"Rusty T-34s in Stalingrad" Topic

There is a legend of factory workers and students cobbling together several T-34 tanks from spare parts in the ruins of the tractor factory in Stalingrad and driving the unpainted rusty vehicles right into combat. This sounds too good to be true, but is it?

Good question. I've read many accounts of that, but it could be anecdotal. But that didn't stop me from making my own! From what I could find out, they did rough welds and used a big plate on the back of the turret to help keep it together. The steel was sound, but rusted and unpainted. Supposedly the workers scrawled their names on the tanks in chalk and then accompanied the tank out into battle.

Pictured here along with the factory workers.

Thats a great story and even cooler that you've modeled it!

I like the model too, great rust effects. How many of these hurriedly assembled tanks are there supposed to have been? How did they fare?

Pretty sure I read that tanks were going out without sights in some cases, I can only assume they didn't last long.
Workers militias are well known.

While these factories were being rapidly moved*, the industrial complex surrounding the Dzerzhinsky Tractor Factory in Stalingrad continued to work double shifts throughout the period of withdrawal (September 1941 to September 1942) to make up for production lost, and produced 40% of all T-34s during the period.[34] As the factory became surrounded by heavy fighting in the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, the situation there grew desperate: manufacturing innovations were necessitated by material shortages, and stories persist of unpainted T-34 tanks driven out of the factory directly to the battlefields around it.[35] Stalingrad kept up production until September 1942.

Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-34
*The Leningrad and Kharkov tank factories being moved to the Urals.

The last tanks are said to have left the factory unpainted and gone straight to the front line in September 1942, before production was stopped by the German advance.

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Stalingrad tanks had several distinctive features. Notably, the flat plate on the back of the turret, the chisel front of the gun recuperator cover, and the use of "locomotive wheels".
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Thanks, Walking Sailor! I have also read that some of the drivers of these "Stalingrad" tanks were women -- the same women who shuttled the tanks around the factory during the production process.

Nice T-34 ! I too had heard/read the same that some tanks rolled off the line and into combat with no paint, etc.