The Stavka had abolished the pre-war mechanized corps on 15 July and employed the few remaining units as independent tank divisions. Nine new ‘100-series’ tank divisions were hastily formed from existing units in July–August 1941 and equipped with surplus light tanks and a handful of newer models. Most of these expedient units were consumed in the Battle of Smolensk. By 1 September, there were only four intact large armoured formations left in the entire Red Army: the 61st and 111th Tank Divisions in the Transbaikal MD and the 58th and 112th Tank Divisions in the Far East. The Stavka decided to leave the two tank divisions in the Transbaikal since their combat readiness was negligible, but the two better-equipped tank divisions in the Far East were ordered to prepare for transfer to the West as soon as rail transport was available. However, the movement of Soviet industry eastward severely curtailed the amount of available rail capacity, so neither tank division could be immediately transferred. It was not until 14 October that General-major Aleksei F. Popov’s 60th Tank Division, stationed on the Manchurian border, began entraining and then spent two weeks traveling over 8,600km westward by rail.
It was clear, though, that the Red Army could not rejuvenate the shattered prewar units, and it lacked the trained personnel and equipment to create new corps or even division-size formations. In particular, the loss of command cadre and the lack of radios mandated smaller formations, so General-leytenant Yakov N. Fedorenko, head of the GABTU, successfully convinced the Stavka to concentrate on creating tank brigades for the rest of 1941. Fedorenko played an important role in rebuilding the Red Army’s tank forces in 1941–43 and in guiding how they were used, but he was one of many officers whose contributions were minimized due to Zhukov’s efforts to keep the spotlight on his own actions. Fedorenko combed the tank schools for officers and NCOs to act as cadres for the new tank brigades and filled them out with thousands of tankers who had lost their tanks in the early battles and survived to escape eastward. In mid-August, the first nine tank brigades began forming in Moscow, Kharkov and Stalingrad.
These first tank brigades had the pick of survivors from the pre-war formations and were supposed to consist of three tank battalions with a total of sixty-two tanks (seven KV, twenty-two T-34 and thirty-one BT/T-26) and a motorized infantry battalion. A few of these early brigades were quite good and represented a conscious effort by the Stavka to marry up the best commanders with the best available equipment. Polkovnik Mikhail E. Katukov’s 4th Tank Brigade, formed at Stalingrad, was provided with thirty brand-new T-34 tanks and thirty BT-7s. Polkovnik Pavel A. Rotmistrov’s 8th Tank Brigade, formed in the Urals, was also given seven new KV-1s and twenty-two T-34s. However, Soviet industry could not provide anything like the amount of equipment to outfit these brigades properly and most were provided with only light tanks and the number of tank battalions was soon reduced from three to two. Another twenty-one tank brigades began forming in September, followed by another dozen in October. Yet the diversion of all new tank production to support the formation of tank brigades meant that the remaining Soviet armoured units at the front were starved of replacements and allowed to disintegrate.
In fact, this Soviet shift to tank brigades marked a critical point in the dynamics of Eastern Front armoured warfare, since the Red Army chose to disperse all its armour into smaller units for infantry support, thereby removing any possibility of conducting decisive mobile operations until this was reversed. Each Soviet front-line army began requesting a tank brigade, which meant that the principle of concentration was set aside. This was the same mistake that the French army made with tanks in 1940. While many accounts of the Eastern Front choose to emphasize that the Soviet Union was producing more tanks than Germany in 1941, they fail to note that the Red Army was dispersing its armour to the point that it lost numerical superiority on the critical sectors. In contrast, the Germans had fewer tanks overall, but continued to mass them where it counted most. Furthermore, the new Soviet tank brigades were designed only for the infantry support role and lacked organic artillery or engineers, which put them at a major disadvantage when up against German panzer divisions.
