"Extremely Rare KV Variant" Topic

Back when I was in high school I took a band trip to Leningrad. In a junk shop I found a two-page pamphlet with a line drawing of a tank I didn't recognize, and bought it for a quarter. I forgot about it till last year, when I had someone fluent in Russian over to the house, and pulled it out so he could translate it. It was a factory newsletter for the Kirov Works dated 1947, and an older employee related a story about Workshop 23b. It seems that during the German assault on Leningrad in 1941 the workshop was producing KV-1's, and at one point it ran out of diesel engines. The shop staff became frantic, because other workshops that got stalled for any reason were dismantled and packed off to the Urals with the personnel sent to the front. The shop supervisor sent several work parties out that evening with orders to come back with diesel engines by hook or crook. The largest diesel found came from a line repair car on the Leningrad trolley. Some quick calculations proved that the engine was far too small to power a KV-1 tank, and the shop foreman ordered the shop to strip the tank down to the bare minimum, taking off armor, accessories and anything not absolutely necessary, but even that was insufficient to power the tank. However, while they were test fitting the engine in the compartment an apprentice wandered by and, looking at the small engine in the cavernous compartment said "Too bad we can't just cut the whole tank down". It didn't seem like a good idea but the workshop was getting desperate. After some quick calculations, they shortened the tank by cutting the engine compartment, cutting off two road wheels and welding the tank back together again. The engine ended up being in part directly under the turret, but since the turret motor had been removed anyway it was given a 90 degree traverse (front arc only) and a box was built around the engine that the turret crew could stand on. At some point during the week the tank was jokingly labeled "KV ½". After a Herculean weeklong effort the tank was taken out to the test track and given a try. Even after all the weight reductions it's performance was inadequate, small inclines defeated the engine' s efforts, and firing the gun threatened its stability. Furthermore, the fact that the shop produced only one tank in a week reached the wrong ears, and the next morning the shop workers were greeted with a packing crew loading flatcars with the machinery and a squad of NKVD with four crates of Mosin Nagants. So Workshop 23b marched off to the front, pushing their last tank up hills with a tractor. None of the workers survived the war, and the tank was never seen again. The story would have been lost forever if a supervisor from a different workshop (who had hidden away a dozen diesels "just in case") hadn't had lunch every day with the shop sup from 23b and related the story after the war for the factory newsletter. Anyway, I built a model of the KV ½ just for the fun of it based on the description and line drawing, here's coupla pics:
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Pretty cool little KV cool story……………..Doug

You mean those boys didn't have a union to protect their rights? tsk, tsk. Nice model.

Nice. That's quite a bit of motivation to keep up production.

Thanks for that fascinating story.
Nice model too. I might have to attempt it myself for something a bit different.

You might think about sending a copy of the newsletter to the museum at Kubinka.

Allen

Cute – I wonder if you could mate it with that big KV-VI someone made a few years ago & get back to the original….

Awww, it's so cute!

Cool – any way you can scan and post that brochure you have?

w.

Murvihill, great story, and nice model.

Not being a specialist on Soviet armour just seeing the picture I would have thought it some light tank.

If possible could you add a photo of it compared to a standard KV1.

Thanks for sharing.

Let's see. I just looked up a rule. Any post over 549 words is fiction. And, oh..too bad. This post is 550 words. Just kidding. I laughed out loud when I came to the end. This is giggly stuff. You had me going. But it is funny.

I smell a Ratski

You got me, the whole thing's a joke. I had a bunch of pieces left over after I built this:
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out of two KV-1's and a BA-10 and used the leftover bits to make the KV 1/2. Since it actually came out better than the SMK I put it up first. I'm going to build an armored truck out of the (now turretless) BA-10.

Interesting,

I was reading today on "The Russian Battlefield" link an article about how a prototype KV heavy breakthrough tank was equiped with a standard KV-1 turret and sent into action with the 124th tank brigade. At 100 tons it may well have been the heaviest tank ever to see action.

Cool story--!!! Your KV1/2 or .5 looks a bit like a Chaffee on steroids!!!

Well, you are a better modeler than I am!
Now, how about using those powers for Good, rather than Evil?