Page 73 - The Chief Culprit
P. 73
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On the “Obsolete” Soviet Tanks
If I had known that the Russians really possessed such a number of tanks . . . I think I
would not have started this war.
—A H, A ,
hen Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the German armed forces had
zero tanks, while the Red Army had 4,000 tanks. In the whole of 1933, not a
W single tank was produced in Germany; in contrast, 3,819 tanks of all types and
modifications were produced in the Soviet Union. e production of tanks in Germany be-
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gan in 1934: in the next five years, German factories produced 2,683 tanks. Soviet factories
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in the same time period produced 14,283 tanks. On January 1, 1939, the Red Army was
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equipped with 21,100 battle-ready tanks. In 1939, Hitler started World War II with 3,195
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tanks, the same number that Soviet factories produced per year in peacetime.
In 1941, the German army, by a crushing blow, defeated gigantic gatherings of Soviet
troops in the border regions. ousands of Soviet tanks were destroyed or simply aban-
doned by the troops. is catastrophe had to be explained somehow. Communist historians
explained what happened very simply: the tanks were obsolete, and therefore useless. e
whole world laughed at Stalin and at his “obsolete” tanks. But how many of them were there?
To this question, an equally simple answer was prepared: why count them if they were ob-
solete? For the six decades since the disaster of 1941, the number of Soviet tanks has never
officially been named. Only after the dismantling of the Soviet Union has the truth slowly
started to emerge.
What were these “obsolete” tanks? A few thousand of them had the “BT” marker. eir
spiritual father was the great American tank genius George Walter Christie. Soviet com-
manders and designers were the only ones to see the value of Christie’s achievements. Two
of Christie’s tanks were purchased and shipped to the Soviet Union with fake documents, in
which they were listed as agricultural tractors. On December 24, 1930, a ship carrying the
“tractors” of Christie’s design left New York.
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