What Soviet Tank Crews Said When They First Drove An US Sherman-ZZ

Autumn 1943.

A rail head somewhere east of Stalenrad.

The crates have been unloaded.

The protective sealant scraped off the gun barrels.

And a row of newly arrived American medium tank sits in the cold air painted Soviet green over American olive drab.

They are Shermans M4A2 diesels.

Lendley.

A young Red Army tank officer named Dmitri Loza climbs onto the deck of one and lowers himself through the hatch.

He has been in combat since June.

He fought from inside a British Matilda and briefly inside a T34 around Smealinsk.

He is 21 years old.

He sits in the commander seat and notices something he has no category for.

The seat is upholstered.

Soft leather-like material covers it.

It is, in his words years later, remarkable special artificial leather.

It is also so good that whenever a Sherman gets knocked out and is left unguarded for even a few minutes, Soviet infantry tear the upholstery out by the handful.

They use it to make boots.

That detail, Soviet riflemen converting tank seats into footwear, captures what is about to happen on the Eastern Front.

Because Dmitri Loza is not just inside a different tank.

He is inside a different idea about what a tank should be.

A different idea about what a soldier is worth.

To understand why Soviet tank crews who climbed into the American Sherman walked away changed and why what they said about it had to wait 50 years to be published.

We have to go back back to what they had been fighting in.

Back to a war where the men knew without ever quite saying it that their own machines were trying to kill them almost as efficiently as the Germans were.

What Soviet tank crews said when they first drove an American Sherman is not really a story about a tank.

It is a story about what men get used to when nobody gives them anything else.

Part one, what they had been fighting in.

Before we put a single Soviet tanker inside an American tank, you have to understand the world they were coming out of.

And to understand that world, you have to be willing to look at the T34 honestly.

Not as the bronze monument legend.

Not as the war-winning machine of the propaganda films.

As a place where a man went to work.

the T34 won the war on the Eastern Front.

That sentence is true.

It is also true that by 1943, the men who actually crewed those tanks had a complicated relationship with them.

And that relationship was not the one in the recruitment posters.

Start with size.

The T-34 had brilliant sloped armor that deflected German rounds the way a tilted plate deflects rain.

But sloped armor steals interior volume.

American engineers who tested a captured T34 in 1942 reportedly could not understand how four men in winter sheepkin jackets fit inside at all.

At the worst point of factory chaos, T34s reportedly left the production line without a proper driver’s seat.

The driver folded his great coat under himself.

Then there was the turret.

The original T3476 turret held two men.

The commander was also the gunner.

He was supposed to spot enemy targets, lay the gun, fire it, observe the fall of the round, communicate with his platoon, and command his crew, all of it, simultaneously while moving.

German Panzer three and four turrets had three men.

The Soviet commander aimed when he should have been commanding.

A US study after the Korean War found that when an anti-tank round penetrated a T34, on average, roughly three out of four men inside were killed.

The figure for a Sherman was closer to one in five.

Soviet tankers internalized this without anyone showing them a chart.

They watched.

Loza himself fought briefly in a T34 around Smealinsk in 1943.

And one of the things he carried for the rest of his life was something specific.

When a T-34 was hit, the onboard ammunition often exploded.

Crews who jumped clear did not stop running.

They tried to get as far away from the tank as possible, even though regulations forbade it.

He described one specific moment.

A company commander’s tank had been hit.

The crew got out.

They could not run because German machine guns had pinned them down in a wheat field.

They lay there as the tank burned.

Then it blew up.

By evening, when the battle quieted and Loza walked over, he found the company commander on the ground with a piece of his own tank’s armor sticking out of his head.

That is what a T34 brewing up looked like to the men inside it.

The tank itself, when struck, was a second weapon firing at its own crew.

There was the noise.

The T34 ran on a brilliant V2 diesel engine, 12 cylinders, aerodyived.

When it ran well, it was a marvel.

