Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 108 - The T-55: A History

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

On this episode Joe and Travis dive into the history of the podcast's favorite cold war tank: the T-55. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Sources: https://ospreypublishing.com/t-54-and-t-55-main-battle-tanks-1944-2004-pb

Hey everybody, Joe here from the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. If you enjoy what we do here on the show and you think it's worth your hard-earned money, you can support the show via Patreon. Just a $1 donation gets you access to bonus episodes, our Discord, and regular episodes before everybody else. If you donate at an elevated level, you get even more bonus content. A digital copy of my book, The Hooligans of Kandahar, and a sticker from our Teespring store. Our show will always be ad-free and is totally supporter-driven. We use that money to pay our bills, buy research materials that make this show possible, and support charities like the Kurdish Red Crescent, the Flint Water Fund, and the Halo Trust. Consider joining the

Legion of the Old Crow today. And now back to the show. Hello, and welcome to yet another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast.'m joe with me today is travis formerly our uh our our famous guy our man in kurdistan but no longer in kurdistan travis how you been uh you know it's been a rough couple of months but i'm here it's been a while uh but you uh i think it's been like almost a year it seems like uh since you've been on the show it's been it's been a while uh but you have a hand in uh creating a little bit of lore for the show uh and our low our lore admittedly seemingly organically develops independently from nick and i yeah who knows i don't even try to understand i don't understand how to fit myself anymore. But one of those things was our not so ironic,

but not so ironic obsession with the T-55 tank. Yeah, I don't honestly know where it came from. I think, like, I mean, I know I definitely had something to do with it because, like, it started around the time I came on the pod and talked about Iraqiaqi uh arms development back in like november of 2018 and a lot of what i studied was the t55 but like how that became a meme i don't know and now we have it on uh shirts and stuff but uh which i haven't got i need to get one of those i don't have a t55 shirt either i have virtually every other one though um i think it's just because uh personally i'm against idolatry and uh you know

owning a shirt with a t55 on it and not owning an actual t55 yeah it's sacrilege um although to be fair if somebody wanted to mail me one of the nicer uh model kits for the t55 i would not argue uh if somebody i think that's been our patreon goal since like day one is like i think it's like 55 000 and we can buy a t55 from syria you know and if yeah if our patreon gets that big i'll worry about the import cost don't worry about that i'll handle it somehow i got a tank guy uh so you know we thought and you approached me and said you know i would like to do an episode in the history of the t55 tank and i thought that would be a really good idea since we seemingly made this joke out of nowhere and then never explained it and i think a lot of that so personally and i think you probably

agree with me that uh my obsession with it is mostly well obviously as a fucking tanker like I'm never going to be able to separate myself from like my deep deep irrational love of giant inadequate machines right but it's because that it seems to be like if you were to pick

like in a symbol of eternal warfare it would be like a T-55 tank crossed with a shitty old ak from somewhere yeah because even though they were bolted together in a long long ago shuttered factory that no longer exists and everybody who built it's probably dead if there if we fight our first intergalactic war i guarantee you we're going to be fighting ak-47s and t-55 tanks so it's like as someone who spent entirely too long in the military and around tanks and never was in a tank that could

seemingly operate for more than an hour at a time without breaking down like that sort of thing has always really interested me and i always wonder how the fuck this thing got made yeah well um i mean for me i think it's a pretty interesting story. So I first found out about it because I was doing research for my paper on the Iraqi arms industry. And one thing you kind of can't avoid when reading about the Iranian-Iraq war, and particularly the Iraqi army during that war, was the fact that they just had shitloads of T-55s. I think at some point they had upwards of 5,000 to 6,000 of various models of T-55, T-62, and T-72, but mostly T-55s. And so after reading that, I was like,

so what is this thing? And I found a couple of books and started reading into it, and it's just been really, really interesting, at least to me. I mean, granted, I've always kind of liked tanks and the t55 once the more i learned about it the more i was like i feel like this tank is kind of the i don't know it's like it's like this the quintessential tank it's hard to get more or less tanky than this so if someone's gonna ask what is a tank you gotta start with the t-55

and work forwards or backwards from there in my opinion it's really unfortunate that uh the t-55 is going to excuse a whole lot of war crimes for being so tanky uh yeah but it's dope so you know what i think that might be the first tanky related dad joke probably hopefully let's not do more of those because it was a shit joke sorry joe you know you can't land them all the time uh my my life is just a series of throwing shit to the wall and seeing what sticks yeah fair enough all right well shall we uh shall we begin i am the nick this episode i am here to i am here to be educated so take it away good sir all right let's do that so i think um we before i get started i kind of want to talk a little bit about um like a lot of people say a tank is good or they'll say a tank is bad or they

say a tank um i don't know it just like doesn't work or whatever like that. And I would say just to start, I think that, or at least I would argue that at some point in World War II, you can't really point to an example of a genuinely bad tank that has been fielded in any significant quantity. The reason I say that is because tanks are designed for very specific purposes to fit a given doctrine at a given time and while not all were necessarily extremely successful at that um pretty much any tank that got fielded in any significant number met some basic standards that like were basically got hammered out by the time world war ii was over and um another thing i'll add is that tanks are not designed to like be good in world of tanks the video game they are designed within very specific limited material limitations and in order to fit a doctrine in need of a specific army or user and as a result a lot of armchair generals and oftentimes even tank crew

members think that their tank or a given tank is bad or that their enemy tanks are good or better when in reality they just aren't really seeing the full picture of the context of the situation and what i mean by that is like armchair generals namely nerds on the internet or not really nerds usually just dumbasses on the internet will look at like statistics the hosts of this podcast well you know us and then basically everyone who plays world of tanks they'll look at um the statistics that will show up in world of tanks namely which tank has like the thicker armor a bigger gun goes faster or whatever and those questions often um tend to ignore the kind of material reality

of a lot of those things like for example thicker armor doesn't mean shit if the steel it's made out of is terrible for example most german tanks made after like 1943 1944 like the tigers and so on they may have had really thick armor but the quality of it was so poor because the steel production germany was so terrible that oftentimes you could simply hit it with high explosive and it would cause enough spalling to kill everyone inside the tank without even damaging the exterior of the armor. That's what anti-tank crews call a pro-gamer move. Yeah, exactly.

