How 4 Soviet Crewmen Ate, Slept & Fought Inside a 30-Ton T-34

A T34 turret ring is a little over 4 and 1/2 ft across. Inside that circle, two men worked a gun that recoiled more than a foot  into the space between them. Over a floor that did not turn when the turret did. Down in the hull sat two more men, one of them with no hatch of his own.

 Four  men, 30 tons of sloped Soviet armor, and one of the best tank designs of the war. It was also one of the worst places on the Eastern Front to put a human body. The same set of drawings explains both of those things. Start with the box because  everything else in this story follows from its shape.

 The T34 was designed at the Karkov locomotive works in the late 1930s and went into mass production in 1940. The midwar versions weigh a little over 30 tons. The hall is about 22 ft long and roughly 10 ft wide across the tracks. And if you stand next to one in a museum courtyard, it does not look small.

 It looks like a low, wide, slab-sided machine with tracks nearly 2 ft across and armor plate leaning back at 60° from the vertical. Almost none of that interior volume belongs to the crew. Behind the fighting compartment sits a bulkhead. And behind that bulkhead is a 12cylinder diesel engine called the  V2 producing around 500 horsepower along with its radiators, fans, oil tanks, and  the transmission at the very back.

 That engine block is enormous.  Forward of the bulkhead, you have the fuel tanks tucked into the hallsides, the ammunition stowage under the floor, the gun and its recoil gear, the turret traverse motor, the batteries,  the tools, and whatever the crew has managed to hide in the corners.  The men fit into the gaps that are left over.

 There are four of them in the 76 millimeter versions of the tank, which is the version that fights through 1941, 1942, and 1943, and which is the version most people are picturing when they picture a T34. Down in the hall on the left is the driver mechanic. Beside him on the right is the radio operator, who is also the hull machine gunner.

 Up in the turret, on the right of the gun, is the loader. On the left of the gun is the commander, who is also the gunner. Hold on to that last one because it is the single decision that shapes more of this  story than anything else. Four positions, four completely different ways to spend a war. The driver mechanic sits in a low seat at the front left of the hall with his legs stretched out under the glac’s plate and his head just below the roof.

 In front of him are the two steering levers, a gear lever, the clutch and brake pedals, and a small instrument panel.  Above his head is a hatch in the sloped front plate, and set into that hatch are vision blocks made of laminated glass, which Soviet crews called triplex. The controls in the early tanks are brutal.

The T34 uses a dry multiple plate main clutch and until 1943, a four-speed gearbox that is not synchronized. Changing gear means matching engine speed and shaft speed by feel and then forcing the lever across. Crew memoirs describe the  lever refusing to move at all and describe the radio operator sitting to the driver’s  right, reaching over with both hands to help drag it into position.

 Some accounts mention a mallet kept in the hull for exactly that purpose. Steering is done by hauling on the levers which act on clutches and brakes in the rear transmission and the pull required runs into several tens of kilograms on each lever. A driver making constant small corrections across broken ground is doing heavy physical labor for every mile.

 When American engineers tested a T34 at Aberdine Proving Ground in 1942, the transmission and the air cleaner were among the things they criticized most sharply. Soviet designers were not unaware of the problem. A five-speed gearbox arrived in 1943 and made an enormous difference, and drivers who had used both were unambiguous about which they preferred.

 Then there is the question of whether the driver can see anything at all. The vision blocks in the early tanks are poor. The glass is often cloudy. The optical quality is inconsistent, and the blocks crack under vibration and under any hit that does not penetrate. Within minutes of moving, they are also filthy because  a tank throws up mud, dust, and snow in every direction.

 And the blocks sit low and forward where all of it lands. There is no wiper. The driver can reach up and try to clear them, which means taking a hand off the levers. So drivers do the obvious thing. They unlatch the hatch and prop it open a few inches and they drive looking through the gap. This is a completely rational decision and it is also how a great many drivers died.