Soviet tank production began to drop off in September 1941 as the KhPZ plant prepared to evacuate from Kharkov to Nizhny Tagil and the Kirov Plant in Leningrad was in the process of relocating to Chelyabinsk. The only major Soviet tank plant unaffected by the evacuation was the Stalingrad Tank Factory (StZ), which was producing forty T-34s per week. An alternate T-34 production line set up at Zavod 112 in Gorky managed to build only five T-34s in September and twenty in October 1941. Instead, the only tank being built in quantity in autumn 1941 was the new 5.8-ton T-60 light tank, armed with a 20mm cannon. Mass production of the T-60 began at the GAZ plant in Gorky in October, with output rising to 600 units per month in November–December, although these light tanks added very little to the Red Army’s armoured capabilities. The industrial evacuation also had an impact on supplies of ammunition and other equipment necessary to outfit large armoured units. Even before the German invasion, the People’s Commissariat for Munitions (Narkomat Boepripasov) had regularly failed to meet ammunition production goals and this remained one of the least efficiently-run sectors of Soviet defense industry throughout 1941. Most frontline Red Army armour units were dreadfully short of tank ammunition throughout most of the summer, but rapid efforts to increase production output led to a sudden decrease in quality control. Instead of using hardened steel for penetrators, some manufacturers began substituting other metals, which reduced the penetrative power of 45mm anti-tank shells by nearly 50 per cent. The production of 76.2mm tank and anti-tank ammunition was so low that tank gunnery training was minimal or omitted altogether. Like the Wehrmacht, Red Army tankers faced serious shortages of spare parts in the second half of 1941, which led to a high level of non-combat losses. Production of tank radios was suspended in August and did not resume until mid-1942.[83]
Despite all these problems, Stalin’s war cabinet – the State Committee for Defense (Gosudarstvenny Komitet Oborony or GKO) – made the very critical decision to put priority on a few tank models and to build them in large quantities. A number of new models, such as the KV-II heavy tank and T-50 light tank, were discontinued. The KhPZ had already completed a prototype of an improved T-34, designated as the T-34M, which was approved for mass production just seven weeks before the start of Barbarossa. The T-34M had thicker armour and a number of other advantages over the standard T-34 Model 1941, but since it would take months to complete the design and get it into production the GKO cancelled the program. One exception was the T-34–57 equipped with the high-velocity ZiS-4 L/73 57mm gun, which was optimized for anti-tank combat. This variant was ready for production when Barbarossa began and the GABTU was keen to improve the firepower of the T-34, so a limited production run of forty-one was authorized in August, but the program was then put on hold. Furthermore, only 2,800 57mm anti-tank rounds were manufactured, making this variant little more than a field test. Afterwards, the GKO mandated that only minor, incremental changes be allowed in tank designs in order not to impact production output, even though it essentially ‘froze’ Soviet tank design in place for the next two years. Some aspects of the cancelled T-34M program were gradually worked into later upgraded models of the T-34.
In order to ensure that tank production goals were met by Soviet industry, Stalin made Vyacheslav Malyshev, an engineer who had proven himself in the expansion of Soviet heavy industry in the 1930s, head of the People’s Commissariat of the Tank Industry of the USSR (NKTP) that was established on 11 September. Malyshev took charge of an industry that was in chaos, moving the Leningrad and Kharkov tank plants to the Urals. He rapidly began to simplify construction procedures for the T-34 and within less than a year the number of man-hours required to produce T-34s was cut in half. Malyshev encouraged the use of stamped parts and a cast turret in order to cut corners, accepting a certain temporary reduction in quality in return for much greater output of tanks. He motivated factory managers by reminding them what happened to people who didn’t meet Stalin’s quotas and pointedly said, ‘I am responsible for the tanks with my head.’ While Soviet efforts to mobilize labour and industrial resources were prodigious, it should be noted that the rapid expansion of Soviet tank production would have been handicapped without the delivery of Lend-Lease raw materials and machine tools to replace equipment lost in the hasty evacuations. After the loss of aluminum sources in the Ukraine, 80 per cent of the aluminum used in the T-34’s diesel tank engine came from Lend-Lease deliveries; without Lend-Lease, there would have been significantly fewer T-34s.[84]
83
Artem Drabkin & Oleg Sheremet,
84
Albert L. Weeks,