They had pretty crappy stuff in WW II.

Sure, a lot of that was. Particularly when they hit peak war and were churning out stuff with decreased standards. But they were still a fundamentally more serious force than most militaries were, since they planned to go to war on a level most others didn’t.

Much of their factory work was redoing tanks and artillery and similar items which failed long before the design was, supposedly, going to need major maintenance. One reference I saw said it was one-third.

Honestly that was partially intentional; a particularly ruthless form of Planned Obsolescence. Which certainly fit.

Their famous T34 tank had only one advantage; it could be cranked out in huge numbers. Its crewing, ergonomics, reliability, and communications were all terrible.

I can’t go quite that far. The T-34 was a good tank- even superlative one- for its era in terms of armor, mobility, and firepower, and in particular the default/design specifications were remarkable, down to things like the commander’s sights. The issue is that basically no T-34 between 1941 and 1945 was ever designed to factory specifications due to quick, shoddy work. Which meant that its flaws were exaggerated and its advantages muted.

Still a formidable match for most tanks on the field though, and helped carve away the Axis armor’s dead flesh.

The Red Army loved our Studebaker trucks. We shipped 200,000 of them. There is even a memorial to them.

https://www.rbth.com/history/333156-how-us-studebaker-became-soviet

Oh yes indeed. The importance of Western trucks and other supplies for the Eastern Front is one of those things that often gets lost in the cracks.

The Luftwaffe mega-aces flew on the Eastern Front against sub-par aircraft.

Eh, the Luftwaffe Mega-Aces were by and large true professionals who fought wherever they were ordered to, Western Front, Eastern Front, Africa, where have you. It’s just that those fighting the VVS had a more favorable environment to rack up truly eyewatering kill amounts due to a generally less competent (and indeed even less numerous) enemy than those fighting the Western Allies did, which is one reason why Axis Aviation hung in longer in the East than it did in the West and elsewhere.

And even this requires some caveats, since there was a fair bit of overlap between the areas of Western Aerial activity and the Eastern Front; for most of the war Romanian and German pilots defending the homeland at Bucharest or Ploesti were more likely to confront the USAAF and RAF than they were the VVS.

There were plenty of reasons for this, but the cumulative issue is…Russian stuff isn’t very good.

Honestly I think the bigger issue is that Russian stuff was not built to good tolerances and was under a regimen that accepts heavier losses than it should.

And there’s corruption. One tank unit commander, upon his unit being alerted, discovered–presuming he didn’t already know it–that 90% of his tanks wouldn’t run. Parts sold on the black market, apparently. He killed himself.

Ayup.

People who’ve been paying attention to videos of the conflict claim lousy tactics making Russian armor vulnerable to new anti-tank weapons. Might be true, might be AT is ahead of the game just now no matter your tactics. To count those losses as part of lousy equipment will distort the answer to the question.

Honestly you can deal with superlative AT and vulnerable tanks to some degree, like we’ve seen with the latest German tanks, with proper design and tactics. The Russians though have had rather poor tradecraft and tactical employment.

Where Ward Carroll talks with Justin Bronk about Bronk’s new article titled “Why Russian Air Superiority in Eastern Ukraine Might Not Matter”.

miguel cervantes on April 25, 2022 at 1:31 pm said:
well the top gun at miramar, started because the mig 19? over vietnam, had been quite effective,

MiG-25 was intended as a high altitude interceptor. The US thought it was a high performance fighter, but that wasn’t what it was for. It was intended to intercept high altitude US reconnaissance flights and bombers.

In the Vietnam era the US had focused on air to air missiles and aircraft more suitable as interceptors. In Vietnam that was a problem in dogfights with nimble MiGs. So the F-15/F-16/F-18 were designed with high performance dogfighting in mind.

You can click on some of the pictures provided on the link you’ll see some of the T-72 with the active protection still intact while the tank is destroyed. Russia has talked about the capabilities of their tanks active protection which is suppose to be on par with western NATO active protection. Yet they have face higher tank casualties in 2 months of fighting compared to Allies tank casualties in 20 years of Afganistan and Iraq.

Or to put it another way if you look at total Vehicle losses that is more AFV losses than Isreal lost in the last 70 years of fighting and they were using ww2 tanks in the earlier parts of fighting.

That level of performance is way below par on what has been predicted by western analysts.

They should have performed better because those same vehicles when used by other nations when facing similar ground opponents like the Iran Iraq 1980’s war performed better against their equivalent modern opponents.

It seems to me that those would combine well with Ukrainian drone surveillance and possible NATO SA info provided to Ukraine to mess the Russians up. 155s with the right intel would have a significant impact.

The problem for the Russians is that their weapons are not leading them to victory.

They are pretty good at killing people using arty and long range missiles. But battlefield victories have been difficult for them.

Sure, but it is still one of the better WW2 tanks. And T34/76 was definitely good by 1941 standards. T34/85 was good by 1943 standards. But at the same time T34 is perhaps the most over rated WW2 tank.

Sherman was the best WW2 tank, overall.