 An open hatch admits shell splinters, small arms fire, and in a burning tank flame. Drivers did it anyway because a driver who cannot see is a driver who puts the tank into a ditch or presents a flank to a gun he never noticed. Sitting immediately to his right is the man with the strangest job in the tank. The radio operator is also the hull machine gunner. He works a 7.

62 mm DT machine gun mounted in a ball housing in the front plate and the sighting arrangement for that gun is close to useless. He has a narrow field of view, minimal magnification, and no practical way to observe fall of shot. In practice, whole machine gunners across every army fired in the general direction of the enemy to suppress infantry rather than to hit anything specific, and the T34 gunner had less to work with than most.

 His other job is the radio, and for much of the war, he does not have one. In 1941 and into 1942, radio sets are in short supply, and  the sets that exist go to company and platoon commanders. A large number of T34s in the early battles carry no transmitter at all. Some carry a receiver only. Communication between tanks is done with signal flags waved from the turret hatch, which requires a man to stand up out of the tank in combat and by watching what the commander’s tank does and copying it.

Radios become far more common through 1943 and are standard by 1944. But the men fighting the first two years are mostly fighting deaf. And there is one more thing about his position that matters more than everything else combined. He does not have a hatch. The hull has exactly one opening in the front, and it belongs to the driver.

 To get out of a stricken tank, the radio operator has to cross in front of or behind his own driver and use the driver’s hatch or climb up through the turret, past the gun, and past two other men who are also trying to leave. Every post-war Soviet tank design deleted this crew position. That is not a coincidence.

 Now go up into the turret where  the space problem becomes a design problem. The turret ring on the 76 mm T34 is 1,420 mm, which is a fraction under 4 and 3/4 ft. Two men have to work inside that. The gun sits between them on its trunions. The brereech and the recoil guard occupy the center and the two crew seats are hung from the turret ring so that they swing round with the turret when  it traverses.

 The floor does not. There is no rotating turret basket in the 76 mm tank. The floor is the hull floor fixed in place, covered in rubber matting with  access panels set into it. When the turret turns, the seats and the men turn with it and the floor stays where it is. So the loader who is doing the most physical work in the tank is shuffling his feet around on a surface that  is constantly changing its relationship to him in the dark over panels in a space where the gun breach sweeps past at head height. His job is

to feed that gun. The 76 mm F34 gun fires a complete round weighing in the region of 14 or 15 pounds. Lifting that is nothing. Lifting it 40 times in an afternoon in a moving tank in a space where you cannot straighten your back is something else. And the loader cannot use his left hand freely because a Soviet loading drill has him keeping his body clear of the recoil path.

 When the gun fires, the breach travels back more than a foot. A man leaning the wrong way at that moment is badly hurt or killed by his own gun. And this happened often enough that it appears in training material as a specific warning. The bigger problem is where the ammunition lives.

 A T34 carries somewhere around 77 rounds. Only a handful of those, typically between six and 9, sit in ready racks on the turret walls where the loader can reach them. Everything else is stored in metal bins under the floor beneath the rubber matting and the access panels. So, the first minute of an engagement is fast. The loader pulls ready rounds off the wall and the gun fires as quickly as the commander can lay it.

 Then the ready racks are empty and the loader has to get down onto the floor, lift a panel, pull rounds out of a bin, wipe them off, and pass them up to the brereech while the tank is maneuvering while the turret is traversing over him. And while  spent brass cases pile up around his feet, rate of fire collapses. Crews who had time before an action would pull rounds out of the floor bins in advance and stack them loose inside the fighting compartment, which is against every safety principle you can name and which everyone did anyway. Which brings us to

the man on the other side of the gun and to the decision at the center of this entire video. In the 76mm T34, the commander is also the gunner. He sits on the left of the brereech. His face is against a telescopic sight and a periscopic sight. His right hand is on the elevation hand wheel and his left is on the traverse control.

 He is responsible for laying the gun, judging range, choosing ammunition, and firing. He is also responsible for finding targets in the first place, for watching the battlefield, for keeping track of the other tanks in his platoon, for talking to his driver, and if he is a platoon or company commander, for directing several other tanks at the same time.

