(Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from the book, The Tigers Are Burning, by Martin Caidin © 1974.)

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The driver sat in a padded armchair, his folding backrest locked securely behind him. No luxury there; a man needed all the “give” he could get against his frame when the going became so severe as to be violent. Lurching cross-country within the tight-fitting confines of a T-34 tank is not conducive to comfort. There are tanks and there are tanks, and the one thing its designers did not bother about in creating the Russian T-34 was anything more than a cursory consideration for the crew.

Four men rode to war in what was one of the truly great weapons of World War II. In the front left side of the tank hull, the driver controlled the T-34’s track speeds with conventional steering levels. He had, as well, the usual tank controls of the clutch, foot brake, and accelerator, all placed in standard automobile alignment from left to right.

Some tanks built during the war brought envy to other tankers’ eyes in that every step was taken to assure maximum crew comfort along with as many controls and facilities as might be squeezed into the rolling fortress. Not so with the T-34.

Loaded for bear, the Russian tank as it went into the fighting at Kursk weighed between 54,000 and 56,000 pounds, the weight variations depending upon equipment and supplies to meet different situations. Measured from the muzzle of the 76.2-mm. cannon to the rear body, the T-34 had a length of not quite twenty-two feet. The tank stood eight feet high and moved on tracks each with a width of nineteen inches.

The heart of the T-34 — and it was Guderian who had said long before the war that everybody thought too much about the guns and not about the engine — was one of its strongest points. The 12-cylinder engine was a partly aluminum diesel that ground out 500 horsepower at 1,800 rpm and performed with great reliability and exceptional economy. To monitor and control his engine, the T-34 driver had water temperature, oil temperature, and oil pressure gauges. To his left was a second instrument panel with a tachometer, speedometer, ammeter, voltmeter, and starter. The T-34 used in the summer of 1943 (improvements were made in the tank throughout the war) had a gearbox with three forward and one reverse gears.

To the right of the driver, in an identical padded seat with folding backrest, sat the hull-gunner, who fired a 76.2.-mm. Degtyarev gas- operated machine gun. The weapon was fed through a drum-type magazine holding sixty rounds. Officially, the machine gun was capable of firing at a rate of 580 rounds per minute, but this was a grossly unrealistic figure (as are most firing rates for automatic weapons), and the combat firing rate was closer to a maximum of 150 rounds per minute.

The remaining two crewmen had even less room and considerably more discomfort than did the driver and hull-gunner; the tank commander and gun loader were forced to squeeze into the turret of the T-34. Considering that the commander had to operate in a space with only fifty-six inches of headroom — within which he commanded the tank’s operation, laid and fired the heavy cannon, and coordinated his movements with the man who loaded the shells — crew performance in the T-34 demanded a great deal from Russian tankers.

The two men in the turret sat on padded seats secured to a tubular framework. Each man had a wide, thickly cushioned backrest that was permanently secured to the ring of the turret. The arrangement called for some physical dexterity. In most tanks built by the United States or England, the crew seats were so fitted as to turn with the turret when the latter revolved. Not so the T-34 with its seats secured to the turret ring. When the turret traversed, it was up to the commander and the loader to shift their body position, turning physically on the non-moving seats, as they moved the turret to position the 76.2-mm. cannon.

That was only the start of the great skill and coordination needed for combat operations, when the world was a madhouse of screaming engine and gears, hammering machine guns, the crash of cannon, and the bone-bruising movement of the tank as it ground its way across inhospitable terrain.

The tank commander operated not only the high-velocity cannon but also a machine gun mounted beside the heavy weapon. He could activate the turret guns with the help of a periscope dial sight or through use of a cranked telescopic sight; in either case he did his sighting through an eyepiece with a rubber eye guard and a brow pad (with as much pressure as possible against this equipment to keep head-bashing to its minimum during severe maneuvering). The commander fired his weapons through his choice of hand or foot controls (the loader could also fire the machine gun through a separate hand trigger), and there were times when the ability to select one or the other was critical.

Few men in battle were ever busier than a T-34 tank commander. Below him the driver peered at the world through a distressingly limited field of view (much less than German tanks, for example). Unless the driver was on a straight course, he needed constant instruction from the tank commander, who passed on his orders by throat microphone. At the same time the commander was constantly shifting back and forth from driving commands to handling his weapon and seeing where his rounds had struck; the heavy cannon was completely under his control.

Accordingly, he needed to direct the forward movement of the tank through the driver, aim the heavy cannon (and often the machine gun), snap out orders to his loader for different types of ammunition, use his sighting equipment for range determination, sighting, and firing - and making absolutely certain he was clear of the cannon when it fired, because it crashed back with lethal force a full fourteen inches of recoil on each firing. He also had to keep an eye peeled for signal flags from the troop commander for any special instructions; the Russians didn’t bother with tank radio below troop commander rank (troop commanders had three tanks under direct control beside their own T-34).

The loader — in the turret with the commander — had his own headaches with which to contend. The heavy gun carried a total of seventy-seven rounds. Average ammunition loading (and it changed according to the expected combat requirements) came to nineteen rounds of armor-piercing, fifty-three rounds of high explosive, and five rounds of shrapnel. If the first engagement was short and swift, the loader could handle his job without much difficulty, but in any protracted battle he had to perform with almost physical legerdemain.

Of the seventy-seven rounds in the T-34, no more than nine were easily accessible — a wall rack on the left side of the turret held six rounds, and another rack on the right side held three rounds. At the bottom of the turret was a storage bin that held the remaining sixty- eight rounds. Fair enough, but the bin lay beneath a rubber matting that made up — physically — the floor of the turret. If the combat engagement promised to last for any length of time, the loader then had to get down to the turret floor and initiate an instant removal of the matting so that he might quickly (but never easily) reach the shells. And he had to do this (by agitated squirming) in a tank pitching and swerving violently, with his ears assailed by noise, in stifling heat —  with a clanging, extremely hot shell casing dumped into the storage bin every time the gun fired.

