Stop Worrying and Love the T-34

We here at tha Jalop tend toward two sorts of vehicular affection. We adore the high-tech and revolutionary, but we're just as smitten with mass-produced machines for the general populace. The T-34 strikes us as the 20th Century vehicle that really hit smack-dab in the middle of that matrix. It was KISS-simple, it worked well, and its continued supremacy was a result of an incredible logistic reorganization of the world's largest nation's manufacturing base. As is the unfortunate case of practically any large-scale government project, there were many, many tragic human casualties, and the subject of that is an Encyclopedia Brittanica-length story in and of itself. Nevertheless, the T-34 stands as one of the most world-changing vehicles of the 20th Century, and to be honest, while we could never see ourselves rolling in a King Tiger, despite its inherent, unfortunate majesty, and we've always found Shermans a bit ungainly, we could roll correct in a T-34. The rest of the T-34 saga after the jump.