Dead Tank Crew – “End of the Line,” General Palmer remarked. The surrender of the 19th Army. The end! With the final capitulation of Germany to the Allies, German soldiers who have bore arms for over five years against almost all of Europe and the U.S.
surrender their rifles to their American conquerors near Landeck, Austria. They seem happy that it is all over. Hand grenades and other equipment can be seen piled up beyond the rifles. When the German army attacked the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, tanks were a crucial factor in their initial success.
Dead Tank Crew
German tanks roared across the Soviet border giving the enemy no time to recover. The main object of these tank hunts is the armored vehicles that became mired in marshes, many of which fell off bridges into the soft ground.
Those who slipped under the water were preserved. Tanks, even when set on fire by enemy guns (known as “brewed up” by tank crews), were rarely abandoned. If it was possible to lift up and fix it, it was removed by a maintenance battalion.
The Germans were especially good at it. If they could not pull out the tank, it was filled with explosives and destroyed to stop it falling into enemy hands. “It is easy to hunt when you are shown a definite point,” says Mikalutski.
“But to get to the point you may have to go five kilometers through marshes or snow. You reach the place and then you have to crawl back…” The KV-1 was feared by the Germans because its armor was too thick for their standard shells.
In August 1941 the crew of the Soviet tank commander Kolobanov in a KV-1 knocked out 22 German tanks within 30 minutes after setting an ambush near the city of Leningrad. The KV-1 we have followed in this story was restored to help mark the 75th anniversary of Kolobanov’s battle.
Later, a tank is hooked by steel hawsers and pulled by a large lorry. One example, a KV-1, was lifted up in November 2015 near Senno, in the Vitebsk region of Belarus. The KV-1 got stuck there in July 1941, when one of the biggest tank battles of the Second World War took place.
The battle involved about 2,000 tanks from both sides, including this KV-1. The charred remains of a German pilot, the plane was brought down by small arms fire on March 15, the first day of the Seventh Army offensive in Germany.
Interesting note: According to this forum, the plane may actually be a U.S. P-47. “From the very beginning we worked without a salary. We thought, we would lift up tanks, renovate them and get money for this.
But we had worked in Poisk for nine years and only received a salary for one year. I was growing potatoes, cucumbers, and selling them to make money for living,” says Vladimir. At 1300 hours, after three days of battle, this town was finally retaken.
Yanks surrounded the Germans after losing the town during the initial German counter attack. The patrol is about to enter the church to examine the belfry and cellar where snipers are still believed to be hiding.
American prisoners were held here. Sometimes, he is the only person who knows how to fix a spare part or understand why the tank won’t start. Vladimir was trained as a mechanic. In order to help his father, his son Maxim became a welder and Aleksei a painter.
Mikalutski is a former marine engineer, who worked in the navy search and rescue service for eight years. The largest number of tanks are left in the Stalin Line museum complex. Working models live in the repair hangar.
When they are not gathering dust they are participating in parades or filming. The developers of the computer game World of Tanks have even visited to record the sounds of different tanks. Older locals said the vehicle had sunk into soft ground near a spring, but nobody knew the exact location.
Vladimir suggested that the tank had been blocking the spring and the water had found a new route. He was absolutely right – the BT-7 was discovered 10 meters (33ft) away from the current spring. A tank destroyer moving past an American tank that was knocked out during the battle when the Americans retook the town.
Between the two armored vehicles two medical men are picking up an American soldier who was killed in the fight to take the town. If you liked this story, sign up for the weekly bbc.com features newsletter, called “If You Only Read 6 Things This Week”.
A handpicked selection of stories from BBC Future, Earth, Culture, Capital, and Travel, delivered to your inbox every Friday. When working for the club, they sold a German armored vehicle, an SdKfz 252, to a collector in Britain, and a Soviet heavy tank IS-2 went to a private collection in Latvia.
This did not make the renovators rich. Vladimir drives an old Soviet Niva four-by-four. Occasionally they have to fix the car with their own hands; fortunately, they are very good at welding. “There was the time when we slept in vans,” says Vladimir, who has been commuting from Stalin’s line to his home village for nine years.
One son joined him in 2010, and the other in 2012. This was almost 20 years ago. Since then, Vladimir and his sons have taken dozens of armored vehicles and almost every one has been restored to working condition.
Now Vladimir works as the chief mechanic and renovator in a historical and cultural complex called the ‘Stalin Line’ near the country’s capital, Minsk. A helmet and rifle mark the spot in a ditch by the road where two infantrymen gave their lives, during a new drive by the Seventh Army which opened on a front of 50 miles from Saarbrücken to the Rhine.
