Where Did the Tanks Go? The Price of Analytical Errors on the Eve of War
World War II is often called a "war of engines." In our country, this definition often includes a competition between the tank-building schools of the opposing sides. Why? Tanks, and not aircraft? Probably because, at the initial stage of the Great Patriotic War, German tank tactics simply discouraged us—and this was against the backdrop of Soviet numerical superiority, which on the eve of the war seemed overwhelming. Even though the German armored fist had already steamrolled Polish and French roads in the previous year and a half.
Enough has been written about the comparative characteristics of tank models and their quantities. However, questions about the influence of intelligence services and analytical work within the Red Army and national leadership on Soviet tank production (and elsewhere) remain somewhat obscured. An excerpt from an address by Innokenty Khalepsky, the leading Soviet armored vehicle designer, to Semyon Ginzburg, the chief tank designer, on January 26, 1931—two years before Hitler came to power in Germany—prompted me to examine these aspects.
Let me remind you: literally the day before, Khalepsky had returned from a long trip abroad to study Western armored vehicles and purchase some of them. And at the end of 1930, the first British tanks arrived in Soviet ports. Vickers 6-ton.
A 1937 photograph shows Innokenty Khalepsky (left) and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov (right)
In particular, the note states:
...according to intelligence information available at headquarters,... the Polish government is purchasing prototypes of the 6-ton Vickers tank and the 10-ton fast Christie tank and is intensively preparing for their mass production... Comrade Voroshilov, Comrade Eidemann, and Comrade Tukhachevsky agree that, using Anglo-French assistance, the Poles are capable of producing more than 300 light 6-ton British tanks and up to 100 medium Christie tanks by the end of the current year... Next year they may even double this number...
For Khalepsky, the logical conclusion was to increase design and production efforts to maintain armored parity with the Poles. From his perspective, this was understandable: more tanks in the Red Army meant more subordinates, more diamonds on their insignia. A peculiar way of converting the Polish threat into career capital. But it remains unclear why the Red Army leadership responded to the plans of its aggressive neighbor not by developing anti-tank weapons, but by dragging the country into a dubious race for tank numbers.
The Polish failed to acquire Christie's American tank. From the same trip, Khalepsky brought back samples of his hulls with a wheeled-tracked chassis, which Soviet designers modified and refined into a tank of the Kharkiv family. BTLet me remind you of a few details:
The BT-2 light wheeled and tracked tank, created in the early 1930s on the basis of the chassis of the American designer Walter Christie
- The BT-5 (about 1900 units were produced) was successfully sold to Republican Spain at a price of about 30 thousand dollars per vehicle – almost half the price of the T-26.
- The BT-7 (with a conical turret in later series; about five thousand were produced in total) was nominally not inferior to the Czech ones in terms of its main characteristics. LT vz. 35 (Skoda) and LT vz. 38 ("Prague"), German Pz.Kpfw.II and even earlier versions Pz.Kpfw.IIIYet, taken together, these vehicles constituted up to half of the Wehrmacht's active armored vehicle fleet in June 1941.
- The diesel BT-7M (about 800 units) is considered by many to be the ancestor of the legendary T-34.
But even the initial BT-2, used primarily for training purposes, was produced in quantities of around 400 units by the end of 1932—out of a planned 600. A question for Khalepsky and Soviet intelligence: didn't they know a year later, in early 1932, that the Poles had never purchased the Christie? This information could have been verified not only in hostile Poland, with its only sovereign Baltic seaport of Gdynia, through which the tank could potentially have been delivered, but also in the neutral United States. And even if they didn't know, isn't the 400 Soviet BT-2s versus the roughly two hundred vehicles of this class the Poles actually possessed a rather useless advantage, given the famine in the country? Innokenty Khalepsky clearly had no intention of following Suvorov's principle of "not numbers, but skill" in the upcoming conflicts.
Polish 7TP light tank from the 1930s.
