The Tank Commander Who Had to Aim the Gun Himself

The T-34 of 1941 had armor and a gun the Germans did not expect. It also had a problem that no specification sheet showed. The turret held two men. One loaded the gun. The other aimed it, fired it — and commanded the tank.

A tank commander's job is to look. He watches for threats, picks targets, directs the driver and keeps in touch with the rest of the unit. In the T-34/76 that same man had his eye pressed to a gunsight. While he was aiming, nobody was commanding. While he was commanding, nobody was aiming.

A wider ring

The fix was not a new tank but a bigger hole. Retooling the factories for an entirely new design would have cost months the Soviet Union did not have, so the existing hull was kept and only the turret ring was widened, to 1,600 mm. That was just enough to carry a larger turret, adapted in a hurry from the cancelled T-43 prototype at Factory No. 112, Krasnoye Sormovo, in Gorky.

The new turret had room for three: commander, gunner and loader. The commander finally got a cupola with all-round vision, and in the model of 1944 the radio moved up from the hull to sit in front of him. For the first time, the man in charge of the tank could simply be in charge of it.

The gun in the name

The 85 is the gun. An 85 mm weapon replaced the 76 mm and gave the tank a real chance against the German armor it had been struggling with since 1943. The first production tanks carried the D-5T; from the spring of 1944 the simpler ZiS-S-53 took over.

The rest of the tank changed very little, and that was the point: the factories could switch over without stopping. More than 22,000 T-34-85s were built in 1944 and 1945 alone. After the war the tank served with more than forty countries, some of them for decades.

The model

COBI's T-34-85 (2 in 1), set 2683, is a 1:28 model built from 1,046 blocks, with one crew figure, and can be built in two versions. Set 2595 is the earlier T-34/76 — the tank with the two-man turret — at the same scale, and set 2716 is the T-34-85 at 1:48.

It is available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.

See the COBI T-34-85 (2 in 1), set 2683