So, like, the statistics of that tank on paper don't mean shit if the quality control is bad, or, like, the logistics aren't able to keep up with it. And it also ignores the fact that battles don't take place in like a 1v1 flat arena where both vehicles are perfectly well supplied with crews of equal skill and training and every part within each tank works perfectly and then kind of the flip side of that is a lot of tank crew members they may be really good at driving their particular tank or maintaining their particular tank but they don't necessarily see their individual tank in the larger context of logistics and doctrine and strategy and all that kind of stuff. Like the most famous example of this, in my opinion, is there's this book from World War II called Death Traps about the M4 Sherman tank. And this book was written by the guy whose job

during World War II was to basically clean out the dead bodies of American tank crew members from Sherman tanks so that they could be repaired and sent back to the front. And as a result of his experience, he felt somewhat understandably that the Sherman was not good at its job and was, well, a death trap. And this missed a couple of key points, namely the fact that the Sherman could be repaired to be sent back,. Which is pretty important, especially if you have to ship all of your tanks across the Atlantic Ocean.

You want it to be able to repair it and reuse it even if all the tank crew members have been turned into paste. And also it was ignoring the fact that the German tanks they were up against were even worse. For example, the Sherman actually had the highest crew survivability rate of any tank in the war.

But the guy cleaning the dead bodies out is probably not going to really get that. So basically, all I just want to point out is that things are a little bit more complicated than they might seem about whether something is good or bad or effective or not effective or whatever. good or bad or effective or not effective or whatever so that and i i actually have to admit that i had to source death traps um during an episode that we did there's a bonus episode about um fury because the people who made fury made everybody read death traps yeah yeah so i'm like well fuck i guess i have to figure out what it is they used. It's been pretty savaged as a book. It's the gun germs and steel of tanks. Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

I mean, it is what it is. I mean, myths about military equipment are really prevalent and they're hard to dispel because fortunately pretty much most military equipment made since World War II hasn't really been put to much of a test with the exception of like a handful of small arms. And most importantly for this episode, the T-55 main battle tank. Um, so I guess, you know, where did it all start? Where did it begin? Where did the T-55, uh, when was it first a twinkle in its father's eye? And, um, that would be, would be World War II, of course,

where most things seem to have begun, at least with modern military technology. So the Soviet Union during World War II, they were pretty lucky that when the war broke out, they had begun to field in large quantities early versions of the T-34 medium tank. And even though during the early war, the T-34 wasn't particularly well armored, it didn't have a particularly powerful gun, and it didn't have

particularly high crew survivability or comfort, but it was good enough that for the desperate early days of the war that it, you know, it was fine. It was good enough. And even the Germans thought that it was a very formidable tank. But it wasn't amazing. It was far from perfect. You know, it had its ups and its downs. And of course, the Soviets knew it wasn't perfect, and they had actually planned a pretty comprehensive upgrade program, but then the war broke out, and they didn't quite have the resources, at least early on, to do comprehensive upgrading

that they really wanted to have done. Basically, they couldn't let Perfect be the enemy of good because they were fighting a war of extermination against Nazi Germany. So they didn't really have time to wait. They just had to churn out what they could. But as the tide of the war began to turn in 1942, 1943, the Soviets felt a little bit more comfortable in investing more resources and seriously reworking the basic design of the T-34 instead of just throwing on whatever

upgrades they could. Of particular concern was the relatively underpowered 76 millimeter main cannon that the tank was using at the time, as well as a suspension system that took up a lot of extra space inside the body of the tank. And then the layout of the turret was really cramped and really not particularly well suited to the job. So they started, you know, they made a couple upgrades. They made some stopgap versions. They put a version with a, they built a version with a bigger turret and a more powerful 85mm cannon that they began to field in large quantities by the end of the war.

And that was the T-34-85, which by the end of the war was the most common kind of modern tank that the Soviets were fielding. And it was extremely effective and versatile. and versatile and probably, I mean, I would argue that the T-34-85 along with the M4 Sherman, the M4A3 EZ-8 Sherman with the 76 millimeter cannon or the British Sherman Firefly were probably the quote-unquote best all-around tanks of the war. Although that's kind of a meaningless statement because that's not really how it works, like I said before. But they were pretty darn good and they were very effective against pretty much everything that the Germans could throw against them.

However, around 1943, the KV-250 design bureau at the Ural-Vogonzovod tank plant in Nizhny Tagil in the Ural Mountains of Russia and I don't speak any Russian or understand Russian so I'm going to butcher these pronunciations. So, have

fun with that. Any Russians in the audience? These guys, particularly the Zainbrio chief was Alexander Morozov. They began working in earnest in the middle of the war on a full-fledged replacement to the T-34. And their primary

goal was to design a tank that had thick armor that was strong enough to defeat the larger tank guns that the Germans were using, like the Panther or Tiger tanks, without also compromising on weight and speed. So they basically had to figure out a way to build a tank that had thicker armor, bigger gun, bigger engine, but way the same. Tall order.

However, this would require completely redesigning the hull of the tank. So they're basically starting with the T-34 and trying to figure out a way to make it better in every possible way without being heavier. So they had to redo everything, particularly the hull, in order to fit all the new parts in. And the design that they started working on was actually pretty darn effective. The thing that it came out with was not substantially heavier. It had substantially thicker frontal plate armor.