When it ran in April 1943, fewer than 11% of newly built T34s could complete a 330 kilometer trial run.

By June 1943, that figure had dropped below 8%.

And it was allowed.

Loza later said the T34 made so much noise on hard surfaces that in his memorable phrase, “Only the devil knows how many kilometers away it could be heard.

” There was the radio problem.

Until the T34/85 entered production in 1944, generally only Company Commander tanks carried a radio.

The rest of the company communicated by signal flags poked through the turret hatch.

In a smoke-filled tank battle in dust in winter, signal flags were exactly as useful as you would imagine.

To charge the batteries on a T34, the crew had to start the main engine.

the main engine.

500 horsepower of diesel V12 fired up just to keep the radio and the lights from going dead.

Imagine sitting silent in an ambush position in a treeine waiting for the German column.

Every few hours you have to wake the entire countryside up just to keep your battery alive.

Loza spoke about this for the rest of his life as a small particular form of misery that nobody in the west understood.

And there was the armor itself which was strange.

The T34 had hard armor, sometimes brittle armor.

There were documented cases where a German round failed to penetrate, struck the inside of the plate, and sent fragments of Soviet steel flying through the crew compartment like shrapnel.

Men were wounded by their own armor.

Now, none of this means the T34 was a bad tank in the abstract.

by certain metrics.

Production scalability, sloped armor, the V2 engine when it worked, the wide tracks that floated in spring mud where Panthers sank.

It was an extraordinary weapon.

The Soviets built almost 84,000 of them.

But here is the part that matters.

The men inside those tanks did not know any other way.

They thought a tank was a thing where the commander aimed his own gun, where the radio was a piece of jewelry one tank in 10 got to wear, where the seats were whatever you sat on, and where ammunition cookoff was a normal sound effect of war.

They had no comparison.

This is the world Dimmitri Loza was sitting in when the first M4A2 Shermans began arriving through the Persian corridor from Iran into the southern Soviet Union and through the Arctic convoys to Morman and Archangel.

The Americans would eventually ship 4,12 Shermans under Lend lease.

About 3,664 actually arrived.

The rest are at the bottom of the Barren Sea, courtesy of German Hubot.

The Sherman is sometimes called in Western popular history a death trap.

The Ronson, named after the cigarette lighter slogan, lights every time.

Some American crews in Normandy used that nickname bitterly.

But the Soviet experience of the Sherman was different, radically different, because the Soviet experience was relative, relative to what they had been driving the day before.

The official Red Army note on the M4 A2 was by the standards of Soviet military bureaucracy glowing.

The transmission was reliable.

The suspension required minimal effort.

The diesel was less firerprone than gasoline.

And the armament surpassed both the Panzer 3/4 and even the late T34 variants on paper.

But the report was one thing.

What the men actually said was another.

What they actually said was the thing nobody in Moscow wanted printed for the next half century.

Because the longer they drove these tanks, the more it sounded like a question.

The question was, why is theirs like this and ours like that? That question would not be answered in 1943.

It would not be answered in 1945.

It would have to wait until the Soviet Union itself was gone.

And only then would Dmitri Loza walk into the United States embassy in Moscow in February 1994 and hand a manuscript to an American military atache.

A manuscript that had been forbidden for 50 years.

But before we get to what they wrote, we have to look at what they saw the first time the hatch opened.

Part two, the first contact.

Picture a Soviet tank battalion in late 1943 receiving its first Shermans.

The men have come down from the line.

They have not seen a hot meal in weeks.

They are tired in the specific way a man gets tired when he has been losing friends for 2 years.

The tanks arrive on flat cars.

They’re sealed against the long sea voyage.

Every opening, the gun barrel, the brereech, the periscope ports, has been jammed with heavy waterproof sealant by the workers at Fisher Body or Pressed Steel Car.

The sealant has to be removed before the tank can be operated.

The crews start chipping it out.

And here is one of the small details that 50 years later would still make Loza smile in the telling.

