It’s well known that, throughout the Second World War, the Nazis were building a plethora of
weird weapons they hoped might turn the tide. Not to be outdone by a man with a smaller moustache,
Stalin went all-in on crazy weapon designs too. Reflecting his focus on land and air warfare,
the big man in Moscow greenlit a whole host of experimental weapons projects. In this video,
we shed light on just eight of Stalin’s mad projects, saving the craziest for last.
By the end of the First World War, all the European armies had realised that tanks would be
critical in the inevitable round two. But how do you make your tanks better than everyone else’s?
The Russians threw their best German scientists at the problem,
and they came up with the monstrous T-35.
What made this tank superior? It had five turrets.
It was also enormous — weighing 54 tons when loaded for battle. Obscenely expensive,
the Soviets were forced to stop production in 1939 after they’d made 61 of these monsters.
The 1930s were the golden age of crazy Soviet weapons, and a major reason for this
was resources. The rapidly industrialising Soviet Union was keen to manufacture everything using its
nationally available materials. This worked great until Konstantin Kalinin of the Kharkiv Aviation
Bureau asked for metal to build his massive experimental plane. The government gave him steel.
Steel is pretty strong but also very heavy, so when Kalinin built his plane,
the K-7, he had to add extra engines to get it off the ground. That meant increasing the
wingspan to maximise lift too, and the project grew out of hand. The final prototype was
53 metres from wing-tip to wing-tip and weighed a whopping 38 tons! The behemoth needed eight
engines to get off the ground but could deliver 112 paratroopers or drop 19 tons of bombs.
During the K-7’s initial set of test flights,
the crew discovered the engines vibrated so much that they damaged the airframe. The engineers
tried to fix this by shortening the tail booms, but this made the monster plane so unstable
that it crashed on its next test flight, killing everyone on board. The project was scrapped.
For most people, tanks and planes are two very different types of vehicles that don’t
share many design features, but the Soviets thought a little differently. Oleg Antonov,
the famous aircraft designer, looked at a tank and decided he would make it fly.
The idea was simple: wings and a tail would be attached to a T-60 light tank,
allowing it to glide. Then this tank-glider would be towed to its target by a TB-3 heavy bomber.
When the tank crew were overhead their destination, they would glide the tank gently down
to earth, where they could support paratroopers right away. Antonov called it the A-40.
While it seems crazy to us, for the Russians, airdropping tanks wasn’t out of the question.
The TB-3 bomber had successfully airdropped T-27 tankettes from a few meters above the ground
during the 1940 Bessarabia campaign.
If they were left in neutral, the T-27s could roll to a stop when they hit the ground.
The problem was that crews were dropped separately, and often lost their tanks.
Amazingly, the A-40 actually worked during its only test flight. After detaching from the bomber,
the pilot landed safely, detached the wings, and drove the tank back to base.
The bomber pilot, however, was not happy. He had almost crashed trying to drag
the immensely heavy vehicle into the air. Soviet heavy bombers were in short supply,
and more valuable than experimental flying tanks, so the project was shelved.
The Soviet Union of the 1930s had some weapons projects that weren’t necessarily crazy,
just way ahead of their time. One of them was a naval hovercraft built by Vladimir Levkov.
Using air-cushion technology, Levkov wanted to build an exceptionally speedy attack craft for
the Red Navy. In 1932, he built a 2.5-metre model and tested it successfully. This caught the eye
of Stalin’s Navy mates, and they had Levkov transferred to the Moscow Aviation Institute.
With access to the Institute’s resources, Levkov quickly scaled up his plans and completed the
first prototype hovercraft in 1935. It was named the L-1 and could reach speeds of 60 knots on a
calm sea. Two years later, he built the upgraded L-5. This prototype REALLY impressed the admirals.
It had a cabin for the pilot and mechanic, a machine-gun turret, a troop compartment,
torpedoes, and depth charges. It was fast too, with a top speed of 70 knots.
The L-5’s only drawback was its engines. They often stalled if water got into the intake, which
happened in even marginally rough seas. Levkov spent a few years working on a better design,
but it was too late. The German invasion forced him to relocate to Siberia,
and Stalin demanded he worked on a new project: troop-transport gliders.
Despite its early success, the project was over, and the hovercrafts were scrapped.