So the T-34 had a front armor plate of 47 millimeters thick at an angle. The tank that they were designing had a front armor plate that was 120 millimeters thick so that's three times thicker at the same weight um and similarly they also up majorly upgraded the size of the cannon they made it standard to be uh the 85 millimeter gun instead of basically having to scale up the turret substantially in order to fit in the gun um they actually even made prototype versions with like this massive 122 millimeter cannon that like when you see a picture of it it looks kind of absurd um because the cannon is like like twice as long as the actual tank it's pretty ridiculous but i'm sure that would be dope um until you had to like turn in every way yeah or

like reload the gun uh so the what they came out with was the t44 or yeah t44 and um this tank they started producing it um basically at the end of 1944 and early 1945 but they weren't able to get them out onto the front lines quite fast enough before the war ended. So it never saw combat. However, they were able to make a fair few of them by the time the war ended. And I think around 1800, the T-44s were actually built before they were phased out of production. And I would argue that the t-44 um at least in the soviet union was kind of the basis for what would become the quote-unquote main battle tank so basically well i guess to explain before world war ii and during world war ii tanks were divided into like light tanks medium

tanks and heavy tanks um where the names are fairly self-explanatory and each tank has a slightly different role light tanks are fast and they're with a small cannon, light armor and they just kind of scoot around the battlefield doing recon. Medium tanks are kind of compromised where they're kind of the bulk of the tank force and then heavy tanks are heavy, heavily armored

heavy gun are like used to like break through and stuff like that. But the concept of main battle tank is essentially you build one tank and it does all those things. So it's light, it's fast, has a big gun and it's got heavy armor. And somehow it can do everything.

And that required just like advancing technology, which happened quite rapidly during World War II. And I would say the T-44 was kind of the first Soviet main battle tank in some ways. However, still wasn't enough. The end of the war in 1945 did not see a halt in the continued upgrade and redesign and new designs of tanks because the Cold War was starting to heat up

basically as soon as World War II ended. And the primary desire of the Soviet designers was to take the T-44 and fit an even larger and more powerful cannon in it. Because like I said, they'd been using the T, or sorry, the 85 millimeter cannon as standard, but they felt that even that was not really enough. It wasn't quite powerful enough

to do what they were looking for. So they started to consider a couple of other options for the cannon. They had a couple of 100 millimeter cannons that they were looking for. So they started to consider a couple of other options for the cannon. They had a couple of 100mm cannons that they were looking at, and then the 122mm cannon that I mentioned prior. However, they felt that the 122mm cannon was too slow to load

because it had a two-part round where basically you load in the explosive and then you put in the powder afterwards. Oh, so like an old... So it's kind of like a straight-up artillery piece. Yeah. I mean, I think they eventually made their way back to that

with the auto-loading cannons and the T-72 onwards. But at the time, it meant you had to have an actual physical guy in the turret, put in the shell, and then reach back and put in the uh powder charge and so it's just slower um and also you could you couldn't carry as much ammunition um so they ultimately decided against the 122 millimeter gun even though it was fucking huge and sick and like tight and thick uh bainey um throbbing throbbing uh oh god oh jesus uh anyway um excuse me so they decided actually on the d10t 100 millimeter smoothbore cannon

um and they chose this because it was a compromise between, it was bigger than the 85mm, smaller than the 122mm, it was pretty accurate, high velocity, you know, just generally, it was a pretty decent gun. However, this would require completely redesigning the current existing T-44 turret in order to accommodate the larger cannon. So in 1945, the new design fitted with this new turret and an even thicker

200mm front armor plate was dubbed the Objekt 137. It's probably just Object, but it's Russian, so Objekt 137. And the production version was granted the designation T-54. And so Soviet tank

factories, particularly Nizhny Tagov and Kharkov, began cranking out T-54s as early as 1947. However, the first production model, the T-54, wasn't that great. Its limitations were clear pretty early on, causing to production halt after only about a thousand of them were built. And the primary concern was that on top of some reliability issues, the turret that they had wasn't large enough to fit a sufficient number

of shells and other ammunition because they wanted to carry something like 40, 50 rounds and they carry maybe half that. So they had to totally redesign the turret. So the Morozov Design Bureau quickly redesigned or quickly

designed a new uh replacement turret and this may have figured that out like in testing in some way uh yeah probably but i mean things were going real fast and probably different um bureaucracies kind of talking past each other and you know who knows how this sort of thing really worked um on a day-to-day basis but um yeah it does seem like the kind of thing they would have figured out or like one guy signed off on like 25 rounds ammunition capacity and then they actually got to the army and the army is like what the fuck we said 40 um so you know who knows um i like rnd that waits until the first thousand are done and like we'll work out the kinks.

They call that the MRAP method. Well, some of the numbers I'm going to be giving you in a couple of minutes, a thousand is a pretty small number. So a thousand, they could have built a thousand in like a year, no question. And so, yeah, so they quickly built a new turret or designed a new turret at the morozov design bureau and this new turret would be kind of the first design that looks kind of like the classic cold war tank uh soviet classic cold war tank with that you know that like kind of dome shaped

turret um that looks almost like it grows out of the hole of the tank very kind of iconic soviet kind of style turret and this was the um they called it i think the t-54 one like model one um and this entered production soon after the first production variant uh and along with a couple of other minor improvements kind of in the late 40s early 50s and the five-year plan from 1951 through 1955 called for the production of 12 000 of these um jesus yeah so during that time in these years in the late 40s early 50s the alexander morozov's design bureau moved from their wartime place in the ural mountains at the ural valganzavod tank plant to karkov and ukrainian soviet republic um morozov at this point was getting pretty tired

of just upgrading the T-44 that he had designed back in the war. And he, at this point, was starting to really desire to really revolutionize tank design and do something totally different. And he was granted permission and he began to work on his new project, which he dubbed the Object 430.

However, unfortunately, we won't really be talking about that much today because the Red Army and the Soviet Union did not have time to wait for Morozov's revolutionary design to come into production. As the Cold War was heating up and the Soviets needed tanks that they could pour into Eastern Germany in case war with NATO went hot. And here I should probably talk a little bit about Soviet doctrine on like a broad scale as

this greatly impacted how their tanks were designed and i'm not an expert on soviet doctrine i only know kind of a basic gist of things but broadly speaking the soviets were planning for a highly mobile mobile mobile offensive war in central europe oh well i like where you're going with that um do we have any tom of finland drawings of soviet tank crew members anyway it's getting real horny on tank main oh you know it so they were planning for a highly nubile offensive war in central europe and they knew that any hot war with nato would have to be won extremely quickly or it would risk going nuclear. This would mean launching a quick, overwhelming offensive against NATO forces in Germany and maintaining an extremely high operational tempo in order to completely overwhelm NATO forces before reinforcements could arrive and any trenches could be dug in. And this is partly why the Soviets made almost all of their vehicles amphibious. Like the BMP

and BTR series of APCs and infantry fighting vehicles and stuff, all of those are amphibious. And even their tanks, starting from the T-54 onwards, were actually capable of being relatively quickly outfitted with snorkel equipment so that they could

forward streams and rivers and stuff and i would not want to be the crew that finds out if their seals work or not because if they're anything like the m1 the seals never fucking work yeah i mean i i'm sure it wasn't perfect um but i've actually seen a lot of like videos and read some of their things where the soviets and Pact allies were actually pretty good at this. Because so much of their doctrine and strategy rested on being able to cross streams. So they had to make sure they could do it reliably. Because Central Europe is just like a nightmare of rivers and streams and stuff. And that meant that in order to maintain the offensive pace that they needed, advancing Soviet forces and Warsaw Pact forces couldn't wait for the bridging teams and the engineers to come up every time they hit a river.