 Those two jobs are physically incompatable. Aiming a gun means putting your eye to an optic with a narrow field of view and holding it there. Commanding a tank means keeping your head up and your eyes moving. You cannot do both in the same second. And in a tank battle, the seconds are the whole argument. It gets worse in the early tanks because until roughly the second half of 1942, there is no commander’s cupula.

 The commander’s all-around vision consists of a periscope and the option of opening the hatch and putting his head out, which on a battlefield full of artillery and machine gun fire is a decision with consequences. And the hatch itself is a problem. The early turrets have a single large one-piece hatch covering both turret positions which Soviet crews nicknamed the pirojac  after a stuffed pastry because of its shape.

 It is heavy. It is awkward to open from inside. When it is open, it stands up like a wall and blocks a large  part of the commander’s forward view and it is the only way out of the turret for two men. From 1942, the design was changed to two separate hatches, one for each turret crewman, which is a small alteration on a drawing and an enormous one if you are the second man trying to leave a burning tank.

 The consequence of all this is that the T34 is often slower to see and slower to react than the tanks it is fighting, even when it is fully capable of destroying them. German tanks of the same period generally carry a three-man turret, a commander with a cupula, and  nothing to do but observe and direct, a dedicated gunner, and a loader.

 That crew finds a target, lays on it, and fires while the T34 commander is  still deciding whether to be a commander or a gunner. The gun on the Soviet tank is good. The armor is good. The tank frequently loses anyway, and the reason is sitting in the left of the turret trying to do two jobs at once.

 If you are finding this useful, subscribing helps the channel more than anything else, and there are more of these on the way. All of that is the tank as an engineering object. Now, consider what a day inside it actually did to the men. Start with the noise because it never stops. of V2 diesel at working revolutions  in a steel hull with no meaningful sound insulation is punishing.

 Add steel tracks running over steel road wheels. Add the transmission winding behind the bulkhead and add a 76 mm gun firing inside a sealed box a few feet from four sets of ears. Tank crews across every army came out of the war with hearing damage. Soviet crews had the added problem that for much of the war they had nothing in their ears but padding.

 The padding came from the tank helmet, the schllemopon, which is the leather and canvas cap with the thick raised ribs that you see in every photograph of a Soviet tanker. Those ribs are not decoration. They are shock absorbers because a man’s head hits the inside of a tank constantly  on the site, on the roof, on the brereech, on the hatch rim.

 Pockets were built into the helmet for earphones and a throat microphone. And when an intercom was fitted and working, the crew could talk. The intercom in the early tanks was unreliable, and a great many crews operated with it dead, so they used their feet. Crew accounts describe a simple system between commander and driver.

 A kick on the driver’s left shoulder means turn left. A kick on the right shoulder means turn right. A shove in the back means forward. A pull on the shoulders means stop. It sounds crude and it worked.  And it tells you exactly how much of a Soviet tank battle was fought by men who could not hear each other speak. Then there is the AIRIR.

 Every time the gun fires and the breach opens, propellant gas comes back into the turret. There is an extractor fan in the turret roof. And in the early tanks, it cannot keep up. Carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides build up in a space with four men breathing hard. The symptoms are headache, nausea, streaming eyes, and vomiting.

 And in a long engagement, men lost consciousness. The loader, standing over the breach and handling every case, took the worst of it. Crews cracked hatches open in the middle of firefights simply to get air, which is the same trade the driver was making with his vision and for the same reason. The temperature was its own war. There is no crew heater in a T34.

 The engine and its heat sit behind a bulkhead and the fighting compartment is a steel box with the outside temperature on the other side of 45 mm of plate. In a Russian winter at minus30 and below, the inside of the hull grows frost. Bare skin sticks to metal, so crews learned never to touch anything with an unglloved hand, and men still lost fingertips to it.

 Keeping the tank alive in that cold was a nightly job. Water-based coolant was drained out each night, and the system refilled with hot water in the morning because a frozen block ends the tank. Oil thickened to the point where the engine would not turn. So crews lit fires and used blowtorrches under the engine compartment to warm  it, which is a procedure with obvious risks that they carried out anyway.

