This one is for Chris.
A cool thing about wandering all alone around a museum, with not a curator in sight, is that you can touch things. Now, I’m a sensible and law-abiding person and wouldn’t touch paper or fabric or really old things or anything under glass, so one can safely let me wander around most museums alone. But tank armor? Sure! If it can’t handle a little touching, we have a problem.
Uralmash made tanks and artillery all through the war – KBs first, and then T-34s – and there are pieces of armor plate in the museum. The thinnest one is 60mm, the thickest – 150mm, and each piece on display is about the size of a brick. Except I could hardly lift the thinnest one, and the 150mm one just laughed at me. I saw it. It suddenly made a lot of sense to me that Uralmash developed a technology for casting tank towers whole rather than making them out of rolled sheets of metal. It also suddenly made sense that tanks are so slow. I mean, I knew why, but seeing a piece of a tank brought it home.
I also got my hands on this document (from the archives):
Minutes of the party committee meeting, “Regarding the bombardment of factory #56 by tanks from factory #183.”
No, it was not competition for resources. It was comrade Shvyrkin, of the army quality control, accidentally getting too close to his industrial neighbor. Comrade Shvyrkin was expelled from the party “for opening tank fire on the factory #56’s territory” and handed over to the public prosecutor’s office, and factory #183 was ordered to repair #56’s road they accidentally destroyed and banned from letting its tanks come within a 1.5 kilometer radius of #56.
2 Comments
February 20, 2007 at 5:18 am
Oooooooooh… Can I hire some of the people from #183 to come produce tanks for Chris next time we’re at war?
February 20, 2007 at 1:19 pm
You should come to Pittsburgh with me sometime to see my cousin’s metal rolling/stamping plant. It’s pretty amazing.