Soviet T-10 Heavy Tank and Variants

by Giorgio Sanguinetti, Stephen Sewell

Overview

When it was introduced into service in 1953, the T-10 represented a return to the "classic†? Soviet heavy tank. Although considered a major threat to NATO tank forces, it also represented the end of an era. All gun heavy tanks like the T-10 would eventually be made effectively redundant by later models like the T-62 which had powerful next generation armament and new ammunition types. The tank was gradually withdrawn from service in the 1970s, though the last tanks would only leave Russian service, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation, in 1997. As such the T-10 outlived the Soviet state that had created it.

Never exported outside of the Soviet Union and rarely used in combat, the T-10 has remained a mysterious tank, with many of its variants unknown in the West until very recently. This study, written from original Russian and Ukrainian primary source documents that have only recently been made available, uncovers the history of this enigmatic tank using 130 stunning contemporary and modern photographs of the T-10 as well as full colour side-view artwork.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472820532
Publisher:	Bloomsbury USA
Publication date:	06/29/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	236
Sales rank:	395,250
File size:	124 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

James Kinnear was born in Great Britain and has researched the topic of Soviet and Russian military hardware since his first visit to the Soviet Union as a young teenager. He subsequently lived and worked in the post-Soviet Russian Federation and the other states of the former Soviet Union throughout the entire period of post-Soviet "stability", the two decades between the Soviet Union being considered a military threat and the Russian Federation finding itself again categorized as such again in recent history. James has written hundreds of articles on Soviet and Russian technology. He is a formal contributor to IHS Jane's defence yearbooks and has published books on Soviet military technology with Barbarossa, Darlington, Osprey and Tankograd.

Stephen L. "Cookie" Sewell was born in New York State and is a retired US Army Chief Warrant Officer and Department of the Army intelligence analyst. He was trained in Vietnamese and Russian languages and has been an active Russian linguist since 1974. He was also an enthusiastic scale modeller since the age of 5 and has built numerous models of armoured vehicles, specializing in Russian, Soviet and American tanks and armoured vehicles. He was the founder of the Armor Model and Preservation Society in 1992. While author of numerous intelligence articles he has also written extensively on American and Soviet armour and also provided a great deal of information to other authors on topics that include Korean and Vietnamese air war activities.

Table of Contents

Introduction 7

Chapter 1 Development History 8

Chapter 2 Service and Combat History 34

Chapter 3 The T-10 Tank Variants Described 58

Chapter 4 Derivatives of the T-10 Tank Design 104

Chapter 5 Preserved T-10 Tanks 184

Appendix 1 T-10 Development, Production and Service Chronology 197

Appendix 2 T-10 Production Data Tables 198

Appendix 3 Soviet Era Tank Design and Production Flow 200

Appendix 4 T-10M Cutaway Diagram 202

Appendix 5 Obiekt Number Listing of T-10 Tanks, Prototypes and Projects 204

Appendix 6 Foreign Perspectives: T-10 Recognition during the Cold War 208

Appendix 7 Preserved T-10 Tanks 211

Appendix 8 T-10 and Variant Specifications: Data Tables 216

Appendix 9 Glossary and Abbreviations 222

Bibliography 225

Index 230