So they had to just like keep pushing forward. And that also meant that the resilience and power and all that kind of stuff of an individual vehicle was less important than the collective ability of an entire unit to maintain its offensive pace. And all of this impacted what? I can't help but they literally did communism but with tanks. I mean, in many ways, that's an extremely kind of – it's not correct but it gets the point across, you know? kind of it's not correct but it gets the point across you know um where they they i think it's it's overly simplistic to say that they didn't care about quality because the vehicles they designed were a perfectly good quality it's more just that the the type of quality was different um than for example in german or american tank designs uh at the same time uh because they were

just going for a different thing entirely. And this also talks, like, if we were doing an episode on, like, T-64, T-72, T-80 tanks that the Soviets built after the T-55 and T-62, these had the autoloader. They decided to go with an autoloader

so they could reduce the number of crew members in the tank so that they could have the same number of trained crew members but have like 25% more tanks per their number of crew members. And so it's just like they came at it with a very different design calculus than the same design bureaus that were coming up with like the Leopard 2 or the M1 Abrams. So anyway, back to the T-54. Morozov had left the project in the capable hands

of the Vagomka design team under Elen Kartsev back at Ural Vagomzavod in the Nizhny Tagov factory. And here the Soviets were playing with more advanced technology to start putting in their tanks. And for example, the Red Army had been given large numbers of M4 Sherman tanks under the Lend-Lease program by the Americans during World War II, and most of those tanks had been fitted with gyroscopic gun stabilizers, which allowed the tank cannon to maintain its point of aim even while the tank was moving. And this would increase

its ability to hit targets by as much as like a thousand percent under tests that they performed. it hit targets by as much as like a thousand percent under test that they performed um similarly a lot of american m26 and m46 tanks were captured by the chinese during the ongoing korean war and these tanks were fitted with bore evacuators on their cannons which were designed to basically pump the gas from the exploding round out the front of the barrel instead of just kind of letting it sit um in the tank and make the crew uh uncomfortable yeah that shit sucks yeah you can really tell when you need to clean your bore evacuator yeah i can imagine suddenly i'm dying yeah um and basically up until like the 50s no tanks had those um it's astounding how none of them like just immediately it's like some world war ii or world war one shit where they would all just slowly die from carbon monoxide inhalation from

their own engine yeah honestly it wouldn't shock me um yeah so after they had captured these american tanks had them from the least they started putting some of these newer technologies on their t-54 production models they also started started adding, like I said, snorkel equipment. They also added infrared optics, a newer improved version of the D-10 cannon, improved engines, all these sort of things. These got all grouped together in the new latest production model, which is the T-54A,

and a later version called the T-54B, very creative. And these also started entering production in a lot of Warsaw Pact partner states and China, particularly Poland and Czechoslovakia. And the Chinese started calling their production version the Type 59. They had a couple of minor changes to the design, but it was basically a T-54A is what the Type 59 is. And so a lot of other smaller improvements would continue to be added by both the Soviets and the various new factories they were being produced at in the Warsaw Pact in China. But the next change came rather fittingly during the 1950s when planners on both sides of the Cold War began to envision fighting a true total nuclear war,

which meant not only would you need bombers and missiles to, you know, lob nukes at each other city um and you know military plants uh you know like it's dr strange love but they'd also need their tanks and soldiers to fight through the radioactive wasteland after the nuclear exchange um and honestly everything i've read about the 1950s uh and their kind of initial approach from both sides to nuclear warfare is fucking terrifying. Yes. And I think you did an episode or two that kind of talked about some of that stuff, at least on the American side of things. We talked a little bit about, it was with Martin Pfeiffer forever ago.

And he talked about the, we talked briefly about a lot of the insane weapons we came up with. Like the UK came up with a nuclear landmine that was powered by chicken body warmth. And the Soviets had a much more Soviet way of testing nuclear weapons and tactics. And that was by marching soldiers through a nuclear blast. Yeah. Well, I think the Americans did that too or something similar. Yeah. nobody really knew what they were doing. They just liked to

send their divisions toward nuclear explosions and see what happened. Yeah, it was a fun time. But actually when I first read this I was like, yeah, no way you're going to have a T-55 or like a tank or whatever fighting through a nuclear battlefield. But actually when I read about it, the way they

kind of approached it is actually pretty smart, unsurprisingly, I suppose. And which is, you'd need to pretty seriously rework the internals of the tank. And the new tank would have to be able to completely seal itself off and also pressurize in order to prevent radioactive dust or even chemical weapons from entering the tank and killing the crew. So they installed a lead plastic lining on the interior of the tank. They also added basically like a pressurization system

and then they included some other upgrades like larger fuel capacity, larger ammunition capacity. They also removed the Dushka heavy machine gun from the top of the turret because they figured, well, for a couple of reasons. First of all, they figured that modern jet strike aircraft, like it's just not useful in order to try and shoot those down. And then also Soviet tank divisions would be starting, had started fielding more advanced mobile armored anti-aircraft systems like the Shilka and similar stuff.

So they figured we don't need to waste all these resources sticking a machine gun on the tanks when we have much better systems that can actually be useful. And so this new tank entered production in June 1958 with the designation, drumroll, T-55, and an improved version in August of 1963 as the T-55A. However, here's where it's at. If I had a soundboard, this is where I'd play the Soviet National Anthem. Okay, yeah.