Unlike Christie's tank, Vickers The Poles bought the 6-ton tank and even learned to produce it—in the form of their own 7TP. In total, their armored fleet included about four dozen original "English" tanks, some with machine guns, and over a hundred of their own. But not by the end of 1931, but (attention!) throughout the entire pre-war nine years—roughly from 1930 to 1939. Single-turreted artillery The Poles would only begin mass-producing tanks in the mid-1930s, and only 24 machine-gun-equipped units were produced. This means that the annual capabilities of Polish tank builders, even for 1935, were vastly overestimated by Innokenty Andreevich and his "group of comrades"—Voroshilov, Eideman, and Tukhachevsky (with intelligence input).
How did the Soviet tank industry respond?
In 1931 (from August onwards), Leningrad factories produced over a hundred twin-turret T-26s, derivatives of the Vickers. In the famine-stricken year of 1932, the figure had already reached over a thousand. Moreover, not all of them went straight from the factory floors to tank units. It's difficult to judge how willingly specialists from the Red Army's Directorate of Mechanization and Motorization accepted vehicles from the factory, even with all their flaws and "teething problems," but according to some sources, such vehicles accounted for at least half of the first years. The fact is that the depots of the most widely produced pre-war tank were located just a few dozen kilometers from the border with hostile Finland. In the event of the deployment of foreign combat forces on its airfields, aviation These warehouses could have been swept away by a raid in a couple of hours.
Question: During 1931, when Poland's tank fleet was supposed to grow by a whopping 400 vehicles (not a needle in a haystack), was intelligence data not updated? And secondly, regardless of the answer to the first: was the Leningrad factory plan for 1932 adequate to meet the needs—even without taking into account the famine in the rural areas?
Soviet light tanks T-18 (also known as MS-1), developed in 1925–1927
A couple more figures. Between 1928 and 1930, the USSR, primarily in Leningrad, produced over 400 light T-18 tanks, the predecessors of the T-26. When sending Khalepsky's commission to the West, the Red Army leadership acknowledged that the T-18 did not meet the requirements of modern tank use: the head of the Red Army's Directorate of Mechanization and Motorization explicitly stated this in a report dated November 11, 1930, to Deputy People's Commissar of Defense I.P. Uborevich. It would have been logical, while focusing on mastering the Vickers, to curtail T-18 production on the Neva within two or three months—perhaps retaining it in Perm. Or, at the very least, not to increase it. However, in 1931, Leningrad produced almost 70% more T-18s than the year before. In other words, with an alternative available, production of a tank that was obviously unsuitable was forced. Soviet officials at the turn of the 1930s apparently didn't even remember the title of Lenin's article "Better Less, But Better"—let alone "the slightest savings for the development of our large-scale machine industry."
It's fair to object here: the comparison is flawed. Germany in 1937 relied on the mature industries of Krupp and Daimler, while the fledgling Soviet tank industry of the early 30s was built literally from scratch—with a severe shortage of engineers, machine tools, and metal. Hence the inevitable wave of "teething problems" and the copying of foreign designs. Moreover, the small production runs of the early Pz.Kpfw.III are not solely due to German frugality: the first modifications were plagued by problems with the suspension and running gear, which designers spent years rectifying. All this is true. But it is precisely this that reveals the crux of the matter. The different industrial bases are an argument against those who would demand German quality from Leningrad factories. This isn't about the quality of the castings, but about the decisions made before the machine tool was even put into operation: how many and which vehicles to order, based on what intelligence, and to counter which enemy. The development of a new tank can be forgiven for its technological immaturity. Forcing production of the obviously defective T-18 when there are alternatives, like the race for a phantom Polish fleet, is no longer an option. This is not a question of manufacturing defects, but of the mind that set the task.
And here one cannot escape the feeling that Lenin’s article “Better Less, But Better” was studied more closely in Nazi Germany.
German medium tank Pz.Kpfw.III (Panzer III): The main tank of the Wehrmacht from 1940 to early 1943
The most effective German tank that invaded the Soviet border on June 22, 1941, based on its overall characteristics, can be considered Pz.Kpfw.IIIIts production began in 1937: the first two modifications produced 10 units each (in one year!), the third 15, the fourth 25, and the fifth alone produced about a hundred, with only half of them produced by September 1, 1939. And this in a country that was proactively planning an attack! Only in the sixth series did the production count of "troikas" reach into the hundreds. Moreover, the German tank industry was very limited in its focus on older models, as well as on the development of unpromising multi-turret or wheeled-tracked hybrids, which plagued Soviet tank production in the 30s. June 22, 1941 Pz.Kpfw.III It proved to be not only the most advanced German tank on the Eastern Front, but also the most widely produced. That is, from 1937 to 1941, German taxpayers' money was invested in what proved most effective on the battlefield.
