The Southern Front campaign and the excellent equipment of the Thor Hammer Army had a great impact on the Red Army, but they were sure of one thing: they were playing the same routine of "medium and heavy combination" and "high and low matching" as the Germans in the field of tanks, which showed that the development route was correct - no matter when, the correct route was always the overriding evaluation criterion, more important than anything else!

Undoubtedly, it gave the East Russian tank industry a lot of confidence, and the news that the United States asked the Red Army for help and asked for the IS-1 prototype and a full set of drawings, and also grafted and used the M-26 tank strengthened their confidence - if the best tank in the world is the Germans, then the second place must be the Soviet.

The Politburo has held many meetings to study and discuss the strategic situation in the next stage, and everyone basically agrees with Father Stalin's judgment: Germany's current strategic focus is to split the Soviet Union, consolidate the European Union, and suppress the United States, and until these goals are achieved, Germany will not attack the Soviets again, and even oppose the attack of Japan or Western Russia -- this will undermine Germany's strategic deployment. Therefore, it is possible to achieve a short-term peace for 3-5 years, or even 8-10 years. Of course, the most ferocious enemy of the Soviet Union at present is Germany, but only Japan and Western Russia are the real real threats, so military preparations are still indispensable, and it is even necessary to give priority to the building of military strength and engage in "military-first politics."

Specifically in the field of tanks, now the Soviets are facing the disadvantage of being suppressed on all fronts: the T-43/85 in medium tanks cannot beat the Panther; The IS-1/2 in the heavy tank can't beat the Tiger/Tiger 2, and it needs to be solved urgently.

"Judging by the recent wars, we believe that the era of tanks has not really passed, on the contrary, the demand for tanks in the future will be more comprehensive and high-performance," reported the People's Commissar for the Tank Industry. Of course, the era of winning by quantity is over, and now is the era of quality and performance first. ”

Of course, Malyshev's words cater to the above intentions: now the industrial capacity of East Russia is low, the basic conditions are poor, the population is small, and the number of troops is also small, and it is impossible to play tank sea power again, but it is still possible to do some small but refined equipment - after all, East Russia does not need to use steel for the navy, and there will be no war in a short period of time, and several million tons are enough, and new steel plants are being built in full swing, and the original steel plants are also using the industrial equipment relocated from the west for expansion and renovation, and he believes that the grand goal of "doubling output" can be completed in that year.

On behalf of the General Staff, Vasilevsky added: "The land war still has to rely on armored forces to solve the problem, and the power of the German Blitzkrieg 2.0 is only to defeat the Allied forces that are trying to rely on the defense line layer by layer. Of course, this does not mean that we do not need to develop the forces of air and ground integration, the latter is a multiplier of forces, and armor, infantry, and artillery forces are fundamental! ”

"For the new T-44 tank, we are considering a modification to install a 100mm tank gun - this can not only suppress the firepower of the German Leopard tank, but also have a strong combat and destructive effect on its Tiger."

On the whole, the T-44 is indeed very sophisticated, inheriting the characteristics of the T-34 series with a low overall appearance, compact interior arrangement, a large inclined upper deck of the hull, a rear power transmission and Christie-style large-diameter load wheels, etc., and at the same time a large number of innovations have been made in the lateral arrangement of the engine, the torsion bar spring suspension and the vertical armor plates on the side of the hull - these innovations have actually been explored a long time ago, and could have been used to improve the T-34, but because of the tense war and the need to ensure the number of fronts, So I didn't use it for a long time, but now it's completely usable.

Unlike history, due to the prominent threat of Haw Par, the T-44 overturned the main design of the 85mm tank gun during the design process and adopted the 100mm tank gun - although the 122mm caliber seems to be larger and more powerful, the actual threat is greatly reduced due to the reduced rate of fire due to the ammunition distribution.

The total combat weight of the vehicle is 33.5 tons, the crew is still 4 people (commander, gun commander, driver and loader), and the engine and transmission system are in the same vein as the original system.

Due to the use of the new tank gun, the 520th Design Bureau increased the diameter of the T-44 tank turret to 1700mm, and designed a new cast turret, equipped with a 12.7mm anti-aircraft machine gun on the top, and a 6mm thick side skirt on the side of the hull

Based on the technical reserves of the T-44 and other suggestions for improvement, the design of the next generation of the main medium tank, the T-54, is also being prepared.

If Hoffman is allowed to evaluate, he will definitely feel the strength of the times: the T-43/85 is the first product of the German tank after the impact, and the T-44/100 now seems to be the second.