Yeah, and it's interesting that, like, they thought of an NBC system because U.S. tanks have that as well. And, you know, we've never... Maybe people have used them, like, during the Gulf War or something. But, you know, they were just an encumbrance whenever I was there. Yeah. Because, you know, nobody's gassing us. Yeah, yeah.

And, I mean, honestly, like, for example, even with, like, you know, the highest level of maintained American M1A2, whatever, SEP V50,00 that we're on right now I bet those don't even work really I would really like to never test any MBC system because I have no faith in any of them I mean I do know the

mask works because like you know I get tear gassed and they make you take it off and then I suddenly realized how well my mask worked but if you were to do the same thing but like in the tank i'm like i don't know how but the tear gas is going directly into this tube yeah uh because you'd have to put your mask on then hook up to the internal system yeah and like i don't somehow just like nothing but dirt and mud is gonna flow through the tube or something

yeah exactly like i would not want to like i'm sure with all the American tanks, like, you know, they installed this, like, the lead lining or whatever to prevent radiation back in, like, when it was first produced. And then, like, nobody's bothered to look at it since. Because, like... I have a strong feeling that is most tanks in the world. Yeah. Like, yeah, this thing's NBC sealed.

Don't test it, though. Please, God, don't test it though yeah please god don't test it um but anyway one thing that i thought was kind of funny as soon as the t-55a entered service actually soon before it entered service uh soviet tank designers received a somewhat rude awakening when a communist iranian like an iran Iranian tank officer of communist sympathies decided to drive his American built M60A1 tank across the border into Soviet Azerbaijan

as a defector and the Soviets took a look at the tank and were somewhat disturbed by the 105mm gun that the M60 used as well as just a slightly more comfortable and effective turret crew layout and so they kind of panicked and immediately designed 115 millimeter cannon

that would match the 105 millimeter one that the american tank had and they also redesigned the interior of the turret a little bit and they extended the hull and this was the t-62 and the t-62 entered full-scale series production in july of 1962 hence the name if you'll notice it entered production slightly uh before actually a full year before the t-55a entered production so um this is one of those parts where the kind of logistics and the like the kind of sheer pace of soviet production was kind of interesting because basically they would have a factory building the t-55 and they'd be like they designed the t-62 and they'd started they'd build a factory building the t-62 or they'd take another factory and so have that one start building the t-62 but it's like they still don't

have enough t-62 production to completely phase out the t-55 production and so they would just be producing vast quantities of tanks multiple production series all at the same time in order to fill their needs um they were sedicted to tanks um it's a crippling soviet addiction to tanks yeah honestly that that'd be the main reason i would be a tanky just to like you know do scrooge mcduck dive into a pile of tanks that's the true rich person addiction it's like yeah heroin is is like kind of boring check out all these tanks i have exactly um actually one thing i forgot the t6 so the 105 millimeter gun that the um m60 was using was designed after a T-55 with 100mm gun, or maybe it was a T-54, I think a T-54 with 100mm gun was captured by Hungarian rebels

during the Hungarian uprising in 1956. And British officers at the embassy looked at it and were like, oh shit, this gun is good. So the 105mm gun was designed for NATO and then it got captured by the Soviets who were like, oh shit, this gun is good. And so they built the 115mm gun and... Everything comes full circle. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

It's just tanks spying all the way down. Basically. So as I was talking about the production and stuff, It's just tanks spying all the way down. Basically. So, as I was talking about the production and stuff, once the T-62 entered production in 1962, most of the other factories started transitioning production to the T-62 as well, with the exception of a tank factory in Omsk in the Russian SSR. It continued its production of the t-55a and from around 1964 1965 pretty much every tank they produced was designed for export

or not designed but destined for export and only actually the interesting thing about the t-62 is only a few years after it entered production it was quickly replaced by the T-64 and then soon afterwards the T-72. So the T-62 was actually under major production for a very brief period of time. And the T-55 actually outlived it. And the T-55, particularly the T-55A model, had proven itself sufficiently cheap and easy to manufacture, easy to use, easy to maintain, and as a result, it was basically the perfect tank for the growing market for tank purchases, modern tank purchases in the developing and post-colonial world, particularly the Middle East. And as a result, almost every T-55A built in the USSR after the mid-1960s was exported. And here I'm going to hit you with some sexy numbers.

You know how I just love numbers. Oh, yeah. But you're going to love these. Between 1959 and 1977, the Soviet Union produced 30,000 T-55 tanks. Jesus Christ. Yeah. I wish we had some kind of gross estimate of tanks that were not T-55s

that were produced by literally anywhere else combined during the same time. It can't be close, right? No, I'm sure. I'm sure a ton of M48s and M60s were built, like thousands and thousands but i can't i can't match it can't match the t55 i have a hard time believing that there is 20 000 m60s in existence yeah yeah um but but wait there's more so the eastern pack or the

eastern warsaw pack states like poland romania czechoslovakia, East Germany, and so on, they also needed their own tank forces. And they weren't relying on Soviet factories. They were mostly supplying their own militaries, primarily with just licensed production of Soviet-made weapons. But that means they had to build them. They didn't quite have the resources to so quickly and rapidly adapt new designs like the Soviets did. So they were sticking with basically the previous model that the Soviets had. And these states actually continued production and local modification improvement far longer than the Soviet Union did.

Basically, production through till the end of the Cold War and modification in some cases through till the present. So Poland actually produced over 7,000 T-55s of various models. Czechoslovakia built nearly 8,000 T-55s of various models. And other countries such as Romania and I think Yugoslavia at some point also built T-55s, but I could actually be wrong about Yugoslavia. But basically, the Eastern Warsaw Pact states themselves built probably 15,000 to 20,000 T-55s during the Cold War. So, there's like around 55,000 T-55s. Yeah, I haven't even mentioned, I don't even know the numbers for the Chinese Type 59, but I'm sure that's in the thousands at least, if not more than 10,000.