The younger Soviet T-34 (produced in pre-war quantities comparable to its German competitor) was significantly inferior in units produced on the eve of the war to the T-26, T-27, and BT-7; significantly inferior to the twin-turreted T-26, T-37A, T-38, and BT-5; and only slightly superior to the ancient T-18. In other words, public funds, under Khalepsky and intelligence, were spent extremely ineffectively on tank development in the pre-war decade.
A column of Soviet T-34-76 medium tanks from the Great Patriotic War.
Has Soviet intelligence improved over the past 10 years?
The Presidential Library's website contains a cover letter from A. Kh. Artuzov, Deputy Chief of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate, and O. O. Steinbrück, Chief of the 1st Department of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate, to M. N. Tukhachevsky, Deputy People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR, dated January 26, 1935, with attached intelligence material. This material is based on reports from the American military attaché in Germany (not supported by documents) dated October 30, 1934. Specifically, the document details the armaments of the Reichswehr infantry and cavalry divisions. For example, under the heading "rifles—5000," there is a note from the Soviet intelligence director stating that their number is "clearly underestimated." The "tanks" column is blank, but with regard to mechanized divisions, it is stated that the Germans "have tanks." There are no clarifying notes under the "tanks" column, which means that at least in this document, the intelligence agency at the end of January (we note) did not provide any more precise information or substantiated assumptions.
As Guderian recalls in his famous work, "Memoirs of a Soldier," at the turn of the 30s, Germany did indeed test prototypes of light (6 units) and medium (4 units) tanks, but outside the country. However, the prospects for developing these vehicles and launching them into production were so dim at the time that the Germans used the chassis of a British tank to begin parallel training of tank crews. Carden-Loyd (the Soviet equivalent is the T-27 tankette, which had produced around three thousand three hundred units at the time of Artuzov's report), by installing a turret with a machine gun on it. The vehicle received the index Pz.Kpfw.I and was presented to Hitler as part of a training tank platoon after the Nazis came to power. Such tanks, noted the future Chief Inspector of the Wehrmacht's armored forces, "could have been manufactured by 1934 and used as training vehicles until combat tanks were ready.".
A German light tank, Panzerkampfwagen I (Pz.Kpfw. I), probably during operations in Norway in 1940.
B. Müller-Hillebrandt, a cliché for many, nevertheless points out in his work "The German Ground Forces 1933–1945" that in October 1934 (report of the American attaché), there was a significant increase in the size of the Reichswehr. Shortly before these events, the positions of Reich Chancellor and Reich President were merged in Germany, and Hitler became Supreme Commander-in-Chief. The author of the study mentions for the first time in the structure of the German armed forces a tank battalion consisting of 55 light armored vehicles—evidently, he is referring specifically to machine-gun battalions. Pz.Kpfw.I, since serial production Pz.Kpfw.II hasn't started yet.
Another important detail of the Soviet document marked "Top Secret" is that it was printed in five or six copies (one of the recipients was crossed out); the first on the list, as expected, is the People's Commissar of Defense of the USSR. Of course, practice has seen the production of classified documents in far larger quantities: this was inevitable when they needed to be distributed to executors across the vast geography of one-sixth of the earth's surface. (Operation Barbarossa was produced in nine copies.) Whether this was necessary within the capital, given the document's lack of urgent instructions, is debatable. In my opinion, the leader should have the competence to determine the circle of interested officials and the order in which they should be reviewed.
In the margins of Tukhachevsky's copy there is a remark: “I spoke with the scouts, and they, too, began to think…”The mystery isn't that no one besides Tukhachevsky independently considered the issue of rearmament for the Reich, but rather to whom, besides his adjutant, did he convey his thoughts. Voroshilov? His first deputy, Gamarnik? Chief of Staff Yegorov? Each of them had their own copy, potentially a copy. It's interesting to look at the resolutions of the aforementioned military leaders, reflecting their reactions to the information received.
