Only the gunner didn’t have easy access to a hatch he had to climb up onto the commander’s seat or scramble under the gun to get out.Įven with its larger turret, the T-34-85 was very cramped on the inside.
Ww2 tank battles on youtube driver#
The most important feature of the Panther’s crew compartment were the escape hatches: the driver and the mechanic had large hatches over their seats, the commander had his cupola hatch, and the loader had an escape hatch in the rear of the turret directly behind his position. This meant that all the important controls were in the same positions relative to each crewman regardless of which way the turret was facing. The turret crew sat inside a ‘basket’ with a floor that rotated with the gun. The Panther’s crew compartment was relatively spacious. The upgraded T-34-85 had a larger turret for a heaver main gun. The Panther’s crew, with their superior sights, usually spotted their opponent first, giving them time to move into a good position and set up a shot. In most tank-on-tank engagements, the outcome was determined by who held the initiative, rather than by who had the thicker armour or bigger gun. This, coupled with the 360º-view provided by the vision blocks in the commander’s cupola, gave Panther crews far better situational awareness than T-34-85 crews. The Panther, by contrast, had excellent optics including a pair of clear, high quality periscopes for the driver, hull gunner, and loader a 5x magnification sight for the gunner and a panoramic rangefinder sight for the commander. The other crewmen, who had only a single periscope or a narrow vision slit, could see even less. The commander could not see very much through the often distorted, cloudy glass of the vision ports on his cupola and was reliant on his binocular periscope. As a consequence, when the tank’s hatches were closed the crew was “deaf and blind”, as one commander put it in his memoirs. Though the T-34-85’s gun, armour and other major components were significantly better than those in the T-34-76, minor details, like the design of the periscopes and vision ports, had remained largely unchanged. (image source: German Federal Archive) 1. This article looks at some of the less commonly discussed factors that determined the outcomes of duels between these two tanks. It is important to look beyond statistics like armour thickness and gun calibre because, so long as the two tanks were broadly in the same class – as the Panther and T-34-85 were – such qualities were not nearly as significant a factor as you might think. On paper, the Panther was by far the superior vehicle. The T-34-85, by contrast, was the culmination of a long process of incremental improvement designed with high-volume production in mind. The Panther was an all-new design that incorporated many technologies that had never been seen before in German tanks. The Panther and the T-34-85 represented fundamentally different approaches to wartime production. This tank, known by the designation ‘ T-34-85’, became the Panther’s primary opponent for the rest of the war. The T-34 would be modified to accept the T-43’s enlarged turret and an 85mm gun that was based on the 52-K anti-aircraft weapon. A compromise was reached between the advocates of mass production and those who pushed for new, more powerful tanks. With the arrival of the Panther, however, it was clear that something had to be done to improve the effectiveness of the Soviet tank corps. Furthermore, many within the Stavka (Soviet High Command) believed the war effort would be better served by simply making more T-34s they argued against even minor modifications in case they slowed production. F, it did not have enough firepower or armour protection to go up against the Panther.
They had a new medium tank in development (the T-43) but, having been commissioned in 1942 to counter the Panzer IV ausf. WHEN THE PANTHER TANK first appeared on the battlefields of the Eastern Front, the Soviets did not have an effective weapon to counter it. But which was the better tank? Find out below.
Panther predator? The Soviet T-34-85 hunted Panzer “Mark Vs” all along the Eastern Front during World War Two.
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