The American factory workers had a habit.

They tucked things into the gun barrels.

Not every tank, but enough that crews learned to look.

A bottle of bourbon in some cases, or American whiskey, a note from a worker in Ohio or Michigan to a Soviet man he would never meet.

The Soviets called these special parcels.

At least one American factory representative on the spot eventually had to ask whether such parcels existed.

The Soviets, of course, denied finding any.

Then the next batch came in.

As the crews ran a cleaning rod down a breach to push the sealant out the muzzle, a bottle came sliding out of the gun tube and shattered on the concrete.

The American representative was apparently watching.

There is no record of what he said.

This is the first thing that struck the men.

The tank had been built by people who somehow on the other side of the world had thought about them.

Whatever Soviet doctrine said about American capitalism, the men inside the tanks understood immediately that someone in Detroit liked them.

Then they got inside the radio.

There were two radios.

Loza specifically remembered this.

a high frequency set for talking to brigade headquarters and an ultra-ighfrequency set for talking to the company and battalion.

He used the phrase recorded in his interview that the radios were of very good quality.

Inside the tank, the crew talked through an intercom system, throat microphones, headsets, pushto talk switches.

Loza wrote simply, “It worked great.

” Try to absorb what those two words meant to a man who had spent six weeks fighting in a T34 around Smealinsk.

In the T3476, you communicated with your driver by hitting him in the shoulders.

Right shoulder meant turn right.

Left shoulder meant turn left.

The hull was so loud and the calm so absent that human language been replaced inside the vehicle by physical contact.

In the Sherman, the commander pressed a button on a throat mic and said the words.

Then the men noticed something else.

There was a small auxiliary engine inside the crew compartment.

Loza compared it to a motorcycle engine.

Its only job was to charge the tank’s batteries when the main engines were off.

You started the little engine, the batteries charged, you turned it off, the tank’s electrical system ran without the crew having to fire up 375 horsepower of diesel just to keep a radio alive.

Loza’s exact phrase decades later.

This was a big deal to us.

These are the kinds of sentences that get lost in the bigger histories.

This was a big deal to us.

A man who fought from the Deniper to Vienna who would have three Shermans shot out from under him who would be wounded by a tiger near the Austrian capital in April 1945.

And the thing he keeps coming back to is the small auxiliary engine that meant they didn’t have to wake up the entire battalion to use the radio.

That is what the Shermans showed them.

Not glamour, not invincibility, just a thousand small American assumptions about what a soldier deserved baked into steel.

The seats already mentioned upholstered with that artificial leather.

The position of the loader, the gunner, the commander, all worked out for a person who would have to sit there for eight or 12 hours and remain functional.

Even the periscopes were better.

Soviet sources later acknowledged the Sherman’s vision devices and navigational equipment were superior.

Then the crew arrangement, five men.

The Sherman had a fiveman crew.

Commander, gunner, loader, driver, bow gunner.

The commander commanded.

He had a cupula.

He could see.

He had only one job.

The T-34/76 had four men with the commander doubling as gunner.

And the inferiority of that arrangement was so well understood inside the Soviet Union that the entire purpose of redesigning into the T34/85 was to fix it.

The 85 came in 1944.

The Shermans had been doing it correctly since 1942.

The tracks rubbercoated metal rubber pads on a steel band.

Loza had specific things to say about them.

He believed, possibly inaccurately on the exact figures, that a T34 track had a service life of roughly 2,500 km and a Sherman track exceeded 5,000.

The rubber padding made the tank, in his now famous phrase, drive like a car on hard surfaces.

where the T34 announced its arrival to every German listening post within 20 kilometers.

The Sherman could come up a paved road in something approaching silence.

The auxiliary power unit, the radios, the seats, the periscopes, the tracks, the fiveman crew, each one alone would have been a luxury.

Together, they constituted a different theory of the relationship between a soldier and his machine.

Now, the Sherman was not a better fighting machine than the T34/85 in any simple sense.

It was not better armored.

It was not, at the same gun caliber, more lethal.

Its crews knew this.

The Soviets evaluated their American tanks coldly.

They knew the silhouette was higher.

They knew the high center of gravity made it tip over more easily.

They knew the rubber tracks could not bite into ice the way a steelcleated T34 track could.

Loza himself called the Sherman, when it lost grip on icy roads, a cow on ice.

But here is what changes the picture.

When a Soviet tanker said the Sherman was a luxury, he did not mean it was decadent.

He meant something far stranger.

He meant this is what tanks are for the people on the other side.

This is the standard the war could be fought at.

If anyone had decided that the men inside the tank were worth standard amenities, the men in the first, third, sixth guard’s tank army and ninth guard’s mechanized corps, the units eventually equipped almost entirely with Shermans could not say this in 1944.

They could not say it in 1946.

After the war, the official Soviet line on Len lease became almost overnight that the contribution of American material had been negligible.

The Sherman was an embarrassing fact.

The men who had fought in them were instructed by example more than by order to remember the T34 instead.

So they were quiet for decades.

Loza, who would retire from the Soviet army as a colonel in 1967 and become a senior lecturer at the Frun Military Academy, kept his memories of the Mcha, the Russian nickname for the M4, derived from the cerillic pronunciation mchhatire, for his own writing desk.

He worked on a manuscript.

He could not publish it.

He waited.

The first Shermans had impressed his men profoundly, but what those tanks would do over the next 18 months would impress them even more because what came next was combat.

And what came next would force Soviet tankers to reconsider what they thought they knew about how the Eastern Front was being fought.

Men like Loza, like Captain Nikolai Masdukov, like Captain Bogdanov, like Lieutenant Mikail Golubv, officers in the 46th Guard’s tank brigade, were not heroes for the recruitment posters.

They didn’t need to be.

The way they fought, the way they survived, the way some came home and others didn’t.

That’s a story that earned its own attention.

If it’s worth keeping in the front of the mind, hit the like button.

It takes one second.

It keeps men like Mastukov from disappearing entirely into the footnotes.

But the question we’re really asking is what those men learned in combat because what looked like comfort in the depo looked like something else once the shooting started.

Part three, what it did under fire.

A tank does not earn its place in a man’s memory by being comfortable in a parking lot.

It earns its place under fire.

Let’s start with the question every Soviet tanker had been carrying in his bones since 1941.

When this thing gets hit, am I going to die in it? For the T34 crew, the answer was a trained reflex.

If the tank started burning, you got out and you ran.

You ran knowing this was technically against regulations because Soviet doctrine wanted men to stay near their machines for recovery.

You ran anyway because the onboard ammunition was probably going to detonate in the next 90 seconds.

The Sherman, when it burned, behaved differently.

Loza described one specific incident in Ukraine.

His tank was hit.

The crew bailed out.

The Germans were dropping mortars around them.

They could not run, so they went under the tank.

They lay there in the lee of the burning hull, and they did not die.

The Sherman’s main gun ammunition did not cook off the way a T34s did.

They survived because the burning American tank above them had decided, more or less, not to murder them.

Loza spent years after the war trying to understand why.

Part of the answer was the wet stowage system.

The later 76 millimeter Shermans had ammunition racks moved to the whole floor surrounded by water glycol jackets so that a penetrating round would soak the cordite rather than ignite it.

Part of the answer was the diesel fuel of the M4 A2 which Soviet crews believed gave them a fire safety margin over gasoline engine tanks.

American tests later concluded the engine fuel mattered less than the ammunition stowage.

But for the Soviets in the field, the empirical reality was clear.

A hit T34 might kill three of its four men.

A hit Sherman might let all five climb out and walk to the next one.

There was a documented Soviet preference here recorded in Red Army reports.

