Wednesday 29 June 2016

Teletank Battalion

"To the Chief of the Main Auto-Armoured Directorate of the Red Army, Lieutenant-General comrade Fedorenko

According to your orders, I report on the condition of the 51st OTB.

The 51st OTB has:
  1. Functional control tanks with guns and machineguns: 31
  2. Functional teletanks with chemical weapons: 28
    The battalion can provide 28 groups (56 tanks).
    The chemical weapons can emit flame, smoke, or poison terrain.
    Control tanks have a reduced ammunition capacity compared to regular tanks. 
    1. Regular tanks: 165 shells, 58 machinegun magazines
    2. Control tanks: 96 shells, 46 machinegun magazines.
      Teletanks have one DT machinegun.
  3. All tanks are functional and running (100-150 engine hours expended).
During manual control of the teletank, there is no seat or observation equipment (PTK or PT-1) installed. The ammunition capacity is small (6 magazines).

The battalion is missing the following vehicles:

Type
Authorized
Present
Deficiency
Command tanks
18
1
17
Mobile workshop A
3
0
3
Mobile workshop B
1
0
1
Disinfection vehicle
10
0
10
Fuel truck
6
1
5
Portable charging stations
1
0
1
Comintern tractors
1
0
1

The battalion lacks the following staff:
  1. Officers:
    1. Chemical technician: 1
    2. Junior radio technician: 1
    3. Special equipment technician: 1
    4. Artillery workshop chief: 1
  2. NCO and privates:
    1. Regulator mechanic: 11
    2. Artillery master: 2
    3. Optics master: 2
    4. Laboratory technician: 1
Proposals

I deem it necessary to:
  1. Fill the battalion to authorized strength with necessary materiel and staff.
  2. Use teletanks by radio control in areas of attack on a defending enemy.
    1. Scouting the enemy's artillery defenses.
    2. Blocking pillboxes.
    3. Scouting minefields.
    4. Burning out and crushing machinegun nests.
Commander of the 51st OTB, Captain Lebedev.
July 7th, 1941"

CAMD RF 38-11355-325

4 comments:

  1. How do the teletanks reload their DTs?

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    Replies
    1. Huh, I never thought about this. Presumably you would have to go in there yourself and reload it, there is no mechanism to do this remotely.

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    2. Ouch. That oughta have seriously limited their utility, experimental as they may have been to begin with. Wonder why they didn't just replace it with one of the belt-feds in service - shouldn't have been too much extra work...

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    3. There was a pretty neat project to stick the belt-fed ShKAS into a T-37, but that never made it into production. It would have been useful on teletanks.

      That, and the primary weapon of the teletanks was the flamethrower, anyway, the DT was there mostly for show.

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