In the final stages of World War II, in the campaigns that hurled the Wehrmacht back to the borders of Germany, the Red Army conducted armored warfare on a scale that dwarfed anything seen in the West. The Soviet T-34 was the best-balanced design of any tank in the war. By 1941 the Soviet tank fleet was far larger in numerical terms than that of any Western power. Along with its rocket program and the Kalashnikov, arguably the main industrial legacy of the Soviet Union for modern history are its tanks - the various iterations of the T-series.Īt a rough estimate, of the 73,000 tanks in the arsenals of the world’s armies today, at least 60 percent were either produced in factories of the former Soviet Union or can trace their design to Soviet models.įrom the first decade of its existence, the Soviet Union embraced the tank as a key tool of modern warfare. Such a western-centric, Ford-inspired narrative of the tank inverts the historical record. German, British and American tanks are touted as weapons essential to Ukraine’s war effort, which otherwise tends to be depicted as relying on artillery, reinforced from the West, and plucky infantry, armed with anti-tank rockets, notably, of course, the Javelin. And the current reporting of the war in Ukraine tends to reinforce that impression. Like the car you might thus think that the story of the tank was a Western story - a military version of the Fordist story of modernization. The American M1 Abrams is arguably the most sophisticated tank ever have been deployed in large numbers. Between 19 the Israelis were the masters of the modern art of mechanized warfare. The Germans became famous for the Blitzkrieg of World War II. The French were the first to truly mass produce a tank, in the form of the Renault FT. The tank was first deployed by the British army in 1916 on the Somme.
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