Was this the same tank, then, that constituted the backbone of the Russian armored forces at Kursk? The tank the Germans considered so dangerous that they delayed the onset of Citadel for week after week in order to rush the new Panthers and Tigers to the front? This same T-34, with all its design shortcomings?

By every account the answer is yes. By every account the T-34 was the battlefield ruler, when all things are considered, of the fighting conditions on the eastern front.

Yet it was Mellinthin who stated flatly he considered the Panther and the Tiger Mark VI to be the superior to the T-34. It was Mellinthin, and others with him, who never considered the T-34 to be the armored ruler of the battlefield. The German tank experts who insisted upon technical comparisons almost always came up with a final evaluation that kept the T-34 from the head of the list.

But the Russians, ignoring such technicalities, went on to produce the T-34 in the greatest numbers possible and used the tank to crack wide open the shell of German panzers.

Was it sheer mass of numbers, then, that gained for the T-34 its accolades? Definitely no. Not that numbers were unimportant, but numbers alone could never account for the reputation and the battlefield record secured by the T-34.

This was the tank that Colonel General Heinz Guderian, at the time commanding Second Panzer Army, described as “very worrying. . . up to this time we had enjoyed tank superiority, but from now on the situation was reversed. The prospect of rapid, decisive victories was fading in consequence.”

And to no less a figure than Field Marshal Ewald von Kleist of First Panzer Army, the T-34 “was the finest tank in the world.”

All of which appears, at first blush, to be directly opposed to our brief review of some of the problems inherent in the design of the T-34. But there is a difference in such problems where armored vehicles are concerned, and it is a difference with a vengeance.

The problems of the T-34, insofar as this tank must be measured as a weapon, were minor.

Douglas Orgill, veteran tank commander of the British army in World War II, in his book, T-34: Russian Armor, takes careful note of the ultimate distinction in judging a tank. The T-34, states Orgill, “succeeded, in its day, in solving the basic equation which should be written in gold above every tank designer’s desk: The effectiveness of a weapon is directly equal to its ability to get itself properly into position to deal decisive blows without being harmed by the blows it is itself receiving.”

Orgill adds that the T-34 “was the production not of inspirational genius but of robust common sense. It owed its existence to men who could envisage a mid-century battlefield more clearly than anyone in the West, except for a handful of theorists, had been able to do. The work which the Koshkin design team carried out at the Kharkov locomotive works in 1939 was to change the history of the war, and thus of Europe and the world.”

One final comment of Orgill’s on the subject went a long way in establishing conclusively the efficacy of the Soviet behemoth on the great battlefield of Kursk: “The fundamentals of a tank are armament, armor, mobility. It is the degree of success in balancing these three factors which ultimately decides the fighting qualities of the tank. In each of these three factors, the T-34 offered the most formidable challenge of any tank in general service in its day.”

The Russians massed two basic tanks for the struggle building in the Kursk salient. The T-34 was the main punch, and this may seem surprising because it was a medium tank rather than a heavy tank like the KV-I, which weighed nearly forty-four tons. Both tanks had the same basic engine, but because of the difference in weight, the T-34 had a top speed of 33 mph, whereas the KV-I was restricted to 24 mph. The T-34 had its extremely effective 76.2-mm. cannon, as did the KV-I. The latter mounted three machine guns to the two of the T-34.

Many tanks had thicker or heavier armor than the T-34, but there was nothing like the T-34 armor for its class of tank. The armor plating (65 mm. on the turret and 7 mm. on the hull) was heavy enough, but for its thickness and weight it was far more effective than for any other tank in existence. The Russians paid the closest attention to getting the most for what they put into the protective design of the T-34, and in tests intended to produce armor that would best resist armor-piercing shells, they were fully aware that sloping armor is far more efficient as a defense than armor placed vertically about a tank. If 100-mm. armor plating is installed on a tank at an angle of sixty degrees, it will provide approximately the same protection as 300-mm. armor plating along a vertical plane.

Prior to the summer of 1943, when the Tigers and Panthers were rushed into service with Germany’s armored forces, the principal opponent of the T-34 was the Mark IV tank. Originally this vehicle had a short-barreled -mm. gun, which proved woefully ineffective against the T-34, and was itself grimly vulnerable to the Russian tank. The short-barreled gun on the Mark IV had a muzzle velocity of only 1,300 feet per second as compared to 2,172 feet per second for the T-34, and the Russians took every advantage of the “can opener” effect of their tank.

The reaction on German morale was perhaps even greater than could be measured in losses on the battlefield, for here were the Untermenschen, the subhumans from Russia, with an armored weapon devastatingly superior to what had been the steel backbone of the Panzers.

“It is a wonder weapon,” one German tanker wrote in his report, “that spreads terror and fear wherever it moves.”

German antitank troops, armed with the Wehrmacht’s 37-mm. cannon for destroying Russian armor, watched in amazement and growing fear as their shells bounced harmlessly away from the sloping armor plate of the T-34 — and then ran for their lives as the Russian tanks advanced inexorably toward the helpless gun crews.

In a running engagement or a fast fire fight, or where cross-country speed and agility were vital, nothing could match the T-34. But there were many battles where the Russian KV-I heavy tank showed a side that brought its own kind of despair to the Germans, as is recorded by the official history of the 1st Panzer Division after its initial contact with the KV-I: