Tank Archives Magazine

The largest and fiercest tank battles in history took place on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, with German Panzer IIIs and IVs, Panthers and Tigers engaged in a brutal combat against hordes of Soviet T-34s, KV-1s and T-70s. As the fighting raged, both sides struggled to gain a technological advantage – developing fearsome new tanks with ever thicker armour and bigger guns.
Yet it takes years of effort to bring a new tank to the battlefield, and many programmes remained incomplete even as the war ended. But what if the war had continued for even a few more months? Would legendary types such as the Maus, E-100 and IS-7 have joined the fray? In the decades since VE-Day, imagination has filled in the gaps left by missing historical records – countless artworks, scale models, video games, and more depict German and Soviet armour on the battlefields of 1946, ranging from the plausible to the outright fictional.
In Panzer ’46, tank historian Peter Samsonov examines the most notable real-life projects of the leading tank building nations of the time to see which of them could have been ready in time to fight and what their impact on the battlefield could have been.