![]() “Up until that point, you’d had three very distinctive types of tanks, light, medium and heavy, which had different roles on the battlefield,” Delaney said. “This was the first main battle tank used by the Soviet Union in the Cold War era,” said historian John Delaney, a senior curator at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) in Duxford, Cambridge, as he shows one to CNN. They’re so old, you can find them in museums. The tanks are T-55s, a model first commissioned by the Soviet Union’s Red Army in 1948, shortly after the end of World War II. Moscow has been known to bring out older military equipment from storage to help it prosecute the war in Ukraine, but these are different. The video, seemingly filmed in late March, shows old Soviet tanks being transported, somewhere in Russia. “This is the second train, there was one like it just before.” ![]() “Wow,” a woman says, pointing her camera phone at the convoy. The key to the T-34's success was the introduction of sloped armor.A cargo train loaded with tanks chugs along under the crisp, spring sun. Packing a 76 mm F-34 main gun, its crews became adept at taking out its rivals. However, the MBT wasn't just a mobile target. During the invasion of Russia, faced with superior Panzer Russian tanks, commanders had sufficient numbers for the T-34 to be almost disposable. Production of the T-34 ended in 1958 with over 84,000 units rumbling across European battlefields. None of which mattered, as the T-34 got produced in greater numbers than any other Russian tank. Close up, the turret itself bears the markings of a simple casting process that went against the practice of every German tank builder. ![]() Designed cheaply with a mind for fast mass production, the T-34 is a little rough around the edges. In 1940, the T-34 took the fight to Germany's advancing panzer divisions with devastating effect. Russia, like the US, realized superior numbers could make up for a tank's shortcomings.
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