SU-76

The Red Army of 1942 had a problem of pace. Its infantry needed guns that could keep up with a fast-moving war — to knock out bunkers, sweep away strongpoints and stiffen an advance — but towed artillery was slow to bring up and horribly exposed in the open. The answer was to put a good gun on tracks and give it to the riflemen: a cheap, mobile, expendable self-propelled gun that could be built in enormous numbers.

The design married two proven components. The chassis was a lengthened derivative of the T-70 light tank, and the weapon was the superb 76.2 mm ZiS-3 — the same divisional gun that served as field artillery and anti-tank gun across the whole Soviet war effort. Rushed into service in late 1942, the resulting SU-76 would become one of the most numerous armoured vehicles of the Second World War.

The SU-76 was a study in cheap, practical compromise. The 76.2 mm gun sat in a lightly armoured box at the rear of the hull, its fighting compartment open at the top and back — a deliberate choice that saved weight and gave the four-man crew room to work the gun. Protection was minimal, from about 10 to 35 mm, enough to stop splinters and small-arms fire and no more; this was never a vehicle meant to trade blows with tanks.

Its early history was troubled. The original SU-76 drove its tracks from two GAZ truck engines coupled to a single shaft, an arrangement that set up destructive vibrations and wrecked transmissions. Production was halted and the drivetrain redesigned so that each engine drove its own track; the fixed version, the definitive SU-76M, was reliable, simple and — above all — quick and cheap to build in vast quantity.

Its crews’ verdict was famously mixed, and they gave it earthy nicknames to match: the “Suka” (the bitch) and the “bare-arsed Ferdinand”, a mocking jab at its open top set against the massively armoured German Ferdinand. The open fighting compartment left them exposed to shell splinters, grenades and the bitter weather, and the thin armour offered little comfort.

Yet the same openness they cursed gave superb all-round visibility and fresh air where enclosed vehicles choked their crews with fumes, and the light, nimble machine was easy to drive and easy to fix. Above all the infantry loved it: a gun that could follow them across ground that bogged heavier vehicles, and put high-explosive onto a target when they needed it most.

The SU-76 was never meant to be a tank-killer — that was the job of the heavier SU-100 and ISU-152 that fought alongside it. It was a mobile gun for the infantry: firing directly at bunkers and buildings, breaking up counter-attacks, engaging lighter armour, and lobbing indirect fire like a piece of artillery when the situation demanded.

From 1943 it was simply everywhere. It rolled through the fighting at Kursk, across the great offensives that carried the Red Army west, and into the streets of Berlin — the constant companion of the Soviet rifleman on the long road to victory. Unglamorous and lightly armed though it was, few vehicles did more of the Red Army’s everyday fighting.

Around 14,000 were built, making the SU-76 the second-most-produced Soviet armoured vehicle of the war, behind only the T-34 itself. Cheap, simple and available in overwhelming numbers, it was the Soviet philosophy of war material made steel — quantity, mobility and a good-enough gun, turned out faster than the enemy could destroy them.

The design outlived the war. Surplus SU-76s served on with the armies of the Soviet bloc and its client states, and the type fought again in the hands of North Korean and Chinese forces during the Korean War. Only slowly did it fade from service, its work long since done.

The SU-76 is easy to overlook. It was not a glamorous machine, it could not duel a Tiger and live, and its own crews mocked it — yet it did more of the Red Army’s daily fighting than almost any other vehicle. It was the humble, ubiquitous gun that walked with the infantry from the defensive battles of 1943 to the fall of Berlin.

In that, it captures something true about how the Soviet Union won its war: not only through a handful of superb designs, but through the vast, cheap, relentless production of good-enough weapons in the hands of a soldier who needed them. The T-34 is remembered as the tank of victory; the SU-76 was the gun that walked beside it.

• Steven J. Zaloga & James Grandsen, Soviet Tanks and Combat Vehicles of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Mikhail Baryatinskiy, Soviet Self-Propelled Guns 1941–1945.