When a tank is being lifted up, the officers from the Ministry of Internal Affairs arrive, take the ammunition, and seal off the area so that nobody has “their head shot off”. The Ministry of Emergency Response officers drain the area the tank is stuck in.
Then there are mine clearers sent by the Ministry of Defense; they clear the area of mines, while ammunition is removed and destroyed. Prisoners of War from the German Military Police force and Gestapo agents of the city of Strasbourg are led to the 3rd Infantry Division.
The POWs are being escorted by the French Forces of the Interior. BBC Future has brought you in-depth and rigorous stories to help you navigate the current pandemic, but we know that’s not all you want to read.
So now we’re dedicating a series to help you escape. We’ll be revisiting our most popular features from the last three years in our Lockdown Longreads. Not all tanks are built the same. “If you want to change one spare part in a German tank you have to dismantle half of the machine,” says Vladimir.
“Soviet tanks were made to be assembled and fixed fast, because in the war time even children were welding such machines.” The restoration team claims that some hulls they found were clearly made by children. You’ll find everything from the story about the world’s greatest space mission to the truth about whether our cats really love us, the epic hunt to bring illegal fishermen to justice and the small team which brings long-buried World War Two tanks back to life
. What you won’t find is any reference to, well, you-know-what. Enjoy. Now, more than 75 years after the fighting, both Soviet and German tanks are being lifted from the marshes in Belarus. One Belarusian family has been looking for tanks littered all over the country’s vast marshes and restoring them.
With photographer Anton Skyba, I was able to witness one heavy Soviet tank, a KV-1, being restored after its recovery – and its participation in a re-enactment of a World War Two battle. They often spend nights near the marshes in a van.
“The strongest frost we have ever had when sleeping in a van is -33C. You used to come, change clothes and hide inside your house on wheels,” says Vladimir. Palmer, who served during the invasion of Normandy, the break-out from Saint-Lo, and the crossing of the Siegfried line, went on to serve in the Korean War.
He passed away on June 7, 1999. These photos were recently shared to Argunners (here and here) by his grandson, Daniel Palmer, to honor the memories and service of his grandfather. “The tank was absolutely new, it ran only 400km.
The crew was leaving it in a hurry, all things were left in their places.” A pair of binoculars, socks, textbooks on agronomy (plant sciences) and accounting were all found in the upended tank. It seems that the Germans were sure that they would conquer the USSR and were already making plans for after the conflict.
Following an attack from the U.S. artillery on a German convoy, dead horses, wrecked vehicles and equipment can be seen strewn along the road in the vicinity of Lug, Germany. The Germans were trying to escape encirclement by the 3rd and 7th Armies.
U.S. forces trying to recapture Wingen-sur-Moder from German mountain 6. SS-Gebirgsjäger Division troops, who infiltrated it during the night, dislodging American troops and taking a number of prisoners. Hotel ‘Wenk’ and Gasoline are in the yard and hit by a tracer bullet, resulting in the burning, as seen in the photograph.
In the church tower on the left is a German lookout, who is also sniping at the U.S. soldiers An M-10 Tank Destroyer from the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion supporting the 143rd Infantry Regiment, 36th Division in Rohrwiller, 4 February 1945. Notice the extensive damage to the town’s church, which was likely damaged by shell blasts.
Only two teams have such a license. The Yakushev family and a specialist in renovation, Alexander Mikalutski, are the first. The second team, an amateurs club called Poisk, which is where Vladimir and Mikalutski started to learn their trade almost 20 years ago.
Thousands of German officers and men taken in the redoubt mountains can be seen marched back over to the mountain road they once defended. Although these officers and men gave up without much resistance, other German troops offered fanatical resistance at key towns along the way.
History website Argunners has published a series of previously unseen photos recently uncovered from the archives of an American four-star general who served in Europe during the Second World War. The images show a war-torn Europe as American forces move towards Berlin.
It has always been easier to lift up tanks than to restore them. During the war, tank-building made a giant leap both in the USSR and in Germany, with much less time between initial designs and construction.
Sometimes tanks entered production too early; when the Soviet T-34 was rushed into production in 1941, more than 800 corrections had to be made to the design by the end of the year, some of them requiring entirely new parts.
When renovators assemble one complete tank from several machines it can turn into quite the puzzle. Damage done when a German 280mm shell landed in the area around 0345 hours. General Palmer wrote: “Shell from Railway did this.
Not far from where I live. 5 bigger ones hit about 150 yards from my place the others.. (?). One blew the door in on my caravan. The place was a mess. Nice guys!”
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Emma Nehls is a military writer and historian with a passion for exploring the intricacies of warfare and the human experience within the military. With extensive knowledge and a deep understanding of military strategy, tactics, and historical contexts, Nehls brings a unique perspective to his writings.
