Shield of the Motherland: The Sloped Armor of the T-34 Changed Global Tank Building and Shocked the Wehrmacht

During the Great Patriotic War, there were many tank battles in which 37-mm caliber shells point-blank fired at Soviet T-34 tanks. However, the ammunition ricocheted one after another, without leaving even dents. These episodes became the best advertisement for the ingenious idea of Soviet designers — the armor of tanks should not just be thick, but competently angled.

A Real Revolution in Tank Building

The revolutionary concept was formed in Soviet tank building by the end of the 1930s. Instead of increasing the thickness of the armor, which inevitably led to a loss of mobility and an increase in mass, the engineers of KB-24 in Kharkov took a different path — they used rational angles of inclination of the armor plates.

This approach not only increased the likelihood of ricochets and increased the thickness of protection without weighing down the hull, but also became the banner of a change in the philosophy of tank protection. The focus was on geometry and calculation, and not the brute force of metal — this laid the foundation for the legend of the T-34.

Small, but Mighty

On the T-34, the idea was fully implemented — the upper frontal plate with a thickness of 45 mm at an inclination of 60° gave an equivalent of 90 mm of protection; the lower front (45 mm at 53°) already corresponded to 75 mm.

Even the sides of the hull (40 mm at an angle of 40°) provided a reduced thickness of 52 mm. For the end of the 1930s, this was a real breakthrough: a tank with an average mass received protection comparable to heavy vehicles.

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