the factories would not have had any opportunity to work out in practice all the necessary cooperation, which would have to somehow be organized already in the course of hostilities. And when, in this case, the T-34 would begin to enter the troops in marketable quantities? It is difficult to assume, not knowing all the nuances and peculiarities of production, but definitely not in 1941, and in 1942, probably, not all at once.
Nevertheless, before the war, the question of withdrawing the T-34 from mass production was raised twice. The first time this happened according to the results of comparative tests of the German T-3 with the "thirty-four": it must be said that the contrast in ergonomics and visibility provided by the relatively spacious three-man turret of the German tank, which also had a commander's cupola, seemed striking then. But the German tank also had other advantages. One of them, oddly enough, the speed - the T-3 managed to develop along the highway 69, 7 km / h, overtaking not only the T-34 (48, 2 km / h) but also the BT-7, which showed 68, 1 km / h. However, by and large, the maximum speed is a very unimportant parameter for a tank, especially since the T-34 engine provided the tank with excellent power density, but the next parameter was more significant - it was noise. When moving, the T-3 could be heard from 150-200 m, the T-34 - from 450 m.
Then Marshal G. I. Kulik, having familiarized himself with the test report, suspended the production of the T-34, but, subsequently, under pressure from industry representatives and the head of the scientific and technological complex of GABTU I. A. Lebedev was able to resume it. The second time the proposal to stop production of the T-34 was made after the first production vehicles went to military trials.
However, another point of view prevailed. It was decided to continue the production of the T-34 in its current form, modifying only those shortcomings that can be eliminated without changing the design. And, at the same time, to create a project of a modernized tank, and in fact there were even two of them. In the first project, which received the code A-41, it was supposed to eradicate only those shortcomings that could be dealt with without changing the design of the hull and maintaining the existing power unit. I must say that the A-41 was quickly abandoned, it never left the drawings, did not go beyond the "paper" design stage.
The second project was the A-43, which later received the designation T-34M, and the abundance of changes and additions greatly complicates its definition: here we must talk either about a major modernization of the T-34, or about the creation of a new machine, taking into account the experience gained in the design of the T -34.
The body of the T-34M turned out to be taller, longer and narrower than that of its "ancestor". The turret had a shoulder strap of 1,700 mm (1,420 mm for the T-34) and was three-seater, there was a commander's cupola, the crew was 5 people. Christie's suspension was changed to a torsion bar. For the T-34M, a new V-5 engine was developed, but the gearbox, unfortunately, was left with the old one (while work on the planetary gearbox was already underway). However, a multiplier was added, so that the T-34M had 8 forward speeds and 2 reverse. The radio was moved to the hull, the driver and the radio operator were changed places, the ammunition and fuel reserves were increased. And with all this, the tank also turned out to be almost a ton lighter than the T-34, its speed should have been about 55 km / h, exceeding that of the "thirty-four", and the only thing that made the T-34M worse from its " progenitor "- this is a certain increase in pressure on the ground, since it used a caterpillar 450 mm wide and 550 mm wide. The latter indicator, of course, remained within the normal range.
The project was presented in January 1941 and was extremely liked by the "high authorities" who recommended only using the available weight reserve to increase the thickness of the frontal projection armor plates to 60 mm. In addition, in February 1941, it was decided to develop a planetary gearbox for this tank.
In other words, the T-34M was a kind of symbiosis of ideas inherent in German and domestic tanks and promised to become an extremely successful combat vehicle, superior in all respects to German tanks. With all this, its release was planned for 1941. The decree of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks "On the production of T-34 tanks in 1941", adopted on May 5, 1941, read:
"… To oblige the People's Commissariat for Sredmash t. Malyshev and the director of plant No. 183 t. Maksarev to ensure in 1941 the release of 500 pieces of improved T-34 tanks at the expense of the program established by this decree."
In 1941, it was planned to receive 2,800 medium tanks from the industry, while plant No. 183 was supposed to produce 1,300 T-34s and 500 T-34Ms, and STZ - 1,000 T-34s. In the future, the production of the T-34 was planned to be phased out in favor of the T-34M completely.