 Batteries lost capacity in the cold, and starting became a matter of luck. Crews wore the padded telegeni boots, though drivers often could not use felt boots on the pedals and worked in leather. Summer was worse in a different direction. With hatches closed, the engine running, the sun on the roof, and the gun firing, the fighting compartment climbed past 50° C, which is over 120 degrees Fahrenheit.

Men stripped to the waist inside the turret and worked until they were unsteady on their feet. Food was whatever could reach them. When the field kitchens got forward, it was buckwheat or millet kasha, blackbre, and tinned stew. The Soviet tinned meat was called Tusanka. And from 1942 onward, a great deal of what crews ate came from lend lease shipments, including American tinned pork and stew that Red Army soldiers named after the American who arranged the deliveries.

 When the kitchens could not reach them, crews ate cold from the tin, and they warmed tins on the transmission deck after shutdown because the rear deck of a T34 stays hot for a long time. Water came from cantens and in winter from melted snow which takes fuel and time and which crews often did not have.

 There was also the vodka. A state defense committee order in 1941 established a daily 100 gram issue for troops in the front line and the rules around it were tightened and loosened repeatedly through the war. At one point being limited to units in active offensive operations. How much any given crew actually received depended on their supply situation and their officers, and the accounts vary widely.

 As for the thing nobody films, there is no provision of any kind in a T34. In a quiet moment, you got out. In an action that lasted hours, you used an empty shell case or an empty ration tin, or you did not, and you dealt with it afterward. Crews who fought long engagements came out of the tank filthy in every sense, and the smell inside a vehicle that had been fought in for several days is something veterans mention often and without embarrassment.

Sleep was organized around the machine. The standard arrangement when the ground allowed was to dig a trench and drive the tank over it. Under 30 tons of armor, you have overhead cover against splinters and against the weather. And the ground under a tank that has just stopped is warmer than the ground beside it.

 The risk is that soft or waterlogged ground lets the tank settle and a hit on a tank with men sleeping underneath it does not leave much. Crews accepted that trade because the alternative was sleeping in the open. The other favorite spot was the engine deck. The rear deck of a T34 holds heat for hours after shutdown and men slept on it in freezing weather with a tarpolin over them.

Inside was the last resort. A man can lie on the ammunition bins in the fighting compartment or across the seats, and he cannot straighten his legs, and  the steel takes his body heat all night. Very little of that time was actually spent asleep. The end of a day of movement meant tensioning tracks, replacing thrown links, cleaning air filters that clogged with dust in hours, checking oil, and refueling by hand pump from drums that had to be manhandled off a truck.

 Crews slept in the gaps between jobs in short pieces for weeks at a time. It is worth asking how much preparation these men had for any of it. Not much  and less as the war got worse. Soviet tank schools ran on compressed courses, and the compression fell hardest on the driver mechanic, which is the position that most needs hours behind the levers.

Accounts from wartime training units describe drivers reaching the front with only a few hours of actual driving to their name. Some of it done with the engine switched off to save fuel because fuel was needed at the front and not in a training yard outside. Gunnery training was similarly thin. Ammunition was too valuable to spend on practice and a fair number of commanders fired their first live round at a German tank.

 Many crews collected their vehicle from the factory at Nijni Tagel at the plant in Chelabinsk that soldiers called Tankograd and at the other evacuated works east of the Urals. Crews arrived, took over a tank straight off the line and in some cases helped finish assembling it. That is not an efficiency measure.

 It is a way of teaching a crew the specific machine they are about to fight in. Because a man who has bolted a road wheel on knows something about the tank that no manual gives him. Then the tank went on a flat car and the crew went with it. What that produced was a strange split. A crew that lived through its first few actions became very good because everything in this video is learnable and none of it is complicated.

They learned which vision block was worth cleaning and which was not. They learned to pull rounds out of the floor before the shooting started. They learned the exact kick that meant swing hard right into cover. The problem was that a large proportion of crews never got there. Losses were heavy enough that replacements arrived constantly and were folded into crews they had never trained with.

