And into the belly of the beast.
Both the driver’s and the commander’s hatches have a sideways sliding hatch as opposed to the vertically opening top on the other three.
To get in, to leave room for this to open, the entire hatch has been rotated around so the periscope is facing the rear.
So into the belly of the beast we go.
Slowly
Very slowly.
There we go.
I now kind of fit.
No I don’t.
Yes I do.
Every time I get into a new vehicle, it seems to be that I will say “My God, it’s cramped in here”.
This brings things to an entirely new level of crampedness, if there is such a word.
You can see how close my knee is to the interior of the wall, my head, no room whatsoever.
I can lower the seatback a little bit, and I’m sortof in a nice, Abrams-style reclined driving position, and get the two control handles,
and work that way, but even then we have a small problem that the driver’s periscope which is located up here
(remember I mentioned that the hatch will spin around) , if you spin it all the way to the front, the periscope is now there.
So, I can’t see anything.
The alternative is, I just pull my head very close forward, and my back is going to go immediately.
This is definitely a vehicle for small tankers or artillerymen.
The controls themselves are simple mechanics,
the one thing I will point out initially are the two dials for the compressed air ignition system, the two bottles are directly beneath my feet.
And what that will do is if you’re in very cold weather, you just quickly release the valve,
a blast of compressed air goes and turns over the engine, which uses compression ignition and away you go.
The clutch is the left pedal, a very, very hard pedal to press.
There you go.
And out.
Steering and brakes both have the tillers, you have little knobs here to set your parking brakes if you want to do that,
no complications there whatsoever.
The accelerator on the right, there’s a little stirrup to keep your foot in position,
there is also a hand throttle so that you don’t need to keep your foot pressure, say if you’re idling.
The gearbox is a little bit weird.
It starts off 1, 2, 3, 4 and then up in the top right corner is reverse.
To the left is a little handle, we’re not entirely sure what it is, but we suspect high-range / low range.
You’d have thought it would be in the manual somewhere, but we haven’t found it.
And the instrument panel is missing all the dials such as the speedo and rev counter.
I assume they would have to be there somewhere.
Beyond that, the only remaining item of any note whatsoever is the stop for the driver’s hatch.
So he’ll do this, and I don’t feel brave enough to close this because I may not be able to get it back up again,
this vehicle has not been particularly well maintained.
That’s it.
There’s a driver’s intercom, and next we move to the back.
Hopefully there will be a bit more room.
The inner sloping hull does take up a lot of room inside,
but at least it has provided me with a nice little seat to talk about the gunner’s position.
I suspect that the gunner originally had a seat that was attached to the gun itself, there is a mounting point here with nothing on it.
I certainly can’t imagine how else the gunner would site, because there is no way, given the amount of movement of the gun,
that the gunner could sit where I am right now.
For his controls, fairly simple.
He just controls elevation.
A simple hand-crank, up or down, nothing particularly major there.
Sighting, he would have a direct-vision sight, removed from this vehicle.
It would have been, I’m told, a x2.5 magnification sight.
The panoramic sight, as you can see, is covered in grease and tape.
The idea behind this is that it stops the system from rusting away and you can use it again in the future.
Shame about the rest of the vehicle.
To use it in the indirect fire role, the gun theoretically would lob a round 13 kilometers.
You’d actually have to open up the gunner’s hatch, stick the sight up, attach the panoramic mirrors and whatnot,
and that way you could fire indirect.
The gun is an MT-20SM, which, I am told, differs from the MT-20S by the letter M.
The “M” stands for Modernised, and what they did was they took the muzzle brake off the end of the gun.
The muzzle brake was causing obscuration, causing a much bigger signature,
making it easy to find the enemy shooting the 6-inch round at you if you didn’t see the muzzle blast.
They changed the recoil mechanism, it became more effective, there was less need for the muzzle brake,
so they simply dispensed with it entirely.
It fired two kinds of ammunition.
AP and HE.
99.99% of the time, this thing, together with the other 152s, would have fired HE.
And, frankly, even if you hit a tank..
there was no point in AP.
AP was a bunker-busting round, and it was only the hardened bunkers that the 6-inch High Explosive couldn’t deal with.
If you hit a tank with a 6-inch high-explosive round, the crew are going to have a significant emotional event.
If they’re still alive.
While I’m here, I’ll just push the gun out of the way.
You’re not really supposed to do this.
And you can see the torsion bars running across here,
and then there’s also an escape hatch for the lads to get out if the five on top don’t work.
Next stop, loader.
You may think that this is a recoil guard, but you’ll note that there’s no protection for anyone else in the crew,
so it’s a giveaway that it’s not.
This is the loading tray.
What will happen is that there’s a little U-shaped piece which you’ll see in a moment when I fold it down.
Loader will grab the projectile, put it down on the cup.
Slam it forward, you can roll it into position.
Then you simply shove the round into the breech.
When it’s done, he folds the tray out of the way again, the gun can recoil, it has the room,
and while the gunner is still aiming, he can then grab another projectile and put it onto this little ready cup here.
There are 20 rounds of ammunition in total stored around the vehicle, a lot of.50 cal as well… Sorry, 12.7, different caliber.
Towards the rear, the only other thing of great note is that you can actually see the back end, or front end, of the engine.
In here is one of the multi-cyclone air filters, there’s one on each side.
And just for morale effect, there’s a couple of vents there with fans.
Interior light, I count … one.. two.. two in here, so it’s going to be a little dark.
And that’ it for the number 1 loader.
Next stop, number 2 loader
There is an assistant loader to help the primary lug the huge rounds around.
Nobody has been able to tell me specifically if there is a separate loader for the propellant vs the charge,
or if they just split the job evenly.
I suspect one per type of propellant or charge.
The only other thing he’s got is down there is the manual traverse.
That’s it.
Finally, to the commander’s position at the front right of the vehicle
where he can’t see any of the rest of the crew, but at least he can see where the track’s going.
To his direct front he is going to have the radio mount.
Controller for the radio is here.
No other controls that I can see.
To his left is the coaxial 12.7 DShK.
Nice, for a coax.
I have to say, I’m a product of my age.
I’m looking at the little guide here, and trying to figure out where the ammunition is kept on the far side
because, of course, in the Abrams it goes over the gun.
However, I have it wrong, it is a right-feed weapon, it is not disintegrating link,
so the entire link empty of casing is going to go all the way over the gun and fall off on the far side.
I am about ready to get out of this thing, it is incredibly small.
It’s huge, but that’s in terms of volume.
In terms of how much room there actually is to move around, not so much.
So I’ll see you outside.
I have to say, I am quite glad I was never assigned as an Object 704 tester,
the thing is absolutely miserable in there, even though it is relatively large.
One final point to note: It has a couple of different names.
Object 704 is of course what we are most familiar with, another name was Kirovets 2, after the Kirov tank plant it was made in.
The third name that you will sometimes see, the ISU-152 Model 1945 apparently is a post-war appellation.
I am informed that this term is never found in the archives.
So that’s it for Object 704, and we’ll see you on the next one.