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T-35 Heavy Tank

Five turrets, three cannons and six machine-guns crewed by a dozen men: This was no floating incarnation of Soviet power on the high seas but an early Red Army tank, the T-35 of the 1930s that charged to its destruction in the opening days of the Second World War.

From their appearance during the First World War, tanks grew rapidly in size, power and armament until the fast-paced engagements of WWII brought them back into reasonable proportion. The first heavy multi-turreted tank was the French Char 2C, followed in the late 1920s by Britain’s A1E1 Independent, a formidable 33-ton machine with five turrets that never reached mass production but may have inspired the Soviet designers to go bigger.

Crippled by the loss of many experienced engineers in the Russian Revolution, the industrial base inherited by the Bolsheviks was incapable of mass-producing modern technology and had to be rebuilt from scratch. But then Soviet experimental design came into full swing.

Building light tanks was easier and could be learned by copying foreign models. But there was no ready recipe for heavy tanks, so these had to be freshly conceived, using engineering impetus gained in joint projects with German engineer Edward Grotte. The medium TG tank of the Soviet-German design group did not make it into production but gave the young Soviet team invaluable hands-on experience. They progressed to bigger projects and soon designed the T-35, based on the TG, the German Grosstraktor and models imported from Britain.

This five-turreted, 9.7 meter (31 foot) long, 3.5 meter (11.4 foot) tall, behemoth of a tank was a Russian tank designed around the land battleship concept. In 1932 a requirement arose for a heavy tank to deal with enemy infantry and anti-tank weapons. During the early 1930s the idea of the heavy, multi-turreted "breakthrough" tank was considered, and spawned the British Independent tank, and the Soviet T-35. The T-35 was the only one of the two to actually reach production and service.

The T-35 Heavy Tank was developed developed at the OKMO design bureau by N. Tsiets, building on the project and prototype vehicles prepared by the Machine Building experiment design department of the Leningrad Bolshevik Plant with taking into account the peculiarities of the production facilities of the Kharkiv Locomotive Plant. Having its origins in studies that were undertaken in 1930 the T-35 was strongly influenced by the design of the Vickers Independent, mainly in the form of being a multi-turreted design.

The British showed their own monster, the Independent tank, whose prototype was built in 1929, but did not go into the series. In 1931, the prototype T-35-1 was created, which had a mass of 42 tons, was armed with three guns (one 76 mm and two 37 mm) and three machine guns. The crew of the T-35-1 consisted of ten people, the car had an engine (aviation M-11) in 500 liters. with. that allowed her to reach speeds of up to 28 km / h. The maximum armor thickness reached 40 mm, and the cruising range was 150 km. In 1933, the next modification of the tank, the T-35-2, was made; he even managed to take part in a parade on Red Square. However, at this moment, the designers developed the T-35A - a new tank, which went into mass production.

The T-35A was very different from the prototypes, the length and shape of the hull changed, turrets of a different design and size were installed on the tank, there were changes in the suspension too. In fact, it was a different tank. In 1933, the T-35A was adopted. Production started at the Kharkov locomotive factory, due to the appropriate size. In 1934, the T-35 began to enter the army.

Designers recognized that the tank needed a variety of firepower immediately available during the attack, so they hung a variety of weapons systems on the tank. The Soviet T-35 heavy tank weighed 50 tons, had an 11-man crew and carried a 76.2mm cannon, two 45mm cannons, and six 7.62mm machine guns.

The tank was to weigh around 35 tons but overshot by 10 tons in the 1932 prototype. The resultant monster towered more than three meters high, its two-tiered turrets capped with 76 mm guns and machine guns that could rotate 360 degrees. Two smaller gun turrets with 45 mm cannons and machine-guns that could do half turns were placed fore and aft, while two machine-gun turrets and a firing port under the rear gun completed the tank’s arsenal. The machine was powered by a 500-horsepower engine and had a top speed of just 17 miles per hour (28 km/h) on the open road. The military accepted the tank but was dissatisfied with the complex chassis design and small engine capacity.

The first prototype rolled out of the Bolshevik factory in July 1932 and went on trials in Kubinka in April 1933. Immediately afterwards it went on display by featuring in the annual May Day parade and surprised the world with its great size and abundance of armament, which for the time, was considerable. By the years end and the first batch consisting of 10 units was completed though the early model used exactly the same main gun and turret as the T-28 tank.

In the early 1930s, Soviet strategists planned the next stages of tank warfare. Medium T-28 tanks would break through enemy defenses, T-35s would storm through and annihilate everything around them with their massive firepower, followed by a third wave of T-26 and even lighter models with machine-guns that would mop up with infantry support.

However, the experience of the Spanish Civil War, Soviet border fighting with the Japanese and the Winter War with Finland demonstrated the danger of anti-tank artillery and the need to mount armor-supported infantry offensives. In such conditions, 10-50 mm tank armor was insufficient. Later models replaced the cylindrical turrets with turrets that had sloped and welded armor, giving better all round protection for the crew which was further facilitated by increasing the frontal armor thickness. The main batch produced between 1935 and 1938 had a lengthened hull, which made steering considerably more difficult. Attempts to increase armor thickness drove up the tank’s mass to a prohibitive 55 tons, and no Soviet engine was capable of powering such a size.