The M4 A2 was considered much less prone to blow up due to ammunition detonation than the T34/76.

This was not opinion.

It was the conclusion of the Red Army’s own armor directorate.

For men who had spent years near burning tanks, this was not a small thing.

It was the difference between being a tanker and being a coffin rider.

Then came the gun.

The first M4 A2s the Soviets received had the short 75mm M3 gun, a capable cannon for 1942.

By late 1944, the longer 76mm M1 A2 gun arrived on M4 A276 W variants.

And with HVAP rounds, high velocity armor-piercing tungsten cord ammunition introduced in late 1944, the Sherman could punch through the upper front hull of a Tiger one from normal combat ranges.

That was not a tank that won duels with Tigers at 2,000 m.

Nobody pretended it was.

But the Sherman had a stabilizer, a vertical plane gyroscopic stabilizer, one of the first deployed on any tank in the war.

With training, a gunner could keep the gun’s elevation, tracking a target at 15 miles per hour.

It was a piece of capability nobody in the Soviet tank fleet had ever seen.

And there was the armor.

American armor steel was more ductile than Soviet armor.

It dented before it shattered.

Loza addressed this directly, his exact comparison.

There were cases on our T34 when a round struck did not penetrate, but the crew was wounded because pieces of armor flew off the inside wall and struck the crewman in the hands and eyes.

This never happened on the Sherman.

Read that twice.

He is not saying the Sherman’s armor was thicker.

He is saying it stayed in one piece when struck.

A T34 plate that stopped around could still [ __ ] the men behind it through spalling.

A Sherman plate that stopped around mostly stayed where it was.

There was the operational behavior in the field.

American tanks, contrary to their reputation in some Western histories, were mechanically remarkable on the Eastern Front.

Loza recorded that his Shermans in the march to Vienna could make 70 kilometers per hour on the highway.

The IS-2 heavy assault guns assigned to support him, the JSU152s, magnificent in a brawl, three of them brought into Vienna under his command, could barely keep up, he wrote with audible affection for the JS and audible frustration with the speed gap, how they held us back.

There’s a moment that captures the relationship between Sherman and Soviet tanker, as well as anything else.

His unit had broken into the German rear during the fighting in Romania and gotten cut off from their fuel trucks.

The M4 A2 ran on diesel.

They had no diesel.

They had captured German gasoline and kerosene, so they mixed a cocktail and ran the diesels on it.

The engines overheated.

The tanks kept moving.

They got out.

This is the tank some critics still describe as fragile, finicky, a hotouse flower.

The crews of the Ninth Guard’s mechanized corps would have told you something different.

There is the moment with the British factory representative.

The Soviets had a standing arrangement.

A factory rep was sometimes attached to core headquarters to advise on maintenance.

Loza’s fifth mechanized corps had a British one.

When the core mechanic, Nestro, the kind of mechanic every brigade had one or two of, the kind of man who could open a transmission with a screwdriver and a gas, went into a sealed factory component to fix it, the British representative would object.

This has a factory seal.

You should not tinker with it.

The procedure was to remove the failed component and install a new one.

Nestro, as Loza tells it, opened them, fixed them, and put them back.

After a while, the British representative came up and asked with what Loza recalled as genuine curiosity, “At which university did you study?” Nestrov replied, “At the Coal Cause.

” The Coal Cause the Collective Farm.

A man who had grown up fixing tractors with whatever was on hand was now fixing the precision engineered components of an American medium tank with the same approach.

And it worked.

The Sherman was a tank that been engineered for an industrial army that operated by a peasant army.

And somehow it kept running.

But there were things about the Sherman that the men in those tank brigades did not love.

There were things that made them argue with the design.

The honest accounting would not be honest if we left those out.

And one of those flaws would in fact save Dmitri Loza’s life on a curve in Hungary in December 1944 because the Sherman had a problem.

it would tip over.

Part four, the flaws in the ice.

Honesty about a tank is honesty about a relationship.

