Foreign Tanks in the Moscow Snow

In the dead of winter, a tank officer of the 136th Independent Tank Brigade receives equipment he has never handled: British Matilda II and Valentine tanks, shipped in by the Arctic convoys under Lend-Lease. His crews, thinned by the terrible losses of the summer and autumn of 1941, know the T-34 and the light T-60, not these machines from another arsenal, with manuals translated in haste.

The British equipment baffles them. The Matilda's armour matches that of the heavy KV-1, but its 2-pounder gun, lacking high-explosive rounds, bites little into infantry. The tracks slip on the ice; snow and mud pile up behind the side skirts and jam the suspension. Several tanks break down during the very first training drives, just as the Soviets' own tank stock has been spent in the fighting.

With the Red Army counter-attacking to push the Wehrmacht far from the capital, the officer must decide how to use them: throw these poorly known tanks straight into the front line despite the risk; keep them in reserve long enough to train the crews and adapt the tracks; or spread them out, in small packets, as a supplement among the T-34 and T-60 units.