i have the T34 book by squadron on computer unfortunately hard to get to and set up my PC right now. Wondering what other books are considered informative and accurate and how does squadron stack up to the rest. Most of their books seem pretty good but I've had a few that either missed some part of the subject or had a few short comings. Is anything missing or not covered in the squadron book. What other sources should I look at?? Just want to as through and accurate as I can when I finish these up I want to build every variant from the 40/41/42/43/44. Each has lots of changes and the 40 I want to make the short 76 I think it said only a small number were built and many may have been upgraded to the long 76. I think they are unique looking and they did serve for at least a short period. I really wonder why it took the soviet state so long to put the commanders cupola on their tanks. Like they'd build a tank and then like an after thought hey let's put this on everybody else is doing it. But they did have good designs trying to keep them low and wide tracks. I do think it was crazy that the power and drive was the same on most of their tanks the KVs and T34s something the soviets knew was a drawback but didn't address till very late in the wars. I realize it was an economical point of view but it really screwed their heavy tank program not having a more powerful engine and power train from the start. Like was that statins fault or his ministers fault. Some program said it was to keep a simplified mass production program going they didn't want multiple assembly lines building different types of units that might slow or confuse production lines. I guess here with so many manufacturers we always had companies building new better everything as the war progressed. And we kept improving after the war the M26 M46 M47 were all related and improvements of each other. I thought the M47 turret was a post war design but I saw something saying it was an experiment turret design during the war, probably trying to copy the sloped sides of the panther and tiger II. Neat looking with the sloped like that but I wonder how the interior spacing was I'm sure it was a lot tighter that the older turret. They say we designed our tanks with the average man in mind. The soviets built there really tight and had really short people in mind. I bet they liked having women tankers people say they had women but in small numbers in front like combat. I've seen photos and news reels showing large numbers of women tankers and they did pretty good a number of women became tank commanders with multiple kills. Although many were killed their first time out but so were many of the men. The soviet style of attack was insane even the Germans were shocked. In any case it proved effective but the casualty rates were insane. Victory or death has been a motto thru the centuries the soviets must have lived by it, at least against the Germans.
