| Golden Journal No. 54
Stalin’s Tanks
The T34/57 Exterminator
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
September 2024
 The Red Army faced no appreciable enemy armor during the 1939-40 Winter War, beyond a single, ineffective attack by a single company of Finnish tanks (much over-dramatized in some popular histories of the conflict). Yet despite this lack of data, the Red Army’s self-examination following the war pinpointed tank armament as a potential weakness in any upcoming conflict with Germany.
The standard 45mm gun equipped anti-tank batteries in its towed form, and its tank-mounted model armed most armored vehicles in service in the spring of 1940. Analyses passed up the chain to Marshal Semyon Timoshenko, chairman of the Defense Council, recommended an upgrade to a larger gun with a caliber between 55mm and 60mm, with very high velocity. Timoshenko approved the suggestion, and passed it on to the Central Committee, who voted to make it policy in its 27 June 1940 meeting, possibly influenced by the thought that the Germans would soon own hundreds of well-armored French Char B1bis heavy and Somua S35 medium tanks.
Artillery savant V.G. Grabin, head of Design Bureau 92 in Gorkiy, was already well ahead of the bureaucrats when the order came down. The 76.2mm guns arming the new T34 and KV-1 tanks, the new 76.2mm ZiS-3 divisional gun and dozens more designs had flowed off his drawing board. When his boss objected to his more radical ideas, Party Chairman Josef Stalin himself intervened to fire the plant manager and assure that Grabin would have full creative freedom to pursue his designs.
Grabin had already designed a powerful 57mm anti-tank gun, the ZiS-2. It had a very long barrel (4.1 meters, giving the weapon as a whole the unwieldy length of seven meters). Testing showed some troubles with the barrel’s rifling, but once these had been corrected the weapon delivered great penetration. The gun briefly went into production, but required skilled labor both to make the guns and produce their ammunition, and it briefly fell out of favor so that factories could turn out larger numbers of other guns. When the Germans fielded bigger tanks with thicker armor in 1943, the ZiS-2 went back onto the production lines, with over 8,000 churned out by the end of the war and over 3,500 more after hostilities had ended.
The first T34/57 prototype, seen at Plant No. 92.
Grabin began toying with a tank-mounted version before his anti-tank prototype had even completed testing, building an experimental tank-ready gun and installing it on a T28 medium tank in December 1940. The gun worked well, but the T28 had stopped production in favor of the new KV-1 heavy tank and Grabin had apparently used the same tank to test new 76.2mm guns, and would later use it for an 85mm design. In April 1941, Grabin’s team installed another prototype gun on a T34 tank.
The gun failed both sets of tests, leading to more revisions. The new gun, now labeled ZiS-4, and the testbed T34 went to the Sofrino proving grounds in July 1941, this time obtaining excellent results. Grabin had revised the rifling, and also fitted the tube with a sheath to allow it to fit the same cradle as the standard F34 76.2mm gun of the T34, and a 180-kilogram counterweight at the end of the cradle to balance the weight of the very long barrel.
The T34/57 prototype on the Sofrino Proving Grounds.
This time the tests went very well, and the new gun immediately went into production. Plant Number 92 made 42 of them between August and October 1941, plus five pre-production guns held aside for more tests. In November production stopped on the anti-tank version, and on 1 December the order came to halt the tank gun as well (this seems to have been anticipated well before it formally arrived).
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Of those 42 guns, 21 went to the Kharkov Locomotive Works, and 20 to the Dzerzinsky Tractor Works in Stalingrad (also known as STZ). The Kharkov plant produced ten T34/57 tanks, sometimes called “tank destroyers,” while STZ may have produced eight that went to 8th Tank Brigade without ammunition and saw no combat. These eight tanks may not have existed.
Hero of the Soviet Union Mikhail Alekseevich Lukin. |
The ten existing examples of the “Exterminator,” as it became known, went into combat in October 1941 near Vladimir, north-west of Moscow, with the 21st Tank Brigade. Major M.A. Lukin, the brigade commander, took one of them, dubbed “White 20,” as his command vehicle and led his brigade into action at Tyoyanovo. Lukin, named a Hero of the Soviet Union at Nomonhan in 1939, was considered one of the Red Army’s best tank commanders and, equipped with this splendid weapon, proceeded to show his skill. On 17 October, he and his crew shot up 15 German tanks; an artillery shell destroyed one of his tank’s tracks, and from a stationary position his Exterminator continued to fire until all of its 57mm rounds had been used. Lukin sent his crew away, covering their retreat with the tank’s machine guns until they too ran out of ammunition and he was killed. German soldiers desecrated his corpse, but local schoolchildren managed to steal it so that he could be buried.
As a whole, the brigade’s 10 Exterminators claimed 31 German tanks, 210 trucks (most of these from a single, unlucky supply column) and 31 guns. By the end of the month, all of the Exterminators had been exterminated, and the production program met the same fate. Difficulties in making ammunition for the powerful main gun led to its termination in favor of other weapons. And without the 57mm gun, there could be no T34/57. The tank had performed well, inflicting heavy losses, but nine of the ten tanks were destroyed by enemy action (the tenth was lost to a collision with another Exterminator).
While the Exterminator was deadly to German armor, the 57mm gun had a relatively small anti-personnel round; those of the 76.2mm guns equipping the standard T34/76 had explosive charges three to four times the size of the 57mm shell. Grabin had anticipated this problem, and had a response: the T34/95 close-support tank.
White 20, and its valiant commander, have met their end.
In late 1937 the Red Army’s Artillery Directorate decided to upgrade divisional artillery with a new 95mm piece. The project began early the next year, with V.G. Grabin of course producing the winning entry. His 95mm F28 field gun used the same carriage as the newly-adopted 122mm F25 howitzer. It passed its trials, with good range, explosive power, and anti-tank performance. A tank-mounted version, the F29, never made it off the drawing board but was considered for upgraded versions of the T28 medium and T35 heavy tanks.
Mounted on the T34, the F29 would give the tank troops plenty of firepower against enemy infantry and fortifications, with the T34/57 on hand to fend off enemy armor. But unlike the 57mm gun, no version of the 95mm went into production, and thus never equipped a tank.
 Golden Journal No. 54: Stalin’s Tanks includes both the T34/57 and the T34/95, so you can try out Grabin’s proposed tag-team arrangement on the battlefields of Kursk and Brody-Dubno.
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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good.
He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and new puppy. He misses his lizard-hunting Iron Dog, Leopold.
Daily Content includes no AI-generated content or third-party ads. We work hard to keep it that way, and that’s a lot of work. You can help us keep things that way with your gift through this link right here.
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