So yeah, I wouldn't be shocked if anywhere between 50 and 75,000 T-55 models were produced. Yeah, which is pretty absurd. That's absurd for World War II numbers. Yeah, this is the kind of stuff that kind of hammers home how scary the Cold War would have been had it actually broken out. I mean, not even thinking about nuclear weapons, but just like the sheer quantity of modern military equipment that was present in Europe during that time. It's just really terrifying to think about because, you know, the Eastern Bloc would have had, you know, tens of thousands of T-55s, T- t55 c62s t72s depending on what time of the war it was and of course nato would have had tons of their own tanks of various models and 47s and 48s and 60s leopards uh whatever the fuck the french were using um amx 30 i think something like that yeah they're always terrible yeah

but uh you know like tens of thousands of nato tanks as well and that's not to mention the ballistic mit like the scud type missiles and the um fucking rocket artillery of just like obscene quantities of conventional military equipment present in like germany during the cold war is pretty scary um they're eventually going to come up with a bigger t55 that shoots smaller t55 just to burn up some of the t55s they have laying around honestly that's probably the best way to do it but polish air force just diving in and dropping t unloaded t55s on people please just take one it's like the price of oil is negative 47 cents or whatever a couple of weeks ago. Like the price of a T-55 really probably, at least in like 1990 was probably like negative $40,000.

What am I going to do with all these T-55s? It's the Bitcoin of tanks. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, it does something. Yeah. Unfortunately,

honestly, or fortunately, well, unfortunately, let's be real. Unfortunately, most of these tanks did find, find, they found a war to fight in. So we did talk about it a little bit during the Iran-Iraq war episode that I was on, but huge quantities of these tanks made it to the Middle East, to various state actors there, primarily Egypt, Syria, and Iraq. They were used extensively during the Arab-Israeli wars, mostly, I think, in 1973, I think in 1967.

I could be wrong about this, but I still think the majority of Arab army tanks in 1967 were, like, much older, like, older like literally like T-34s and a lot of even a lot of like World War II German surplus stuff I mean they still had some T-44s or T-54s and T-55s but I think it wasn't a majority

of their tank force by that point but in 1973 absolutely the Egyptians and Syrians had primarily T-55s and T-62s. And I think at that point, the majority were T-55s. And they were up against Israeli Centurions, M60s, M48s, and even modified Shermans that had the 105mm L7 cannon, I think. 105mm L7 cannon, I think. And the tanks themselves, I mean, the Israelis and the Egyptians and Syrians all considered that the T-55 and T-62 were like perfectly good tanks.

But the reason that the Egyptian and Syrian armies lost had nothing to do with the quality of their tanks and more to do with the quality of their training and some other other other kind of secondary and tertiary factors so I don't think I don't think anyone who seriously studied it believes that the Arab armies had inferior technology they just had I did I don't think the Israelis would have taken their tanks that they had disabled. Yeah, exactly. Because they pressed a lot of them back into service. Exactly.

And actually, not the T-55, but the T-62 was considered superior to anything the Israelis had in their arsenal in 1973. One of the main reasons the Israelis were able to kind of withstand or kind of counterattack the initial offensive by the egyptians was the u.s basically just like shipped them unlimited quantities of m48 m60 tanks um and to basically refill their arsenal because they had lost most of their equipment um during the initial offensive and uh so thanks nixon uh again as always um But they were also used extensively in the Iran-Iraq war by both sides.

Mostly the Iraqis, but over the war, the Iranians were able to capture and acquire large numbers as well. Here, I think it's tough to say how well they really performed because they were up against... The Iranian tank force was really not what I think we could consider a conventional

tank force because none of it was locally produced and it was basically whatever they could find or piece together from existing stockpiles or captured from the Iraqis and they didn't really have any consistent form of resupply because they were sanctioned and had arms embargoes. The Iraqis, on the other hand, had

like I mentioned, like a million fucking T-55s by the end of the war. And by the end of the war, they were also, I think, producing some local parts as well. T-54s and T-55s also saw service in the Vietnam War on the side of the North Vietnamese. I think, if I remember correctly, they were primarily used towards the end of the war in conventional North Vietnamese offenses against the South I don't think they saw a ton of service against American troops there

but during the more conventional fighting after the American withdrawal I think they served fairly well against whatever the South Vietnamese had which I think were mostly like you know, not,

not particularly modern stuff, like maybe M47s or something like that. I'm not a hundred percent sure. They also saw some service and some of the India, India, Pakistan wars. Although I think relatively limited service, I think most sides,

both sides were mostly using American made tanks and British made tanks by the during those wars so uh those are the main conventional wars that they fought in they've also seen a lot of service in various civil wars oh i guess one thing i really want to know more about is their usage during the uh angolan civil war because they're primarily used there by Cuban forces pretty effectively against the apartheid South African army as well as in the service of the Angolan communist side of things.

I think they saw a fair bit of service in that war and were pretty effective. They also were, I think, the primary tank during the Ethiopian Civil War between Eritrea were pretty effective um they also were i think the primary tank during the uh ethiopian civil war between eritrea and or i guess the eritrean war of independence and then the somali invasion of ethiopia and the 70s eritrea erasure you bastard yeah uh probably and then basically any conflict you're not banned from ever going to eritrea. I probably already was, but weird.

Yeah, pretty much every conflict in Africa during the Cold War grew till pretty much the present, I think. I've seen T-55s in use by some army or some force. Like the Libyans used them extensively extensively during the toyota wars against chad where they were quite spectacularly defeated but i think again that has more to do with doctrine strategy and training rather than like the quality of the tank malar gaddafi was really only ever good at killing unarmed people yeah they didn't have a whole particularly good record and like anything else um yeah i mean they've also been

used of course extensively in the iraqi civil war the gulf war i guess we should talk about the gulf war um because that's kind of the main the main instance where modern american tanks fought uh soviet tanks i won't say modern soviet tanks that's not true. They were mostly obsolete Soviet tanks by that point. But Soviet tanks or Soviet-designed tanks. And the Iraqi Republican Guard Armor Force was definitely blown up and championed before that. They're like the third or fourth land army, the largest land army, and considered the strongest in the Middle East.

