T-26

The T-26 was not a Soviet design. In 1930 a Soviet purchasing commission bought the Vickers Mark E — the “six-tonner”, a private-venture British light tank the British Army itself had declined — together with a licence to build it. The Soviet Union then did what Britain had not: it put the design into production on an industrial scale and kept improving it for a decade.

The result was roughly 10,300 tanks, which by the late 1930s made the T-26 the most numerous tank in the world. It is a useful corrective to the usual story of Soviet armour: before the T-34 there was a decade in which the Red Army was, in sheer quantity, the largest armoured force on earth — and it was built on a rejected British export design.

The tank that went into production in 1931 did not look like the one that fought in 1941. The Vickers six-tonner had been offered in two forms, and the Soviet Union began with the twin-turret version: two small turrets side by side, each with a machine gun, each with its own gunner, on the theory that a tank supporting infantry needed to sweep trenches on both flanks at once. Later twin-turret machines put a 37 mm gun in the right-hand turret, which meant the two halves of the tank could no longer do the same job.

The layout was abandoned because it answered the wrong question. Two machine guns firing sideways are worth less than one gun that can kill a tank, and from 1933 production moved to the single-turret model with the 45 mm — the form in which the T-26 is remembered. The twin-turret tanks did not disappear: they were still on strength in 1941, obsolete by two generations, and they were committed anyway. The chassis also carried the OT-26, OT-130 and OT-133 flamethrower tanks, which were sent against the bunkers of the Mannerheim Line in the Winter War.

From 1933 the T-26 carried the 45 mm 20-K in a single turret, and for its moment that was a genuinely potent weapon: it could destroy any tank then in service, at a time when most light tanks carried machine guns or a 37 mm at best. In the mid-1930s a T-26 was better armed than almost anything it could meet.

The armour never followed. It stayed at about 15 mm — proof against rifle and machine-gun fire and against nothing else. That was an acceptable trade in 1933, when few armies had anti-tank guns in quantity. By 1941 every German infantry division had them, and the T-26’s armour could be defeated by weapons a crew could carry into position by hand.

The T-26 went to war in Spain from 1936, supplied to the Republic along with Soviet crews and instructors, and there it looked like a war-winner. Against the Italian L3 tankettes and the German Panzer I — both armed only with machine guns — a tank with a 45 mm gun was not in the same category: it could destroy them at ranges from which they could not reply at all.

The lesson taken from Spain was that the T-26 was excellent. The lesson available, and largely missed everywhere, was narrower: that a tank gun capable of killing tanks made everything without one obsolete. Germany drew it and up-gunned; the Soviet Union drew it too, and its answer eventually became the T-34 — but in the meantime the conclusion also encouraged confidence in a design that was running out of growth.

The Winter War of 1939–40 was the correction. Against Finnish anti-tank guns, mines and infantry, T-26s were destroyed in large numbers in terrain that funnelled them onto known approaches, and the Finns — who had almost no armour of their own — captured enough of them to equip their own tank units for the rest of the war.

It was here that the tank acquired its reputation for burning. Thin armour and a petrol engine meant that a penetration frequently ended the vehicle and its crew, and Finnish infantry with satchel charges and improvised incendiaries could deal with a T-26 at close range in wooded country. The Red Army registered the losses, drew the right conclusions about tank design, and had no time to act on them before June 1941.

On the morning of the German invasion the Red Army had 10,268 T-26s. It is the single most useful number for understanding what happened next, because the story usually told — that the Germans ran into the T-34 and the KV — describes a few hundred tanks. The armoured force the Wehrmacht actually met, in the overwhelming majority, was this one.

It was destroyed in weeks, and not mainly in tank battles. T-26s were lost to anti-tank guns and aircraft, but at least as many were abandoned — out of fuel, broken down with no spares, stranded when their unit’s command collapsed, or simply left when there was no order to retreat and no way to ask for one. A tank park of ten thousand vehicles evaporated because the system around it did, and the T-26 is the vehicle in which that happened.

The T-26 was a good tank of the early 1930s that was still, in enormous numbers, the standard tank of a major army in 1941 — and that gap is the whole judgement. Nothing about it was badly done: the gun was right, the licence was cheap, the production was prodigious, and the design was developed steadily for ten years. It simply could not be developed far enough, because 15 mm of vertical plate has nowhere to go.

Its real historical function is corrective. Soviet armour in 1941 is remembered through the T-34, which is like remembering the RAF of 1940 through the Spitfire alone: true, important, and a small fraction of the aircraft actually there. The Red Army that met Barbarossa was, in the main, an army of T-26s — and it lost them all.

• Steven J. Zaloga & James Grandsen, Soviet Tanks and Combat Vehicles of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).
• Steven J. Zaloga, Soviet Tanks in Combat 1941–45 (Concord).
• David M. Glantz, Stumbling Colossus: The Red Army on the Eve of World War (University Press of Kansas).