"Ever since their appearance in the mid-1910s, halftracks have been considered as a chassis for armoured vehicles, especially SPGs. Better off-road performance than wheeled vehicles and stability made these vehicles an attractive chassis for artillery. Halftrack SPGs were popular in Germany and the United States. The heroes of this article, Soviet ZIS-41 and ZIS-43 halftracks, are not as well known.
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Wheeled SPGs (29-K SPAAG on the YaG-10 chassis and light SU-1-12 on the GAZ-AAA chassis) were the only kind of SPG that was built en masse in the USSR in the 1930s. As for halftracks, artillery designers were not interested. The reason was simple: the USSR had no halftracks that could be used as an SPG chassis.
The Scientific Automotive Tractor Institute (NATI) managed to produce halfway decent halftracks only towards the end of the 1930s. The GAZ-AA based halftrack received the index GAZ-60, and the ZIS-5 halftrack was called ZIS-22. Both vehicles were in mass production by 1941, but the military showered them in complaints. An increase in off-road performance came at the cost of higher fuel consumption, and the speed of halftracks was much lower than that of wheeled trucks.
The problems with the halftracks were obvious, and it's not surprising that NATI, as well as GAZ and ZIS factory design bureaus, actively worked on all wheel drive trucks. ZIS was working on ZIS-32 and ZIS-36 trucks, which were supposed to replace the ZIS-5 and ZIS-6. GAZ worked on GAZ-63 and GAZ-33 trucks, which would replace the GAZ-AA and GAZ-AAA…"
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looks at a multi-period building.