Soviet slogans: both turret sides?

[john sears]

I’m working on my first soviet armor and adding patriotic slogans to the sides of some of the turrets. All of my references show only a single side of a particular tank. Did crews paint slogans on both sides of their turrets or only one? If both, were the slogans identical or did they “Crush the Fascists!” on the left and thank the “Moscow Civil Defense League” on the right side?

Also, trolling google image search, it looks like slogans are far more common than simple red stars. Was that the case or are slogans simply over represented because they’re more interesting to photograph?

Thanks!

[quidveritas]

Slogans had to be approved before being applied to the tanks.  Often every tank in an outfit sported the same slogan!  I don’t read Russian so my info is limited.

My son is the local Soviet expert.  His tanks have one slogan on one side of the turret and a different slogan on the other side of the turret.  All tanks in the same outfit are decked out exactly the same.

I have no idea where he got his source material.

[Ivan Sorensen]

I imagine they might be somewhat over-represented in photo’s but they do make for a more interesting army to look at 🙂

Besides, if the German players can have all those Tiger’s and Sturmgewehr hiding behind every bush, surely we can have a few slogans.

[Allen Curtis]

The use of slogans was not widespread.  Some of the best examples are clearly staged propaganda photos.  These tend to show the same slogan on both sides of a tank, but with stylistic/positioning differences:

http://www.o5m6.de/kv-1m1941early.html

http://www.o5m6.de/kv-1e.html

(for a photo of the other side:  http://www.kv1ehkranami.narod.ru/big/big_kv1-rkka-002.jpg )

If you browse through the Tanks section of the Engines of the Red Army site, you will find a number of good examples, both in original photos and art based on original photos:

http://www.o5m6.de/RussianArmour.html

Allen

[Cardinal Biggles]

Interesting. And what is the white horizontal stripe that circles the turret for? Was it very common in 1942?

[Sparker]

The white horizontal stripe around the turret, often matched with one going across the top of the turret, was used in the last stages of the war as an allied air recognition device, so more 1945 really…

Allen that is a hoofing site, thank you!

http://sparkerswargames.blogspot.com.au/
'Blessed are the peacekeepers, for they shall need to be well 'ard'
Matthew 5:9

[Yukon5G]

Damn Russians and their script writing. The hardest part of learning Russian in the Army was all the damn writing we did. I voided so many checks after writing them in Cyrillic script!

Thanks for posting, Allen. Great resource.

Sink meh!

[Allen Curtis]

We used to regularly host the Soviet army specialists from both the US (Leavenworth) and UK (Sandhurst) at the National Training Center to observe the OPFOR portrayal and share their latest work on Soviet tactics (picking interesting details out of open-source literature).  We’d run down to Ontario (California) airport or LAX to pick up the Brits.  On the way back up through the desert, they’d always get a chuckle out of the very prominent Toys “Ya” Us sign in Victorville.  Nowadays, it bugs me when companies like Battlefront/Flames of War use Cyrillic characters in place of “look-alike” Latin ones.  The mind really stalls for a second or two as it tries to process that gobblety-gook.

I didn’t go to ARI, but used my GI Bill benefits to take Russian at KU whe I was working at Leavenworth: in one class, two of us who were civilian intelligence specialists and a couple of the local Soviet foreign area officers took a tailored course in military Russian for a couple of years.  For the two of us civilians (my boss with a doctorate in c.17th German, myself with Latin, Greek and Old English), it started with the alphabet, then basic grammar and everyday vocabulary, before moving on to military vocabulary and reading military journal articles.  That was so much fun I worked with the same instructor learning Old Russian and Old Church Slavonic.  Now those will really bend your mind when learning vocabulary, because there are so many words that only appear in the literature one time.  Ever.

Yep, I love that site, and refer to it regularly.

Allen

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