Overall, the length and 50,000 kg weight of this AFV made it hard to maneuver, and the tank commander had an overwhelming job of trying to command the vehicle and five separate turrets with weapons. Despite an impressive appearance, the armor was also relatively thin and vulnerable to even to the German light 37-mm Pak 36 AT gun.

Weighing some 45 tons, it was well armed with five independant turrets. The main turret had with a 76.2 mm howitzer in the main turret, plus four subsidiary turrets, of which, the off-side front and nearside rear mounted a 45mm gun each [or 37 mm guns and coaxial machine-gun], and the other two, a machine gun each. It carried a crew of eleven and had a top speed of 18 mph and a range of 153 km. It was fairly lightly armored, with a maximum armor thickness of 30 mm.

Development began in 1930 and production continued from 1933 through to 1939, with final total production of about 61 tanks over the seven years. Over seven years various models of the T-35 Heavy Tank were produced. The earlier 1936 version had two hatches atop the main turret, or one large hatch on the later, 1938-1939 versions of the T-35, which had slightly sloped, conical-shaped turret sides.

The T-35 was produced in small numbers. In so doing, the tank was continually modified in order to improve the reliability, combat capabilities and ease of production. Another failing was the commander’s inability to lead firing from five turrets simultaneously. Designers attempted unsuccessfully to fit naval gun systems to synchronize multiple firing, and by the early 1940s the tank was already obsolete in both design and the tactics of its use.

These awesome five-turret monsters were produced from 1936 to 1939, but proved too cumbersome for the battlefield. The T-35 was in service with the Red Army and took part in combat operations at the beginning of the Second World War.

It served more on the ideological front, dominating city squares as a symbol of Soviet military might and drawing huge crowds and observers from abroad. It featured on posters and the ‘For courage’ medal, where it lasted much longer than in real life. In 1943, when the T-35 had already been consigned to history, it was still fighting for the Motherland in Soviet propaganda.

Some T-35s went into action in the winter war with Finland and in practice, fire control over 5 turrets proved to be a difficult task for the commander. During the German invasion of Russia a handful of T-35s saw action and were encountered by the Germans at Lvov in Poland (the East of which was Russian occupied), however, these tanks had run out of fuel.

Of 59 T-35s manufactured from 1934 to 1939, 48 of them entered the war while the rest were being repaired or used in training schools. The Soviet 34th Tank Division, which had all the available units, was alerted on the early morning of June 22 when the invasion began. Three of the tanks broke down even before they went into combat, and after maneuvering through western Ukraine two days later only 10 combat-ready tanks remained. The tank did not survive the first days of fighting since machines created for a sudden breakthrough were not capable of a long retreat. Only seven T-35s were knocked out in battle and the rest simply broke down and were abandoned by their crews.

In the confusion of the retreat and the border fighting there is only one account of their combat performance. On June 30, 1941, a tank group that included four T-35s was sent to reinforce other units but came under attack while en route.

Front turret gunner V. Sazonov later wrote: “Our last fight was stupid. First we fired across the river from the main turret on a hamlet called Sitna and then attacked with the remnants of our infantry. They faltered as soon as the German bullets started to whine and we then went forward and came under German cannon fire from the left.

“I turned the turret to face, looked and looked but saw nothing, and then - wham, the turret took a hit. But you couldn’t stick your head out as bullets were showering on us like peas. The German shells hit us at five second intervals and no longer only on the port side. Then I saw a flash while we were still 50 meters from the hamlet, and one of our tracks broke.

“We opened up in all directions with everything we had but the hits we took caused the engine to stall and the gun to jam. Then we saw German soldiers and knew it was time to skedaddle out of there. We exited the turret and jumped down to the road from the turret. Of the T-35 crews only four men survived, all from different tanks.”

In all only 61 [other accounts report production of 59 or 60 tanks] T-35s were completed, and all of these vehicles served with the same tank brigade which was stationed just outside Moscow.

Like the T-28, the T-35 saw action in Finland in 1940 and during the German invasion of 1941. Since the German soldiers liked to pose beside the abandoned ‘Stalinist monsters’, there are many battlefield photographs of the T-35 despite its limited numbers and brief taste of combat. In July-August of 1941 most T-35s appear to have been lost due to mechanical failure.

The outdated, five-turreted giant never proved its mettle and ended its days as an engineering gimmick, a symbol of military might like the Tsar Cannon of the Moscow Kremlin, which is believed never to have been fired in anger. The last remaining example is kept at the Kubinka tank museum outside Moscow, where it is a star exhibit, reminding visitors of the decisive design projects of the last century, when tanks learned to be tanks.

Soviet heavy tank building began with the T-35. The first pancake came out lumpy.

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