Commanders! One of the most important questions in life that we are absolutely certain you
spent sleepless nights thinking about is: “Why does the T-62 medium tank have a 115mm gun?”
You’ve got the 85mm guns your great-grandpas loved. Or hated, depending on their allegiance.
You’ve got the 100mm guns your conscripted grandpas hated. Or your fathers,
if you happen to be from a poorer country. And then you have the king of all Warsaw Pact
tank calibers, 125mm, which is still in service. So where did the 115mm caliber come from?
It all started with the realization that the 100mm tank gun of the T-54 series was obsolete.
Sure, it did its job in the Second World War and immediately after,
but against the tanks of the 1960s, it was just inefficient.
And what was worse, the capitalists were coming up with all sorts of advanced weapons
like the deadly L7 105mm rifled cannon. And that just wouldn’t do now, would it.
The first idea was to make the 100mm gun longer and make it fire hotter ammo.
Spoiler alert, it didn’t go well. The D-54 gun suffered from a number of problems,
including unreliable stabilizers, exceedingly long ammunition that made loading difficult,
and a muzzle brake, the blast of which would cover the driver’s periscope with snow,
making him effectively blind. So what was the solution to the problem?
That’s right, building a tank with an even longer 100mm gun.
In the late 1950s, the OKB-9 bureau built a 100mm towed anti-tank gun called T-12 Rapira. With its
barrel over 6 meters long, it was a monster of a weapon, but its designers made one critical
mistake. They showed it to the First Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.
Nikita Khrushchev was, amongst other things, very passionate about new weapon systems
and immediately demanded the gun to be mounted into tanks to teach the imperialists a lesson.
Of course, completely disregarding the weapon’s massive dimensions in the process.
The truly awkward part was that someone actually told him it was possible.
Khrushchev became ecstatic and the designers behind the T-55 tank and its intended replacements
had a hard time explaining that the laws of physics wouldn’t bend
even for the leader of the Soviet Union. The gun would not fit and its ammunition was way too long
to be loaded inside a cramped tank turret. Naturally, Khrushchev wouldn’t budge.
In desperation, an emergency solution was proposed. The Rapira gun and its ammunition
were to be made shorter and the caliber would be increased to 115mm by removing the rifling.
This would compensate for the firepower loss. The result was a gun called Molot.
Despite some initial accuracy concerns, the cannon represented a massive improvement over
the old 100mm guns used in the T-54 series with its effective range being nearly twice as long.
The gun was implemented into a new cast turret and installed on an older experimental hull, giving
birth to what we now know as the T-62 medium tank. Ironically, the T-62 was not intended for
mass-production as the Soviet military was waiting for another, more advanced design.
Legend has it that the man behind the decision was the commander of the Soviet land forces at the
time, Marshal Vasily Ivanovich Chuikov. Marshal Chuikov was a Stalingrad battle veteran known
for his bravery, but also for his theatrics. It is said that when the designers of the gun
were unable to show him a T-62 prototype during an inspection,
he flew into a fit of rage. In his words: “I want that gun even if you have to
bring it to me tied to the back of a pig!” But, as they say, all’s well that ends well.
Thanks to his intervention, the T-62 production would launch in the July of 1962
and the tank would become a major success. But that is a story for another time...