Stalin’s ‘Wonder Tank’ - Dmitry Zubov

The Soviet T-34 tank is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable symbols of the Red Army and its struggle against the Third Reich in the Second World War. Not surprisingly, over the years a considerable number of books and films have been dedicated to Stalin’s so-called ‘wonder tank’. Many historians, especially those in Russia, peremptorily call the T-34 the best tank of the war. In so doing, they often refer to the ‘authoritative’ opinion of Heinz Guderian and other German generals. Von Kleist, for example, is stated to have once referred to the T-34 as ‘the finest tank in the world’. But, as Dmitry Zubov sets out to explore in this book, was this the true picture?The reality of the summer of 1941, following Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, revealed that it took the Wehrmacht only a couple of months to turn Stalin’s tank armada into little more than a pile of scrap metal. Despite this inauspicious beginning to its combat service, the myth of the T-34’s ‘invincibility’ was already being born. It was a development that, argues Dmitry Zubov, was in part driven by the Soviet propaganda machine, but also by their enemy. As the fighting wore on, the Germans became increasingly bogged down in endless operations to cover their flanks from the mythical counterattacks of Stalin’s Red Army, which by that time had actually lost most of its combat capability. But to hi
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