Unfortunately, these plans were not destined to come true, and there was only one reason - the V-5 diesel engine, which, unfortunately, never saw the light of day. As a result, plant No. 183, during the evacuation to Nizhny Tagil, "took" with it 5 towers (possibly already with installed guns), as well as 2 hulls with a suspension, but without rollers, engines and transmission, and no more work on this tank produced.
Here, many dear readers will probably want to remind the author that plant # 183 could not produce tanks with a shoulder strap of 1,700 mm until the turning-and-boring lathes received under the Lend-Lease were transferred to its disposal. Indeed, in a number of publications it was indicated that if it were not for 2-5 turning-boring lathes (and in some sources they managed to call them carousel-gear cutting, which, of course, is completely mistaken), received from the USA, then our evacuated plant No. 183 would not at all could produce T-34-85. And it would be okay to deal with some Internet sources, or odious authors like the same Solonin. But here is what M. Baryatinsky, a respected historian specializing in armored vehicles of the Second World War, wrote:
“The largest manufacturer of thirty-fours, the Nizhniy Tagil plant No. 183, could not switch to the production of the T-34–85, since there was nothing to process the gear rim of the tower with a diameter of 1600 mm. The carousel machine available at the plant made it possible to process parts with a diameter of up to 1500 mm. Among the enterprises of NKTP, such machines were available only at Uralmashzavod and plant number 112. But since Uralmashzavod was loaded with the IS tank production program, there was no reason to hope for it in terms of the T-34-85 production. Therefore, new carousel machines were ordered from the UK (Loudon) and the USA (Lodge). As a result, the first T-34-85 tank left the shop of plant No. 183 only on March 15, 1944. These are the facts, you cannot argue with them, as they say."
In general, the shortage in the USSR of turning and boring machines for the production of tanks with a wide shoulder strap of the tower has long been "the talk of the town." Therefore, let us pause a little in the description of the processes of improving the "thirty-fours" in order to illuminate this issue in more detail and never return to it.
So, judging by the information available today, the respected M. Baryatinsky was still mistaken in his judgment regarding the presence in the USSR of turning and boring machines of the appropriate size.
The first thing that raises doubts about the accuracy of the text is an error in the description of the technical operation, namely the phrase "there was nothing to handle the machining of the gear rim of the tower" since the boring lathe does not serve this purpose. In short, the boring lathe represents itself as a rotating table (faceplate), over which the cutter "hangs". The latter can be moved up and down and left and right, so that the cutter, coming into contact with the rotating workpiece, performs its processing.
To be more precise, the support "overhangs", containing a turret on several types of cutters, which can perform a number of operations, such as machining external surfaces, drilling holes, trimming the ends of a part, etc. But it is impossible to process any teeth on a boring lathe, it is simply not designed to work with such surfaces. However, maybe we just misunderstand the thought of the respected author, and in fact he meant only preparatory operations, and the incisors were cut with another tool later.
Second, generally speaking, the first vertical turning lathe in the USSR was manufactured at the plant named after G. M. Gray hair in 1935. Interestingly, the machines of the "first production" are still "held" at some enterprises.
And in 1937 in the USSR, at the same plant, two turning-boring machines 152 with a processing diameter of 2000 mm were manufactured. The exact number of machines produced, alas, is unknown, but by the decision of the Council of People's Commissars in 1941, the plant was allocated 23 million rubles. to bring the annual output to 800 per year: accordingly, it can be assumed that before that the output was significant.
Third. M. Baryatinsky says that there were no turning and boring machines in the NKTP, but what is this NKTP? Some of the readers could erroneously assume that the NKTP is the People's Commissariat of Heavy Industry (Narkomtyazhprom), but this is incorrect, because the latter was abolished much earlier than the events described by M. Baryatinsky, on January 24, 1939. the commissariat of the tank industry, and besides it there were a lot of other people's commissariats, in which, of course, there was a lot of all equipment that was absent in the NKTP.
So, it is completely unclear how the USSR could exist and develop at all without turning-boring machines with a large faceplate diameter. For example, a typical project of a steam locomotive plant assumed the presence of 15 vertical lathes on each, while the diameter of the driving wheels of the most common IS steam locomotive was 1,850 mm. How to make them without a boring lathe?
And the excavators? The swing mechanism of an excavator is the same shoulder strap of a tank turret, while excavators have been produced in the USSR since the 30s. Before the war, in 1940, even career ones were made.
