"Mickey Mouse Tanks" Topic

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Have I beaten Armand?

Possibly!

Such an old story.

The second picture is a T-34, not a BT.

You mean the third picture.

Oops! Fail :(

In a friendly manner ;)

I guess I wasn't counting the 1st picture with Mickey superimposed on it (that's my story and I'm sticking to it).

I never saw Micky Mouse using any of those tanks !

At least the article mentions T-34 tank at the end, so it might be that the photo had slipped into a wrong spot due to sloppy editing.

That said, I would like to draw attention to the following statement:

armed with a 45 mm gun and two 7.62 mm machine guns – good enough to effectively fight against enemy infantry and light military equipment.

The high velocity 45 mm gun had pretty decent armour penetration for the 1930's, and by my understanding could have penetrated the armour on pretty much all of the tanks fielded during that decade, except for a couple of the most heavily armoured French and British designs.

The usefulness of that second MG is another issue…

Where did a BT have a second MG (besides the co-ax)?

They had a roof mounted MG for AA defense on many models and the 1937 even had a third MG (rear turret ball mount).

Yes, there could be a DT MG on AA-mount on top of the turret, though most of the pictures I have seen tend to show BT-7 without one. In principle useful to provide some defense against aircraft, though a bit limited by the 7.62 mm caliber.

In general AAMGs were somewhat rare on WWII Soviet armoured vehicles, though some of the late war assault guns and heavy tanks mounted 12.7 mm versions. However, in the post-war years they started to become a common feature in Soviet designs.

That rear-mounted MG is probably one of those things that seemed like a good idea in the inter-war years, but started to fall quickly out of use once the war started – though KV tanks still featured them. Especially on a tank with two man turret, like BT-7, both of the turret crew would have plenty of work just with the main gun and co-ax.