Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1943-1945: Red Steamroller

Early in the war, the NKO had raided tank schools to harvest trained cadre for front-line service, which greatly impacted the quality of training in 1942. However, the situation began to improve when the NKO issued Order 003 on 3 January 1943 to rationalize and improve tank training by combining various separate tank training battalions into tank training brigades. Cadre with frontline experience – often wounded – were sent to revitalize the training schools, but the quality of Soviet tanker training still remained problematic throughout much of 1943. Even the T-34 training battalions still used obsolete T-26 and BT-7 light tanks for training. Most of the instruction for crewmen was rote in nature, producing drivers and gunners who had attained only a modest level of familiarity with their tanks. In the training schools, there was virtually no realistic field training and tanks were taught merely to move using simple line and column tactics. Leytenant Pavlov V. Bryukhov, who trained at the Kurgan Tank Training School from January to April 1943, described training as ‘very weak’. Bryukhov said that, ‘they only taught us the basics – starting the engine and driving straight. We had tactical training, but it was mostly walking about on foot imitating the manoeuvreing of tanks’. Soviet tank platoon leaders were not even trained to read maps, which became a real problem once the Red Army began advancing westward.⁴³ Enlisted soldiers were segregated into training battalions that trained a single skill – driver, gunner or loader – which meant that they were not cross-trained in other tasks, as German tankers were.

Driver skills and manoeuvreing training over typical cross-country terrain were extremely basic, but gunnery training remained deficient throughout the war. Indeed, given the amount of effort put into increasing tank production, it is an amazing oversight that the NKO put so little effort into training Soviet tankers to execute their main tasks of manoeuvreing and shooting. Gunnery training was particularly deficient and handed a major advantage to German tankers. Bryukhov noted that after he graduated from the Kurgan Tank School he was assigned to a reserve tank regiment where ‘we received a tank, drove it fifty kilometers to a firing range and fired three rounds from the main gun and one machine-gun ammo drum, after which the tank was considered officially ready for shipment to the front.’⁴⁴ Soviet tank gunners and commanders were taught to engage targets within 10 seconds, which was an eternity on the battlefield; the German standard was five seconds for the first round on the way. In combat, German tankers noted how slowly Soviet tankers fired – which was how they were trained. Nor was any effort made to teach Soviet tankers how to lead a moving target or use boresighting techniques, so Soviet optical sights were not properly aligned with the gun barrel, greatly reducing the accuracy of the main gun. Given these standards, it is truly amazing that Soviet tankers managed to hit as many German tanks as they actually did. The only saving grace for Soviet tankers was that as more tankers survived their first action in 1943–44, the veterans gradually learned essential skills that they should have been taught in training. In 1944, several tank training centres were established for Guards Tank units and crews at these sites received more firing and manoeuvre training, but still only a fraction of what most German tankers received.

Nevertheless, the annual output of tens of thousands of even partly-trained tankers was one of the great wartime miracles of the Soviet Union and helps to explain why the Red Army gradually gained the upper hand. Yet it was a frightfully wasteful method of replacing personnel losses, and had the Red Army built even a single modern gunnery training facility like Putlos and a manoeuvre training area like Grafenwöhr, Soviet tank losses would have dropped significantly and greater losses would have been inflicted on the Germans. Indeed, lack of attention to quality training constituted a self-inflicted wound for the Red Army, which was not resolved during the war. The Soviet Communist approach to warfare was driven by industrial imperatives, not concern for the well being of the ‘little cogs’ at the front.

Soviet Tank Production and Lend-Lease