Also, in 5 copies, A. Kh. Artuzov and O. O. Steinbrück distributed on March 5 (we record) 1935 a top secret note “On the preparation of fascist Germany for war” (the same Internet resource contains a version by M. Tukhachevsky).
The authors (Steinbrück's deputy Ryabinin and acting head of the department Uzdansky) expected the formation in the Reichswehr by March 1, 1935, of 7-9 tank battalions, a mechanized brigade consisting of two tank regiments of two battalions, two anti-tank brigades, under which, "according to some sources, brigades of high-speed tanks were disguised," in which there would be 14 divisions of high-speed tank destroyers.
In a short time, the Reichswehr developed and adopted tankettes, light and medium tanks, high-speed tanks, and some experimental heavy tank prototypes. Currently, the Reichswehr possesses no fewer than 1000 different types of tanks... In 1934, due to the need to carefully camouflage tank production, tank production did not exceed 100-120 units per month... Production capacity is far from exhausted.
While the thousand tanks (page 13 of the document) can be explained by superimposing the nominal number of German tank units on the Soviet staff—or by the intelligence officers' pensiveness after their conversation with Tukhachevsky—the "approximately 2000–2300" tanks (already on page 18) defies explanation altogether. This suggests that the future Marshal of the Soviet Union (or one of the candidates for marshal), several months before being promoted to the rank of Marshal, was eager for the enemy to have as many tanks as possible. Clearly, the Red Army Intelligence Directorate's monthly estimate of German armored vehicle production rates was greatly inflated. Why, then, didn't intelligence cite this figure when commenting on the American report back in January?
From 1934 to 1937, approximately 1,800 machine gun vehicles rolled out of German factories (an average of less than 50 per month), including export vehicles—particularly for Franco in Spain—as well as command tankettes equipped with an armored cabin instead of a rotating turret. How Soviet intelligence counted a thousand different tanks in early 1935 remains a mystery.
German medium tank Panzerkampfwagen IV (Pz.Kpfw. IV) from World War II
But it is no mystery to us that the first heavy Tiger appeared on the battlefield only at the end of 1942, and even before the presentation of the 18-ton Pz.Kpfw.IV — a support vehicle, which, given its mass at the time, was sometimes considered a heavier class — was still a few years away. Testing of light and medium "grosstractors" at a proving ground near Kazan at the turn of the 30s was known even without intelligence, but the Germans made no breakthrough with those models between 1933 and 1935. And the mythical high-speed tank destroyers never appeared in the Wehrmacht. Self-propelled guns specialized in combating armored vehicles Panzerjäger I based on the chassis Pz.Kpfw.I The Germans launched them between the Polish and French campaigns, and their speed characteristics were rather modest - about 40 km/h, that is, no faster than the average (and by no means fast) Soviet T-28, which does not qualify it as a “fast fighter”.
Artur Khristianovich Artuzov (real name Frauchi) was one of the founders of Soviet intelligence and counterintelligence, a prominent figure in the Cheka-OGPU-NKVD and the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army. He joined history as a "grandmaster" of covert operations who outmaneuvered leading Western intelligence agencies in the 1920s
Nevertheless, A. Kh. Artuzov, now with the rank of Acting Chief of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate, reported again. On March 15, 1935 (the next day, the Reichswehr would be renamed the Wehrmacht, universal military service would be introduced in Germany, and the Nazis would completely stop being embarrassed about their military-technical developments), he submitted an abridged version of the note to the People's Commissar of Defense, K. Ye. Voroshilov: "By the way, at this time the Reichswehr has at least 1000 tanks (of various types)".
