Kliment Voroshilov KV-2

The KV-2 was born from a very specific problem: the Winter War against Finland in 1939–40, where Soviet armour ran up against the concrete bunkers of the Mannerheim Line and found its standard guns useless against them. The Red Army needed a tank that could smash fortifications by direct fire, and it needed it fast.

The answer was to take the brand-new KV-1 heavy tank and graft onto its hull an enormous new turret mounting a 152 mm M-10 howitzer. The result, standardised in 1940 as the KV-2, was less a conventional tank than a self-propelled siege gun on tracks — and one of the most extraordinary-looking armoured vehicles of the entire war.

Everything about the KV-2 was dominated by its gun and the turret built to hold it. The 152 mm M-10T howitzer fired shells of around 40 kg; a single high-explosive round could demolish a bunker or blow the turret clean off a German panzer. But the price was steep: the ammunition was so heavy that the practical rate of fire fell to roughly two rounds a minute, and only 36 rounds could be carried.

To house the gun and absorb its recoil, the KV-2 wore a tall, slab-sided turret so massive that troops nicknamed it the “Dreadnought.” It pushed the vehicle’s weight to about 52 tonnes and its height to nearly 3.25 m — an enormous target on any battlefield — and demanded a crew of six to serve it.

Protection was genuinely formidable for 1941 — roughly 75 mm of armour on the hull and turret front, effectively immune to the German 37 mm and early 50 mm anti-tank guns. Behind it the crew could shrug off fire that destroyed lighter tanks outright, and in the opening weeks of the invasion that near-invulnerability was the KV-2’s whole reputation.

But the KV-1’s 500 hp V-2 diesel, adequate under the standard heavy tank, was badly overtaxed by the extra weight, holding road speed to about 26 km/h and far less across country. The overloaded chassis was mechanically unreliable, and the turret was so heavy that on any slope it could jam and refuse to traverse — sometimes leaving the whole tank unable even to aim its great gun.

When Germany invaded in June 1941, the KV-2 delivered a genuine shock. German tank and anti-tank crews watched their 37 mm shells bounce harmlessly off its armour — the standard PaK 36 was already nicknamed the “door-knocker” for its uselessness against the new Soviet heavies — and only heavy artillery, the 88 mm flak gun or air attack could reliably stop one.

The problem for the Red Army was that it had too few, scattered too thinly, and crewed by men with almost no training on the complex new machine. Where a KV-2 was handled well it could dominate a stretch of front single-handed; where it broke down or ran dry, it was simply lost. One encounter came to stand for both halves of that story.

At Raseiniai in Lithuania on 23–24 June 1941, a single KV — widely identified as a KV-2 — took up position astride the supply road of the German 6th Panzer Division and refused to move. It shot up a column of supply trucks, then destroyed a battery of 50 mm anti-tank guns dragged up to deal with it, their shells simply bouncing off the armour.

An 88 mm flak gun was brought forward and knocked out in turn; engineers who crept up in the dark to place demolition charges failed to disable it. For nearly two days one tank paralysed the spearhead of a panzer division, until at last a screen of guns fixed its attention while a single 88 finished it from behind — and even then, the story goes, the crew fought on to the end. The account, recorded by the German commander Erhard Raus, became one of the legends of the Eastern Front.

For all such moments, the KV-2’s combat career was brief and mostly unhappy. Its mechanical fragility meant the great majority were lost not to enemy fire but to breakdowns — abandoned when they ran out of fuel, threw a track or bogged on soft ground during the chaotic retreats of 1941. Slow, tall and cumbersome, it was ill-suited to the mobile war the Wehrmacht imposed, and its specialised howitzer was overkill against tanks and wasteful against infantry.

Production at the Kirov Plant in Leningrad totalled only about 204 vehicles in 1940–41 — tiny by Soviet standards — before it was halted as the Red Army rationalised its programme around simpler, cheaper designs and moved the assault role onto dedicated SU-series vehicles. A handful of captured KV-2s served the Wehrmacht as the Pz.Kpfw. KV-II 754(r). By 1942 the type had effectively vanished from the front; a single complete example survives today, in the Central Armed Forces Museum in Moscow.

The KV-2 is best understood as a brute-force specialist: magnificent at the one job it was built for — knocking out fortifications by direct fire — and awkward at almost everything else. Impractical, overweight and short-lived, it was a weapon designed for the siege lines of the Winter War and thrown instead into a war of movement it could not keep up with.

Yet it left a lasting impression as one of the most heavily armed and unmistakable tanks of the war, and a symbol of the raw, oversized ambition of early Soviet heavy armour — the moment when Russian design briefly bolted a battleship turret onto a tank, and frightened an army that thought it had seen everything.

• Steven J. Zaloga & James Grandsen, Soviet Tanks and Combat Vehicles of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Steven J. Zaloga, KV-1 & 2 Heavy Tanks 1939–45 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Erhard Raus, Panzer Operations: The Eastern Front Memoir of General Raus, 1941–1945 (Da Capo Press) — for the Raseiniai action.