BT-4 Light Wheeled-and-tracked Tank
Throughout 1932-1933 design work was directed towards joining armored parts of the hull and turret by means of electric welding instead of rivets. The BT-2 tank with welded hull and turret was designated the BT-4.
According to some sources, a small tank series with two towers was also developed and even built. The earliest known mention of double-turret BT is found in one of the 1992 editions of Tankomaster magazine. The journal cited the scheme of this machine, called the BT-4, and also had a brief history. The magazine stated that the drawings of the tank were made on the materials of foreign sources. The list of these sources, however, was not mentioned. It also remained a secret and the main characteristics of the machine with a non-standard layout. Historians of the domestic tank building could not find any evidence of the existence of a modification of the BT-4 with two towers. At the same time, however, the BT-4 project itself did exist, albeit in a different form.
In the spring of 2002, the publication of the magazine “Polygon” was published, in which there was a large and detailed article about the BT tank with two turrets entitled “The two-headed salamander of the Red Army”. Its author, T.R. Yepachev, allegedly, studied a lot of documents and restored the history of an interesting project. In addition, the author managed to get some unique photos of a prospective combat vehicle, which were attached to the article.
The article “The two-headed salamander of the Red Army” was accompanied by several photographs of not very good quality, which, however, made it possible to view the BT-BT tank. It differed from serial BT of early modifications by the presence of two relatively small turrets with cannon and machine-gun armament. In the right turret there was a 37-mm cannon, in the left - a DT machine gun of 7.62 mm caliber. The hull and undercarriage, apparently, were borrowed from earlier technology without significant changes, although they were refined due to the need to install two towers.
The article of the magazine "Polygon" to this day is the largest and most detailed study of the topic of the two-tower tanks BT, but it has some characteristic features. The attentive reader will notice some oddities in the names of the project participants, as well as notice the discrepancy between the named and real designations of the organizations. For example, the Kharkov plant that built armored vehicles was never called a tank one, and there was no SKB-6 in its structure.
It should be noted, this was not an error of the author. T.R. Yepachev could not be mistaken, because he never existed and appeared only thanks to the release date of the magazine. The second issue of the magazine "Polygon" for 2002 was released in April and to a certain extent was timed to the Day of the Fool. For this reason, in its appeal to the readers, the group of authors urged: “do not fall, please, under the soft charm of some articles, no matter how interesting they may seem to you. However, for people who have no sense of humor at all, we have provided for them "subtle hints of thick circumstances."
In other words, the article about the two-tower modification of BT was a hoax and an April Fool's rally. Mention of such a technique did occur in earlier literature, but did not have any evidence. In particular, there were no images of allegedly built tanks. The authors of the magazine "Polygon" corrected this flaw and independently made several pictures with two-turreted tanks by means of a photomontage.
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