So they weren't modern but they were they were thought of as modern at the time yeah yeah i would say though that the people doing that were mostly um practicing yellow journalism and sensationalism because if they had actually objectively look at looked at ir the Iran-Iraq war and Iraqi capabilities, they would have known that you put like... Not great. Yeah, not great stuff. You spend three months bombing them

and then invade with Abrams and much more modernized M60A3s and whatever the British were using, Challengers probably, Leopards and so on. The vast majority of the Iraqi armored force was T-55s and T-62s with a handful of T-72s. And even those T-72s, which were, you know,

the T-72, the late model T-72 is a very formidable tank. But what the Iraqis had was not the late model T-72. It was the already downgraded export version, often with many low-quality Iraqi-made parts, such as the ammunition. And then, of course, the T-55 by 1991 was a 40, well, in many ways, 50-year-old design of probably a tank that was 30 or 40 years old, tank that was 30 or 40 years old being driven by conscripts who had no particular desire to be there against american m1a1 abrams with a full range of fancy night vision and so on equipment and also the iraqis had just been bombed for like two months by fucking everything in the american air force um so i don't think it's like a fair comparison to say that

just because the iraqis lost in 1991 that they that their equipment was like and that or that soviet or russian designed equipment is inherently inferior to american design equipment there it'd be it's kind of apples and oranges because the ira was not what the Soviets would have fielded if the Americans had been invading the Soviet Union at the same time. Nor would it be up against soldiers who are as poorly trained and poorly motivated, poorly supplied and poorly led as the Iraqis were in 1991. I think we've touched upon this a little bit way back a time ago. And we talked about the Iran Iraq war is like regionally. These were, these were decent vehicles for, you know,

what the Iraqis could produce, you know, before the utter devastation of the Iran Iraq war. Most of their manufacturing capabilities kind of went to shit and then, you know, sanctions and then everything else. But, you know, they're not exactly if you gave them an an equal amount of m1a1 or murkavas or leopards or whatever like they're not going to be able to run them yeah they just don't have the logistics so it doesn't matter yeah uh i mean it's like the u.s still barely has the fucking

logistics to run the abrams so like we can't expect the uh the iraqis in 91 to be able to field an equivalent uh tank and i think a lot of people specifically in the u.s are um running into the same kind of idea of their own tank now uh the abrams and its various forms because you know the now there's soon no end to uh footage of it being like ripped apart by uh rockets and stuff in like yemen and syria and people like oh wow the abrams is a bad tank it's not i can tell you firsthand it's not a bad tank but much like like the Soviets, we export shittier versions of our tank to people. It doesn't have Chobham armor most of the time. It's like shitty steel armor, which is what I believe the Saudis get and the Iraqis got as well, which then means ISIS has them or had them.

Well, ISIS knew that they couldn't run them so they just torched all the abrams that they captured like meanwhile they were running their t-55s right through the fucking battle of mosul yeah they did some burnouts in their abrams for the propaganda because like honestly who wouldn't uh you know like credit where you do not in fact have to hand it to isis but like you do a sick burnout and you captured american tank before you torch it but yeah i think it really leads me to like a question of do people use the t55 um because it's just incredibly reliable like an ak-47 or simply because like oh t55 blew up we got 16 more like there's there's got to be some kind of balance in the middle right yeah i mean i think it's a it's an answer is both in some ways because like for one it was designed at a time

when military vehicles across the board were just a little were just simpler um they didn't have fancy electronics they didn't have a fucking jet engine well-designed um like analogs like analog vehicles they weren't digitalized nothing was fancy everything was just basic well-designed mechanics um and so they then also produced 50 fucking thousand of them and disseminated them across the entire world um so yeah sure like it might break down easily but you have the spare parts most likely um and even even if you don't you can probably just like hit it with a wrench enough times and it'll start up again um because it's like the abrams and the t-55 do have that in common yeah it's actually a trick

at least in the old version i've been at the army almost 10 years but if your starter was breaking down you could pull off the back plate of the tank which is commonly known as the bitch plate because it was incredibly heavy and a bitch to put back in place and if you hit it with a hammer uh while you're trying to start it it would turn over yeah well i'm sure the t55 is the same way but you'd also don't have to fuel a fucking jet turbine engine or whatever and you don't have to you don't have to make sure like your fancy like thermal optics work or anything like that it's just like there's a piece of glass and you look through it and it's got a piece of like black like etched in it as the optic like

like it even seems like they can put nearly anything in it to fuel it right like yeah places that are are fielding them don't exactly have stable supplies of what i'm assuming is diesel yeah um so like is it like one of those vegetable cars you can just pour whatever into it as long as it combusts and also like i've heard people pouring things that are definitely not gasoline into Soviet era tanks and them still running. No, I'm sure it's something like that. And,

um, and also I think like just the, the basic design is good enough that even like state, um, state actors who have resources, like particularly a lot of Eastern European countries that have since joined nato they continue to actually operate t-55s they've just massively upgraded them with you know way better armor better engines better guns better optics better fire control stuff like everything is different but it's just all stuck onto a t-55 base and um it works fine

t-55 base gentrification i won't stand for it i mean i think they look pretty ugly um the best they do look pretty hideous i think north korea has a model that they continue to uh revamp as well yeah yeah like i think the ones who currently use it like romania slovakia maybe poland still has um czechoslovakia or something um has a couple knocking around and like yeah they look completely different like they're really bastardized the best T-55s were built in like the 1960s

by Poland or Russia or something and they didn't have all this extra shit stuck to them they're pure if it's not from that region it's just sparkling armored warfare got it in there you know it's interesting because it seems like they're

simple machines because you know for my experience researching the Soviet Afghan war is the Soviets thought very very little of their own soldiers and what they could operate. Yeah. So like they tried purposely and I'm not saying this is a wrong thing to do. I believe the U S military should try to do it more. Um,

even in 2020 is make things dumber. Yeah. Because like, well, I mean, obviously the Soviets had conscription, which we did at the time as well. So you are purposefully sitting out like we are

scraping the bottom of the barrel they need to be able to operate this and historically tank uh what the soviets called tankists weren't the brightest people uh normally they just kind of knew how to work on tractors and stuff uh but like you know that you had to be able to figure it out and the m the m1 abrams kind of does that but it also has a ton of computers in it now which my first version did not yeah when i when i was originally i was i was in an m1a1 that was you know one you know the one that we use in the golf is the m1 with the 105 main gun on it um and a few other changes but then i was an m1a1 which has 120 and has a few other computerized changes and they came out with the sep which is like r2d2 on top of it yeah so you know you can beat the shit out of the tank

and force it to work and like tape fuel lines together and you know it's still big dumb stupid tank work but you know it has a ton of computers on it that are finicky as shit. And the T-55 seems to be... Because even if the most complex part of it breaks, which is probably, I don't know, maybe the optics, you could still kind of use it. Yeah, just like point blank or as indirect fire support or something like that, which I think a lot of the militias are doing.