This next vehicle is a classic example of a Russian solution to a Russian problem.
I imagine the development went like this:
Ivan: Comrade Igor, how to move soldier quickly in deep snow, in middle of glorious Soviet winter?
Igor: Ah, Comrade Ivan, it is simple. We make sled from old car and old plane.
Ivan: But what if we must kill fascists too?
Igor: We attach machine-gun.
The resulting vehicle was named the “Aerosan” and was extremely successful.
There were many iterations, but the basic design was a two-man cockpit, with a gunner upfront and
the pilot behind, sitting on four skis and powered by an aircraft or car engine spinning a propeller.
The Aerosan was set low to the ground, giving it exceptional manoeuvrability on ice and snow.
In snowy conditions that stopped trucks and tanks, the Aerosan could zip around easily,
carrying out reconnaissance, transmitting messages, and raiding enemy supply lines.
One of the most successful Aerosani was the RF-8, which was used against the Finns
during the Winter War and the Germans during the freezing winters on the Eastern Front.
Before the adoption of the aforementioned T-35 heavy tank,
the Soviets experimented with plans for an even bigger monster — the T-42 super-heavy tank.
Like the T-35, this behemoth had five separate turrets, one armed with a 107-millimetre howitzer,
two with 45-millimetre anti-tank guns, and two with 7.62-millimetre machine-guns.
It needed a crew of 14 to 15 to operate and would have weighed over 100 tons.
The design team quickly ran into a problem. Even with their German engineering expertise,
they couldn’t develop an engine capable of producing 2,000 horsepower.
It was 1932, and an engine capable of powering their monster tank
was still six years away from being inventedThe design eventually got so
massive that the Soviets canned the project. The T-42 never left the drawing board.
The design eventually got so massive that the Soviets canned the project.
The T-42 never left the drawing board.
What’s the best way to increase the range of your aircraft? The Germans thought *better* engines,
the Brits thought *better fuel,* and the Americans thought *more planes.*
But the Soviets had a different idea — bolting several planes together
Called the Zveno Project, Soviet designers wanted their heavy bombers to be able to carry
several fighter planes and deploy them from the air. The idea was that fighters
could be deployed at further ranges, escort the bombers, and carry heavier payloads.
Early designs had fighter planes fixed to the top of the bombers, but tests proved
that getting them up there was very difficult, so they bolted them under the wings instead.
Shockingly, the crazy idea worked pretty well.
Testing showed the Zveno-SPB was the most practical. A TB-3 heavy bomber would take
off with two stumpy Polikarpov I-16s under the wings . The I-16s would detach and then
dive-bomb their target, returning to base under their own power. In July 1941, Zveno-SPBs of the
Black Sea Fleet Air Force bombed an oil depot in occupied Romania. The raid was successful,
and between July and August, 30 Zveno-SPB raids were carried out on Romanian infrastructure.
But as more BF-109s appeared in the Soviet skies,
the TB-3 motherships became too vulnerable. The Zveno Project was shelved by January 1942.
If you thought a flying tank was absurd, you’ll love this. Possibly the craziest two
vehicles the Soviets, or anyone, ever tried to combine — was Ushakov’s Flying Submarine.
The inventor, Boris Ushakov, started by designing a seaplane and then adding modifications to allow
it to submerge. The final design had three engines as well as a propeller at the rear.
Steel plates kept the engines sealed while compartments inside the craft were flooded.
One of these compartments was the cockpit, so the crew would have
to climb into another compartment to pilot the sub-plane while underwater.
The rationale was that the crazy contraption would search for enemy shipping from the air,
then, once it had located a target,
fly ahead, land, and submerge until the ship steamed into torpedo range. To facilitate this,
the sub-plane would have to fly around with a periscope, batteries, and torpedoes.
The Soviet admirals humoured Ushakov for a time,
but they never gave him enough resources to make his invention work. Cool as it might
have been to fly around in a submarine, the design just never got off the ground.
Those were eight of the craziest World War Two-era experimental vehicles the Soviet
Union ever designed. But what do YOU think? Why do YOU think the Soviets didn’t try to build a
tank that was also a submarine? What about a tank with smaller tanks inside it? Are YOU
as surprised as us that some of these vehicles actually worked? Let us know in the comments!