Page 74 - The Chief Culprit

On the “Obsolete” Soviet Tanks y 51

In the Soviet Union, all aspects of Christie’s “tractors” were carefully studied. An en-
tire family of tanks was created based on their design—the BT-2, BT-5, BT-7, BT-7A, and
BT-7M. BT stood for bystrokhodnyi (high-speed) tank. e shape of the BT was simple and
rational. Not a single tank in the world during the prewar period and the early period of
World War II had an armor of such a shape. e best tank of World War II, the T-34, was a
direct descendant of the BT. e shape of its body was a development of the idea of the great
American designer. After the T-34, the principle of a sloped location of the frontal armor
sheets was used on the German Panther, and later on tanks around the world.
In the 1930s, practically all tanks around the world were produced according to one
design: the engine in the rear, the transmission in the front part. e BT was an exception:
its engine and transmission were both in the rear. Twenty-five years later, the entire world
understood the advantages of the BT design. e BT tanks were heavily armed for their
time. e 45-mm cannon could penetrate the armor of any foreign tank. Great Britain and
the United States began installing such cannons on their tanks only a decade later, in 1942
and 1943. In addition to thousands of BT tanks, armed with 45-mm cannons, 154 BT-7As
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were manufactured and armed with 76-mm KT-26 cannons. At the beginning of World
War II, no tank in the world outside the borders of the Soviet Union had weaponry of com-
parable caliber.
What about the armor? e BT had just bullet-proof armor. At that time, most of the
world had tanks with the same kind of bullet-proof armor. e engine is the heart of the tank.
e BT-2, which was made operational in the Red Army in 1932, had a 400-horsepower
M-5 engine. German tanks began having engines of equal power only by the end of 1942.
e specific power of the BT was 36.4 horsepower per ton of mass. Not a single tank in
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the world had such a high specific power, which allowed the tank to do unbelievable things:
“BT units could jump over obstacles to a distance of 15 to 20 meters; a few could do it to a
distance of 40 meters.” e cinematography of those times preserved such incredible stunts
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of Soviet tank drivers for posterity. Nonetheless, Soviet historians categorized these tanks
among the obsolete models, calling them so obsolete that until 1991 they were not included
in statistics.
In April 1941, Germany began producing in series the T-IIIJ tank. In the German army
it had the highest specific power—13.9 horsepower per ton of mass.How could the BT-2 be
obsolete, if its specific power was almost three times higher than that of the best German
tank? e first BTs had a speed of 69 mph, that is, over 110 km/h. Seventy years later any
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tanker would still be envious of such high speed. Soviet sources point to the much lower
figures of 86 km/h for BT-7Ms, and 72 km/h for BT-2s and BT-5s, as maximum speeds for
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BT tanks on paved roads. is discrepancy, between Soviet and foreign sources, is simply
explained: on Soviet roads, the engine was too powerful for the transmission, so a speed-
limiting device had to be installed. When the tank was used on highways, the device could
easily be taken away. But even if we think of the BT speed as being “only” 86 or even just 72
km/h, at that time no other tanks in the world had such statistics.
e BT tanks were constantly improved. In 1936, after a series of experiments, a num-
ber of BT crews became capable of crossing rivers underwater. At the beginning of the twen-
ty-first century, still not all the tanks of the most developed countries have such capabilities.
In 1939 the Red Army received the BT-7M. It had the following capacities: on tracks over