Yeah, I think the uh northern alliance did that um when john walker lind whatever prison he was uh being held in in northern afghanistan rioted yeah i i believe that's how they they finished the riot was by uh pouring gasoline into the basement lighting lighting it on fire, and then pumping T-55 rounds in at, like, point-blank range. Jesus. Yeah, but it worked. Yeah. I mean, I saw a video, I think in Libya, of one of the militias. They had a T-55 there, and they were...

Who knows whether or not the optics were working, but they were just, like, slowly churning out high-explosive ammo into a town at, like, you know, maybe 300 or 400 hundred meters and it's like at that range you don't really need much more than you know a basic guesstimation of like yeah it's it's like about half a click out all right whatever the old kentucky windage of war crimes yeah exactly and uh you know You're not doing highly mobile tank warfare at three kilometers.

That's not what you're trying to do with it anymore. You use it the way you can use it. I don't know. I think I have a lot of... I don't know. I just think it's really cool that something like that can continue to find... Unfortunately, it's a weapon of war.

It's bad. War is bad. But it's still weapon of war it's bad war is bad but i mean but it's still fucking cool that it's still yeah it would be better if our favorite hobby did not exist yeah but i mean think of it in the reverse way what are we still using or what were they still using vehicle wise or or really even weaponized weapon wise in you know that when the t-55 came out that was 50 years before that yeah you know i'm sure a lot of things it's incredibly rare like nobody's rolling around a fucking mark 5 tank in 1950 it's not happening uh and that's a much and a much newer invest and invention and in comparison but um you know the closest thing that can even exist or i believe the closest thing that exists in america to that's the the m250 caliber machine gun which

it still exists with very little changes to it they recently changed like the most back-ass word like headspace and timing. If you're not familiar with that, I know what you mean. They only very recently got rid of that with like a new barrel design, um, which blew my mind. Cause it's like, well,

next year you make me load it from the barrel first. It's, you know, it's such an old thing. Um, but yeah. And it was after I got out that they have, my friend told me like,

yeah, you don't have to do headspace and timing anymore. And it was like, he might as well have explained to me that they just uh like refitted it to shoot lasers because it absolutely blew my mind yeah well that's kind of funny actually that you mention it uh i saw a video of iraqi special forces in mosul during the battle of mosul with like a m2 on a tripod shooting it and some of the comments were guys like incredible yeah and some of the comments were were guys who yeah and some of the comments were guys who I

assume were like US military being like wow like you know they must have really screwed that gun up like they keep having to like yank the charging handle back like my M2 never does that and I'm like hmm hmm how new are you that's not true

first of all second of all they're incredibly finicky and need to have replacement parts put in all the time yeah so like yeah it's also they're fighting in the battle of mosul which i mean very few american soldiers saw the same amount of combat with their weapons it's like the golden division did and stuff like that but um so travis thanks for joining me uh we have a thing on this show which you've never taken part in before questions from the legion uh if you're listening and you would like to ask us a question from the legion you can donate a dollar to the show and ask us

on discord uh this one i think is um pretty on brand for for the well obviously this show but also more specifically us is um best european country based on historical war crime sorry best european country based on historical war crime history so if i i i probably should ask for clarification on this, but I'm going to take it my own way, which is what is your favorite country based on their horrific human rights records? Oh boy. I mean, there's two obvious ones here, which is like Germany and Belgium,

right? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to have to pick Belgium simply because everybody knows Hitler's a fucking bastard. Yeah. And not many people know who Leopold II is. Yeah.

Though I did see some heartwarming footage this morning of a whole bunch of Belgian kids vandalizing the shit out of a Leopold II statue until the city took it down. Yeah, that was tight. Yeah, so shout out to our Belgian comrades. Keep doing that. Yeah. I don't know i'm i'm afraid i don't really i can't immediately think of a good answer um because again like you said the obvious choices are going to be germany belgium and then like england or the british empire or

something i mean we're definitely talking podium status here yeah so the uk is up there i'm gonna go with i'm gonna go with france because on the day that world war ii ended in europe the french decided to massacre something like 30 000 protesting algerians um and then over the course of the next 15 years kill something like two to three million algerian people during their war to independence. So I'm going to go with France because... France is a good one. Yeah. They kind of suck at that kind of stuff.

They did a lot of war crimes. Yeah. And unfortunately, my grandpa helped with that one. We'll delete that part. one we'll edit that we'll delete that part yeah it's it's yeah it's most people who are recent immigrants uh or families are recent immigrants from europe yeah you know what you can't judge me your parents did some awful shit yeah it's true So, Travis, again, thanks for joining us. What was the book that you used as the source for this? So the primary source for this would have been...

What's the title? It's by Steven Zaloga. Zaloga, I don't know exactly how to pronounce his name. But I think it's called T-54 and T-55 Main Battle Tank, like 1953 to 19-something or other. I forgot to copy the title page so i don't actually have that um but yeah zaloga wrote a bunch of books about pretty much every tank as far as i can tell he's the premier tank historian out there right now yeah i'm coming for you

yeah not really um but yeah so i think i pulled a little bit of other stuff from his books on the t-72 um and then yeah so basically zeloka is the main source so if you just figure you know buy all of his books or obtain them through other means on the internet um they're fantastic and they've got great uh photographs and uh drawings as well yeah the one thing they need to invent for a tank history book is a scratch and sniff where you can truly experience what the inside of a tank turrets like after like a week of use. Yeah. God,

it's like the worst Yankee candle ever. Travis, again, it's always a joy to have you on. Thanks for finally expanding upon our glorious armored mother T-55's lore praise be and until next time

I don't know normally I have an exit here where it's like until next time don't do this from the episode but this time it's like I don't know buy a T-55 buy a T-55 and buy me a T-55