In general, it turns out one of two things - either in the USSR they have completely mastered the production of vertical lathes with a machining diameter of 2,000 mm or more, or they have invented some magical way to do without them. In the first one is much more believed than in magic, and if, nevertheless, somewhere in the depths of the people's commissariats, magic wands were lying around, allowing the production of excavators and wheels for steam locomotives without turning-boring machines, then who prevented the application of the same "technology" to tanks?
In other words, we can completely trust the opinion of a respected historian that the machines needed for the production of tank shoulder straps were not enough in the NKTP. Indeed, before the appearance of the KV tank, the only plant that needed them was the Kirov Plant, which created T-28 medium tanks, whose towers with 76, 2-mm guns had a shoulder strap of 1,620 mm. The rest, even after the transition to the T-34, by and large did not need "wide" lathes and boring machines. So why should they be in the NKTP in any noticeable quantities? But this does not mean at all that such machines were not in other people's commissariats.
Fourth, in spite of the above, these machines were still in some quantity in the NKTP even before the war. This is evidenced by a letter from the head of the 1st department of the 3rd department of the armored department of the GABTU KA, Lieutenant Colonel I. Panov, who oversaw the work on the T-34, addressed to Lieutenant General Fedorenko. The letter is dated December 13, 1940 and contains the following lines:
“According to preliminary estimates, it is possible to expand the shoulder strap of the tower by about 200 mm. Is this expansion possible from a production point of view? Probably, since this expansion has no meaning for the Mariupol plant, and plant No. 183 has machine tools for the production of extended shoulder straps."
Taking into account that the T-34 had a shoulder strap diameter of 1,420 mm, it turns out that there were machines for processing shoulder straps by about 1,620 mm at the plant. In addition, there is a photograph of the boring lathe made in 1942 at the factory # 183.
The scale is not very visible, but let's pay attention to the 2 machine stands (one of them is just twisted by the worker on the right) - they indicate that we have a large machine in front of us. The fact is that only those intended for processing parts with a diameter of over 1,500 - 1,600 mm were made with two-column turning-boring machines. As a matter of fact, the very first "large" machines of this type (152 we mentioned earlier), made in the USSR, had only one rack, but very quickly it became clear that this was an erroneous decision, and the plant named after G. M. Sedina switched to the production of 152M, which has two racks. That is, even if we saw a large single-column large machine, it is possible that it was 152, capable of processing parts with a diameter of 2,000 mm and quite suitable for the production of a wide tank shoulder strap. But we see a machine with two racks, and this clearly indicates its "professional suitability" for the manufacture of parts, even for the T-34M, at least for the T-34-85.
Fifthly, it is necessary, finally, to pay attention to the number of turning and boring machines required for tank production. Consider the production of the IS-2, a heavy tank with a 1,800 mm turret ring. Not a single historian has ever claimed that we received the machine park for the IS-2 under Lend-Lease.
So, plant No. 200, where the production was carried out, was equipped with vertical lathes with a large faceplate diameter (up to 4 meters) in the shortest possible time. At the same time, as far as can be judged, NKTP itself managed to find only 2 such machines, taking them from UZTM. And the rest of the machines were already "taken out" by the State Defense Committee (GKO), in Decree No. 4043ss of September 4, 1943 "On the adoption of the IS tank", which obliged the State Planning Committee to find for the plant 5 turning-boring machines with a faceplate diameter of 3-4 m, and more "14 special machines for processing shoulder straps" to produce before the end of 1943.
And after all, which is typical, they found and did it. Without any Lend-Lease.
And now let's pay attention to one more thing. The plant, which had 7 boring machines and, in addition to this, 14 special machines, produced during the war years, and after it, a maximum of 250 tanks per month. And plant # 183 supported the production of T-34-85 at over 700 vehicles per month (up to 750), that is, almost three times more than plant # 200. And if the latter needed 7 vertical turning lathes with a large faceplate diameter, then how many of them does plant No. 183 and our other factories producing T-34-85 need? After all, the total production of T-34-85 at all factories in other months exceeded 1,200 vehicles!
