One can often hear the argument that Moscow would have fallen in 1941 if not for Lend Lease tanks provided free of charge to the USSR. The truth is somewhat more complicated than that. Read what effect foreign tanks had at Moscow and how they got there in my latest Warspot article.
Soviet tankers were unlikely to get a T-34 or KV instead of a Valentine or a Matilda, but rather a T-30, T-40, or T-60.
ReplyDeleteWhat I find interesting (and missing) is that I would have thought they would have gotten a BT or a T-26 tank instead. I thought a lot of these '1941 tanks' still were being used as late as the summer of 1942. I remember that David Glantz saying that they were still being used in the ill-fated May 1942 Izyium bulge offensive towards Kharkov, and were still being used in the bloody Kotluban attacks north of Stalingrad (the latter at a lecture I attended given by Glantz many years ago).
The T-26es last went into battle in August of 1945, but typically you would just use up the ones you had, new units would get new light tanks.
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