The Soviet tankers who praise the Sherman did not praise it the way stateisssued propaganda would have.

They praised it the way a man praises a stubborn old farm horse.

Fully aware of every place it kicked him.

Start with the silhouette.

The Sherman was tall.

Its layout with the paired diesel engines mounted vertically in a high turret ring size to the gun gave it a profile German gunners loved.

Wikipedia entries today still note the consensus among Soviet crews that one of the Sherman’s biggest weaknesses was, in their words, the ease of hitting it by enemy fire.

Then there was the high center of gravity.

Loza put it in a sentence that has been reprinted by tank historians ever since.

The Sherman had its weaknesses, the greatest of which was its high center of gravity.

The tank frequently tipped over on its side like a matrioska doll, the Russian nesting doll, going around a tight corner at speed, hitting a curb with a track, taking a slope at the wrong angle, the Sherman would simply roll onto its side.

American tankers in Western Europe had encountered this.

Soviet tankers on roads that often were not roads encountered it more.

Now, here is where the story turns because the same flaw, the deficiency Loza was complaining about saved his life.

December 1944, Hungary.

Loza was leading his battalion forward in his command tank.

The driver mechanic took a curve too sharply and clipped a curbstone with the track.

Loza’s tank rolled onto its side the way Shermans did.

The crew was thrown around, bruised, but alive.

They were stuck where they were.

The other four Shermans of his laid element kept going.

They did not turn over.

They drove on into a German ambush.

All four were destroyed.

Loza’s exact summary.

But I am alive today thanks to this deficiency.

This is the part of war that nobody likes to put on a recruitment poster.

The thing wrong with your tank turned out to be the thing right with your tank.

on a particular afternoon on a particular curve.

Loza slumped sideways inside an upbended American medium tank would live to publish memoirs in 1996.

Then there were the tracks.

The rubber padded tracks were a marvel.

Loza claimed roughly twice the service life of a steel T34 track, possibly 5,000 km versus 2,500.

They drove like a car on hard surfaces, but they had two enemies the Americans had not designed against.

Heat and ice.

The heat came in Romania, August 1944, during the Jasse Kishv offensive.

Loza’s battalion drove roughly 100 kilometers in temperatures around 30° C.

The rubber overheated.

Pieces of rubber pad began to delaminate from the steel chevrons.

The road wheel rubber tires began to crack.

Loza wrote a chapter in his memoir titled Barefooted.

That was what they called a Sherman that had cooked the rubber off its tracks and was running on bare steel chevrons.

Operable, loud, a tank that no longer drove like a car.

In Manuria, August 1945, the same problem returned.

The Shermans had to drive in tropical August heat that turned the soil into liquid sea after the rains.

Some HVSS suspension variants with wider tracks held up.

The older VVSS rubber tracks struggled and the ice.

Loza’s verdict on the rubber block tracks in winter was simple.

They would not bite.

The Sherman on icy roads behaved like a cow on ice.

American mechanics had developed a solution.

Bolt-on metal grouser cleat, like spiked snowshoes, 12 per side.

The Soviets requested them.

The Americans listened.

Crates of grousers started arriving alongside the tanks.

This is a small story embedded in a larger story.

The American factories were responsive.

When a Soviet inspection team filed a complaint about traction in soft wet soil, the Americans began shipping the spike attachments.

When Soviet representatives noted the rubber tracks suffered in tropical heat, the supply program shifted toward later HVSS suspension variants with wider tracks.

The lend lease relationship was a feedback loop.

A Soviet criticism written in pencil at a depot in Morman could reach Detroit and result in a different tank arriving the next year.

There were other things they didn’t love.

The two Thompson submachine guns issued with each Sherman in four or five caliber were powerful.

Loza wrote that45 was a healthy cartridge indeed, but the guns were big and inside the tight crew compartment, you could not turn around holding one.

Soviet crews mostly stowed the Thompsons and used captured German MP40 submachine guns instead with their folding stocks and compactness.