 And a tank crew is a machine that runs on knowing what the other four men are about to do. Two competent strangers in a turret are worse than two mediocre men who have fought together for a month. That is one of the quieter reasons Soviet armored losses stayed so high even after the equipment and the tactics improved. Which leaves the last question and the one every viewer is actually here for.

 What happened when the tank was hit? The T34 ran on diesel. And the argument that diesel made it safer than a petrol engine tank is partly true and heavily oversold, including at the time. Diesel is harder to ignite than petrol. That matters. What it does not do is protect the crew from the thing that actually killed them, which is the ammunition.

 70 odd rounds of propellant are stored under the floor of the fighting compartment, directly beneath the crew’s feet in bins along the hallsides where most incoming fire lands. A penetrating hit that reaches those bins ignites the propellant. Propellant does not detonate like high explosive. It burns extremely fast and it fills the interior with flame and pressure in a fraction of a second and it blows the hatches open or the turret off.

 Between the penetration and that moment,  the crew has a handful of seconds. Now count the exits. Two turret hatches after 1942, one before that. One hatch in the hallfront for the driver. That  is it. The radio operator has no hatch and has to use somebody else’s. And if the turret has been traversed round, the hull escape route and the turret escape route can obstruct each other.

 If the gun is over the front of the hull and depressed,  it can foul the driver’s hatch. In a training exercise, these are inconveniences. With a floor on fire, they are the whole story.  And most men coming out of a knocked out tank are already hurt. A small injury or a broken leg means a man cannot pull himself vertically out of a hatch.

 and lifting a wounded crewman straight up through a hole the width of  his shoulders takes two able-bodied men and time that does not exist. This is why crews so often came out as two survivors rather than four. The Soviet numbers are grim and the honest answer is that they are also imprecise. Wartime losses of T34s of all types are usually given as somewhere in the region of 44,900 vehicles.

 A Soviet Armor Institute study in 1942 examined damaged tanks  and found that the great majority of hits fell on the hull sides in the turret. Though that study looked at tanks that had come back to be examined, which means the tanks that burned out completely are missing from the sample. Estimates of how many of a crew became casualties when a T34 was penetrated cluster around half, and that figure should be treated as an approximation rather than a measurement.

The Red Army did eventually fix the  worst of it. From early 1944, the T3485 entered production with a widened turret ring of 1,600 mm and a much larger cast turret. That extra space bought a third man. The commander finally became only a commander with a cupula and all-around vision while a dedicated gunner laid the gun and a loader fed it.

 Radios were standard and sat in the turret with a commander rather than down in the hall. The gun was an 85 mm weapon firing a complete round weighing over 30 lb, which is a considerably heavier thing to lift 40 times. It did not make the tank  comfortable. It made it survivable in the specific sense that the man in charge could now see what was about to kill him.

 That change did more for T34 crews than any thickness of armor ever  added to the vehicle. Walk around a T34 in a museum today and none of this is visible. The lines  are clean and the proportions are good. And the sloped glaces still looks modern 80 years on. Engineers admire it and they are right to. It was cheap. It was reliable enough.

 It could be built by unskilled labor in enormous numbers. And it was one of the most influential tank designs ever drawn. Every one of those virtues was bought from the same account. The hall was low, so the men were cramped. The turret was small and quick to cast, so the commander had to aim his own gun. The ammunition went under the floor because there was nowhere else to put it and it went under the crew.

 The hatches were few because openings weaken armor. None of that was carelessness. It was a series of correct decisions about a machine made by people who understood that the machine had to exist in tens of thousands or the war was lost. And the men inside were the price. Four positions.  The driver who could not see unless he opened the hatch.

 The radio operator with no radio and no way out. The loader on his knees under a moving turret. The commander doing two jobs and losing the fight to a man who only had one. They took it from Moscow to Berlin. If you want more of this, the videos on the Sherman crew and the Tiger crew are on the channel now.

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