"Nobody respects a country with a poor army, but everybody respects a country with a good army. I raise my toast to the Finnish Army."
- Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, 1948
(500 points) The T-54 and T-55 main battle tanks were the Soviet Union's replacements for the World War II era T-34 tank. The T-54/55 tank series is the most numerous in the world, and very widely employed, especially by former client states of the Soviet Union.
The T-54 and T-55 tanks are very similar and difficult to distinguish visually. Many T-54s were updated to T-55 standards. Soviet tanks were factory-overhauled every 7,000 km, and often given minor technology updates. Many states have added or modified tank equipment (India affixed fake fume extractors to its T-54s and T-55s, so that Indian gunners wouldn't confuse them with Pakistani Type 59s).
The T-54 can be distinguished by a dome-shaped ventilator on the turret front-right, and has a SGMT 7.62 mm machine gun in a fixed mount in the front of the hull, operated by the driver. Early T-54s lacked a gun fume extractor, had an undercut at the turret rear, and a distinctive "pig-snout" gun mantlet. The T-55's new turret has large D-shaped roof panels, visible from above. Ship Date: 1st Quarter 2009.
Length: 4 inches
Width: 1.5 inches
Release Date: ?
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Historical Account: "Client States" - During the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War, India operated T-55s in the northern sector and eastern sector against Pakistan's Pattons, Chaffees and Chinese T-59s. The individual performance of the T-55 alone is not known, however, as the Indian Army also operated AMX, Chafee, Centurions and PT-76s. The vaunted Pattons of the Pakistan Army, decimated in the fields of Punjab and Rajasthan, fared far worse than the Indian armor.
By the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the T-54A and T-55s gun was inferior to the 105 mm Royal Ordnance L7 gun mounted in Israeli Centurion Mk V and M60A1 tanks and was unable to penetrate these tanks' armor. Even the newer T-62, a modernised T-55, was outperformed. Most Israeli tank losses were due to anti-tank missiles. |
Israel captured over a thousand T-55s from Syria and Egypt in 1967 and 1973, keeping many of them in service. They were upgraded with a 105 mm NATO-standard L7 or M68 main gun replacing the old Soviet 100 mm D-10, and a General Motors diesel replacing the original Soviet diesel engine. The Israelis designated these Tiran-5 medium tanks, and they were used by reserve units until the early 1990s. Most of them were then sold to assorted Third World countries, some of them in Latin America, and the rest were heavily modified, converted into heavy armoured personnel carriers designated the IDF Achzarit. |