And what, someone can seriously believe that all this was done on several machines from the United States? No, of course, you can try to refer to the fact that American machines were "a hundred million times" more productive than domestic ones, but this argument is shattered by the fact that the USSR had not only domestic-made lathes and boring machines at its disposal, but also foreign ones. acquired even before the war, for example - the company "Niles".
But this is not all, because there is also "sixth", which consists in the banal mismatch between the delivery times of lend-lease machines to factories and the release of the T-34-85. The fact is that turning-boring machines were actually ordered for our tank factories under Lend-Lease, for example, according to the GKO decree No. 4776ss "On the production of T-34-85 with an 85mm cannon at the plant No. 112 Narcotankprom" dated 1943-15-12 The People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade was instructed, among other things, "for plant No. 112 of NKTP 5 pieces of rotary lathes with a faceplate from 2, 6 to 3 meters … … with delivery in the 2nd quarter of 1944".
But the whole point is that plant No. 112 began producing T-34-85 tanks in January 1944, producing them, respectively, in January - 25, in February - 75, in March - 178 and in April (it is extremely difficult assume that the machines with delivery "in the 2nd quarter" by this time could have been installed at the plant) - 296 tanks. And the most interesting thing is that after the arrival of American machines, production increased extremely insignificantly, the plant produced a maximum of 315 tanks per month!
The situation described above perfectly shows the real need for turning and boring machines - only one plant, which produces only 315 T-34-85 per month, required 5 such American-made machines, in addition to the existing machine park, which already had machines with large faceplate diameter! In general, the version about the miraculous performance of American machine tools is crumbling.
As for the plant number 183, the decree with permission to order machines abroad required to organize the supply of large carousel machines before July 1, 1944, while the first T-34-85 tanks with a wide turret shoulder (for some time the plant produced tanks with an 85-mm cannon in the old, narrow chase), the plant delivered 150 vehicles in March, 696 in April, 701 and 706 vehicles in May and June, respectively. There is also Malyshev's diary, in which he leads a conversation with I. V. Stalin:
“January 15, 1944 … Then Comrade Stalin asked:“Then is it possible to produce T-34 tanks with wide shoulder straps?”I replied that“this requires additional large carousel machines and large molding machines. in the development of a new tower, subject to a simultaneous increase in the production of tanks. But we are working on this issue with the factories and in 3-5 days I can report our proposals. "Comrade Stalin said:" Yes, the production of tanks cannot be reduced. But you give your suggestions through 3 days. Do not forget just "and said goodbye".
But here it is not clear, Malyshev speaks of the need for turning-boring machines with a large faceplate diameter in addition to the existing machines of the same (or are they still different?). However, the fact that the T-34-85 has been produced with a wide shoulder strap since March 1944 speaks for itself - under no circumstances could the plant No. 183 have received lend-lease lathes and boring machines by the specified date. First, it was necessary to coordinate their delivery with the United States, and this took time, then - they still needed to be made, and the production cycle of such a machine is quite large. Then these machines still needed to be delivered to the USSR and it is clear that it was impossible to do all this in 1-2 months. This means that vertical lathes with a large faceplate diameter were available at factory # 183 even before the lend-lease deliveries.
There is one more nuance. We know that such machines were going to be ordered under Lend-Lease, but we do not have a complete picture of how many large turning and boring machines were actually ordered, how many were delivered (some of them could have died on the way), and how many of the supplied machines as a result, it was transferred to the NKTP.
True, here the dear readers may have a question: if things were so good in the USSR with vertical lathes with a large faceplate diameter, why order them abroad? The answer, apparently, was that, since the NKTP itself did not have such machines, for the production of tanks it was necessary to "rip off" other people's commissariats, that is, in fact, to produce tanks at the expense of some other equipment, and its production did not cover the needs of all the commissariats at once. So they were ordered abroad, since there was such an opportunity. It certainly does not follow from this that without the indicated machine tools the USSR could not have organized mass production of the T-34-85, and it certainly does not follow that on the eve of the war the factories did not have turning and boring machines for the T-34M production program. … In the end, we must not forget about the scale: according to the planned targets, throughout 1941, plant No. 183 was supposed to produce 500 T-34Ms, while in the wartime USSR, the same plant produced up to 750 T-34-85 tanks monthly.
But let's go back to 1940-41, to the production of T-34 tanks.