War rearranges every category.

The 75mm gun on early Shermans was by 1944 inadequate against German Tigers and Panthers at long range.

The 76 millimeter version was better, but still outclassed.

Soviet tactics adjusted.

Get close.

Use terrain.

Use the speed.

Use the silence.

Use the silence.

There is a phrase you don’t hear often about a tank battalion, but the Shermans, especially when running on one of the two diesel engines for reduced noise, allowed Soviet commanders to do something almost no other Soviet armored force could do.

Surprise, they defended position by sound discipline.

There are accounts of Sherman equipped Soviet units sliding up to German positions at near pointlank range under cover of darkness, the rubber tracks barely whispering.

By the time the Germans understood what was happening, they were inside the killing zone.

This is what the Sherman was.

A tank with real flaws.

A tank that tipped over.

A tank that lost its rubber in the heat.

A tank that slid on ice.

and at the same time a tank that gave a Soviet tank crew a fighting chance to come home, to communicate while they fought, to sleep next to a tank that didn’t kill them, and to arrive at the next objective in something resembling working order.

If you have a father, grandfather, uncle, or aunt who served in the Red Army, in the US Army, in any of the Allied forces, the comments are open.

What unit? What did they tell you? What did they refuse to talk about? Those small particulars don’t survive in archives.

They survive in families and they matter.

What Loza did in the end was wait until the country that had forbidden him to write the book disappeared.

Then he walked into the United States embassy in Moscow with his manuscript.

And the men he was finally free to talk about began to come back to life on the page.

Because the most important thing about what Soviet tank crews said when they first drove an American Sherman is what they said much later when they were finally allowed to say anything at all.

Part five.

Vienna, Manuria, and what was finally said.

April 1945.

Vienna, the capital of the Hapsburgs.

The 46th Guards tank brigade.

Loz’s brigade, fully equipped with M4 A2 Shermans, had spearheaded the armored thrust through Hungary toward Austria.

They had captured trains loaded with German ammunition.

They had captured an artillery workshop.

They had captured four intact Panther tanks sitting on railway flat cars.

The same day they had defeated a German tank column.

By April 9th, 1945, after a 100 km push, Loza’s battalion was inside Vienna.

The brigade fought through narrow streets where German Panthers counteratt attacked.

Loza, in one of his more memorable moments, called up one of the heavy JSU152 assault guns from his attached battery and pointed it at a Panther.

Well, take a shot was the order he gave.

The 152mm round went off.

The Panther came apart.

The streets were narrow, the buildings tall, and everyone in the unit in his recollection wanted to watch.

A week later on April 16th, 1945, Loe’s tank was hit by another Tiger.

He was wounded.

He survived.

He was awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union and the Order of Lenin on May 15th, 1946 for his leadership during the Vienna offensive.

He had been 23 years old.

Then his unit, instead of going home, was loaded onto trains and sent across the entire breadth of the Soviet Union to the Transicall front.

The war was over in Europe.

It was not over in Asia.

The 46th Guard’s tank brigade with its Shermans was part of the force Stalin sent.

In August 1945, Loza’s M4 A2s crossed the Gobi Desert and the Grand King Range and came down on the Japanese Quanong Army from the Northwest in a campaign that historians now consider one of the most underrated armored operations of the war.

By the time the Japanese Empire surrendered in September, the Sherman had taken Soviet tankers from the Nepa River to Muckton in Manuria.

Loza had personally fought from Ukraine through Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Mongolia, and Manuria.

He had three tanks shot out from under him along the way, and he had walked away from each one.

The same man in a T-34 would have had a much harder time accumulating that survival rate.

After the war, the Americans ask for the surviving Shermans back.

Either pay for them or return them in working order.

According to Loza, the Soviet military spent several weeks getting the tanks ready to ship home.

Then, allegedly, the political instruction came down.

Don’t return them, dismantle them.