The phrase "by the way" (instead of "primarily") isn't surprising: it's as if the information was being forced upon the country's top defense official repeatedly, all in a short period of time. Or perhaps the People's Commissar wasn't familiarized with the full "Tukhachevsky version" within 10 days—perhaps it was his "busyness" that prompted the secretariat to churn out copies of the reports for each deputy. To the intelligence officers' credit, there's no mention of "approximately 2000–2300 tanks"—against this backdrop, "a thousand" is presented as a solid, supposedly verified figure (though it, too, is unsubstantiated). Nor is there any mention of the fact that "Germany should not be expected to introduce universal conscription in its pure form in the near future" (page 10 of the original document). Ironically, the corresponding law would be passed in Berlin the very next day. So, according to military intelligence, who would man the crews of the thousands of German tanks without universal conscription?
Here, it's worthwhile to delve a little into the personality of A. Kh. Artuzov-Frautschi. A descendant of pre-revolutionary Swiss immigrants, he made a career in the Soviet intelligence services. According to the website of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), from the early 30s he served as head of the INO (foreign intelligence) of the OGPU-NKVD, which from May 1934 to May 1935 he combined with the position of deputy head of the Red Army Intelligence Directorate (SVR and GRU in its modern form). This period coincided with a major failure of the Soviet residency in Copenhagen, for which Yan Berzin, Artuzov's boss in the RU, claimed responsibility.
Chronologically, it looks like this: before the Copenhagen failure (February 1935), our intelligence didn't comment on the possible presence of tanks in the Reichswehr—as opposed to the number of rifles in a division—but a couple of weeks afterward, they counted "at least a thousand." Moreover, tanks of "different types" were unlikely to have been manufactured by the same factory, but this didn't prevent them from being counted. The documents don't confirm a direct causal connection, but the coincidence itself suggests a "straw" laid before the organizational conclusions following the Copenhagen failure.
But, for example, this didn't help Matvey Ryabinin, deputy head of the 1st Department of the Intelligence Directorate and one of the co-authors of the memo "On the Preparation of Nazi Germany for War": at the end of March 1935, he was arrested (an interrogation report from April 4 is available online). A peasant's son, a former tsarist officer, and one of the few in the intelligence services of that time whose "Russianness" was beyond question, he was accused of removing official papers discovered during a house search from a restricted facility (hence the remark about the number of copies required of top secret documents).
Whether Artuzov's dual position in both intelligence agencies was necessary for the head of state to ensure the NKVD's control over the Intelligence Directorate (it's unlikely Voroshilov welcomed Yagoda's man, effectively assigned to oversee his People's Commissariat) remains to be seen by Stalin. The leader's systemic error here is obvious: he granted Artur Khristianovich a monopoly on information received from all foreign agents—recruited through both the OGPU Foreign Intelligence Directorate and the Red Army Intelligence Directorate. For an entire year, the head of state was unable to verify the data provided by the intelligence officer who held both positions through alternative intelligence sources. In other words, the leader effectively delegated his own analytical duties to his appointee, depriving himself of the opportunity to double-check—a level of trust rarely accorded to anyone. However, even this trust did not protect Artuzov from the flywheel of repression: in 1937, he was executed on charges of espionage.
The above doesn't automatically mean that Artuzov intentionally passed distorted information up the chain of command. The obvious conclusion is this: the fledgling Soviet intelligence service in the mid-30s was able to operate roughly as it was organized at the very top, according to the sarcastic assessment of cavalryman K. Voroshilov. "limping on all four legs" (The People's Commissar of Defense couldn't help but respond with a barb to Genrikh Yagoda, who sent Artuzov and Steinbrück "for reinforcement"). It's hard to recall a pre-war year in which military intelligence didn't experience a reshuffling of subordination or structural changes within the intelligence service. In the preceding decade, intelligence gained experience with priorities other than acquiring military-technical secrets. It was sometimes said that before the "war of motors," it wasn't even the country's intelligence service, but the intelligence service of the Comintern. At least, the SVR website lists the fight against White émigré organizations as the first task in the 20s. And even within this framework, our intelligence services overlooked the work of the outstanding Russian engineer Alexei Surin, the chief tank designer of a Czech company. ČKD, whose tank LT vz. 38 It would arrive on Russian soil in June 1941, comprising approximately 20% of the Wehrmacht's tank fleet. In the pre-war period, Soviet intelligence lacked, at the very least, an analytical component.
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