However, German designers were not idle, using the research and development results of the Tiger 2 to quickly launch the Leopard 2: using a 735 horsepower Maybach HL230P30 engine, equipped with an 88/L71 tank gun, the frontal armor was thickened to 100mm, and the armor on all other sides was also improved to varying degrees, and the weight of the Leopard 2 rose from 38 tons to 42 tons after improvement. And the production speed of Leopard 2 can reach more than 500 units/month.

Hoffman agreed to this request and decided to convert the entire Leopard to the Leopard 2 (Tiger 2 and Tiger 3) from March 1945 onwards, on the basis of the closure of the No. 4 tank production line, and the Tiger on hand could be sold to the Axis allies.

Now not only Japan, Italy, Iran, but also Romania, Hungary, France, Spain, Belgium, Iraq, etc. have bought some tiger style back, most of the countries are trying to serve as a façade, only France still wants to take it back to study and study, to see if it can create something valuable for its own tank industry - simply working for Germany, equipment is not the status that the French should have.

Even the shy West Russia is eager to try the tiger style, and the British actually want it, but they really can't pull their faces and open their mouths - since you don't open your mouth, the Ministry of Armaments will pretend not to know. However, Speer knew very well that as long as the British wanted to buy it, Berlin would not be stuck - only after disposing of the more than 2,000 Tigers could the funds be recovered and the road for subsequent arms production would be opened.

The overall design and data performance of the T-44/100 was agreed by all in the Politburo, and Stalin hoped that mass production would be possible in March 1945, with a number of no less than 150 vehicles per month. This kind of urgent demand is understandable, because in the past few months, in order to raise food to tide over the difficulties, the Soviets have been forced to sell a large number of B2 diesel engines and T-34 tank chassis to Japan, and if they do not hurry up to upgrade the tanks, not to mention that they are not as good as Germany, which has been suppressing themselves, and even their technological superiority over Japan will be gradually lost, and this is the terrible consequence.

Stalin preferred to sell to China to the Kuomintang and the Communist Party rather than to sell to Japan, but unfortunately neither of them could come up with too much money and too much grain to trade tanks, and the trade routes were controlled by the Japanese, so they could only trade with Japan. However, he also sold a batch of outdated T-26-70 \ armored cars \ old howitzers \ horse-drawn heavy machine guns to the Chinese side, and the Japanese only pumped the toll tax and service fee according to the standard to transport the goods to the designated place, and there was no other obstruction.

This style made Stalin more and more unscrupulous: Japan's rule in India was consolidating, and it was seeking to withdraw from China, and such a huge force was neither withdrawn nor used in other directions, was it ready to target the Far East of the Soviet Union?

In addition to medium tanks, he was particularly attentive to the design of heavy tanks, and several military generals also expressed enthusiasm for this: Now the Soviets cannot build up the army in quantity, nor can they afford to play a large-depth assault campaign, but they can try to build up the army with quality and maintain a short assault.

So there was the IS-3 heavy tank (see photo below), which had two designs at first,

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The first is the design of the Kotin group, the highlight of which is the new upper armor - made of two large armor steel plates welded with a protrusion in the middle, which allows the front armor of the vehicle to obtain a greater inclination angle when facing the incident shell from the front, increasing the probability of ricochet. However, the rear turret followed the IS-2 design, only increasing the thickness of the front armor and shield of the turret to 180mm, in order to balance the tonnage rise, Cotin tried to install a high-power engine with 600-650 horsepower, and even asked the United States for help through secret channels.

Although the United States has a 600-650 hp engine design and is willing to export it to Russia, it exceeds the design specifications in terms of size and weight, and finally has to continue to use the subsequent modification of the B2 - the В-11-ИС-3 diesel engine.

The second design was proposed by the Kirov plant, which was transferred to the rear, and was characterized by a distinctive spherical turret (Dukhov design), which resembled a buttoned soup pot, which was prone to ricochet armor-piercing shells, and was more bulletproof than the turret with vertical sides. Although the spherical turret is 150 mm thick, it significantly reduces the interior space of the turret, and in this design, the front upper armor is still a single inclined armor, but it is 110 mm thick.

In general, Kotin's design made the tank nose avoid elastic performance, and the design of the Kirov factory made the turret more bullet-avoiding, and the sleek Malyshev knew that neither of the two could be offended, but also felt that each had its own reasons and strengths, so he asked for a combination of the Kotin-type bow with a better bulletproof appearance and the Dukhov turret.

To everyone's joy, a new type of heavy tank was born, which was the prototype of the 703 Project heavy tank, the IS-3 tank.

After looking at the design drawings and listening to the relevant introductions and supplementary explanations, the group gave the green light to the production of the IS-3 heavy tank, and demanded that the performance be further optimized, and that no less than 50 units per month should be produced from May 1945, and that the number of production units would be rapidly doubled once the national economy improved and upgraded.