Whether that account is accurate in every particular is debated.

What is not debated is that the Sherman was almost overnight made invisible in Soviet historioggraphy.

The official line became that lendley had been a token gesture.

The men who had fought in MCUS were not punished for their service, but they were not thanked for it either.

The story became something a man kept to himself, told to his sons, never written down.

Loza didn’t write his memoir for publication during the Soviet era.

He couldn’t.

He held a senior teaching post at the Frunza Military Academy.

He had everything to lose.

He waited.

In December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

In February 1994, retired Colonel Dimmitri Fedorovich Loza walked into the United States embassy in Moscow and handd delivered a typewritten manuscript titled in Russian, a tale about the Sherman tanks.

A US Army atache passed it to a translator named James Gart.

In 1996, the University of Nebraska press published it in English as commanding the Red Army’s Sherman tanks.

It was the first detailed memoir from a Soviet tanker about American equipment.

It had taken 51 years.

In the late 1990s, the Russian historian Valeri Potapov interviewed Loza for the Iron Member.

Oral history project.

The interview ran in English.

It is the source of the most quoted lines about the Sherman in Soviet service today.

The seats covered in artificial leather, the auxiliary engine like a motorcycles, the rubber tracks that drove like a car on hard surfaces, the high center of gravity in the matrioska doll, the British representative and the Coloss mechanic, the onboard ammunition that did not explode.

Loza died in Moscow on May 22nd, 2001.

He was 79.

The book and the interview are what survived him.

Verdict.

So what did Soviet tank crews actually say when they first drove an American Sherman? Not in the end a single tidy sentence.

They said many things.

Some were grumbles.

Some were jokes.

Some were the small phrases.

This was a big deal to us.

It worked great.

Drove like a car on hard surfaces.

I’m alive today thanks to this deficiency that men reach for when they are trying to describe something they cannot quite explain.

What they were trying to describe when you read them altogether was this.

The Sherman was a tank built by people who had decided somewhere in a factory in Detroit or Lima, Ohio, that the man inside the tank was a person.

He had a back that needed a seat.

He had ears that needed to hear his driver.

He had a body that statistically was more likely to come home if his ammunition didn’t cook off when he was hit.

He had a war ahead of him that would last at least one more year, and he would last longer if his machine cooperated with him.

The T34 was not built by people who hated their tankers.

It was built by people pushed past every limit, in factories that had been moved across a continent under fire, by workers who slept on the floors of their own buildings.

It was built to be enough.

The Sherman was built to be more than enough.

That was the difference in 1943 that no Soviet tanker had been allowed to articulate.

What the Sherman taught them, and what they could finally say after 50 years, was that the way they had been treated by their own state was not the only way.

Somewhere in a country they had been told for decades was their enemy, workers had thought about them.

Workers had stuffed bottles into gun barrels.

Workers had upholstered seats.

Engineers had put auxiliary engines in tanks for the sake of a radio.

Inspectors had read complaints from a country that did not pay for the tanks and shipped fixes anyway.

And so the answer to what Soviet tank crews said when they first drove an American Sherman is in the end the simplest possible answer.

They said, “We had no idea it could be like this.

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The parts that didn’t make it into the textbooks, the parts that had to wait 50 years to come out.

Subscribe if you want the next chapter because the men who fought from inside Loe’s Shermans, Mazlukov, Bogdanov, Golubv, the Kolk mechanic Nester, and the thousands of unnamed immisti who rode their American tanks from the Neper to Muktton.

They deserve to be understood, not just remembered.

Loza waited 50 years to tell their story.

The least we can do is listen.

What Soviet tank crews said when they first drove an American Sherman is what soldiers in every army have said in every war when they discover that the basic conditions of their service could have been better.

They said it under their breath.

They said it to each other.

And then when they were finally free to say it out loud, they said the thing that all soldiers in every army eventually say given the chance.

They said someone somewhere thought about us.