Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been painting my first 15mm armour: ten Plastic Soldier Company T-34s. I’ll write up a post on building and painting the things when I’m finished, but first I’ll write up what I found in my research when I looked at my decal stash.
In terms of tactical signs and numbering, there doesn’t seem to have been any overall standard, but individual units adopted ‘standards’ of their own (often, no signs at all). On a wargames table it’s nice to have a bit of colour, though. I decided that the rankers tanks could have numbers, while the company HQ vehicle could have a name.
There were two types of names or slogans. Column names were where Pravda would publish a piece saying that a particular region or institution had raised x amount of money that had paid for a batch of tanks, or if the commissar thought it would be a nice idea to put a slogan on ‘his’ unit’s vehicles. All tanks in a unit would be painted with that same dedication or slogan. Some tanks were individually named.
A lend lease M3A1 with ideas above it’s station, named for General Suvorov (source: tankfront.ru)
I own both the PSC and Flames of War Soviet decal sets. The Flames of War ones are all the pretty common ones, and there are a few of each. With the PSC ones, there are 10-20 of each slogan, so they are handy as “column” names if you have lots of tanks.
I decided that If I was going to add a name it would be nice to know what the Cyrillic meant. I’d seen many of the Flames of War slogans before, so I had some idea about them, but I wasn’t familiar with the PSC ones. I spent some time transliterating the slogans and poking around, and found most of them, then I stumbled across this website, which is a bit of a gold mine. Chrome’s auto translate thingy seems to work pretty well on it. Anyway, here is what I was able to turn up…
Tank names and slogans in Flames of War set SU944 and The Plastic Soldier Company set DEC1525
| Суворов | Suvorov (General, d. 1800 – undefeated in over 60 large battles) |
| Матв-Родина | Mother-Homeland |
| Вей Фашистскую Гадину | Crush the fascist vipers |
| Воронежски Колкхозник | [financed by] Voronezh farmers |
| Щорс | Shchors (a Red Army leader in the Russian Civil War) |
| Александр НевϹкий | Alexander Nevsky (Prince of Novgorod, defeated the Teutonic Knights in 1242) |
| Ϲоветский Ϲтаратель | The Soviet miner |
| За Советскую Молдавию | For Soviet Moldova (financed by the Moldavian SSR) |
| К Победе | To victory |
| До Днепра | To the Dnieper (river) |
| Победа | Victory |
| Бей Фашнстов | Crush the fascists |
| Боявая Поаруга | Should be Боевая Поаруга (= fighting friend). Financed by women of the Omsk region. |
| За Сталина | For Stalin |
| Ленин | Lenin |
| Освобождения Крьіма | Liberate the Crimea |
| За Коммунизм | For Communism |
| За Родину | For the motherland |
| Смерть Оккупантам | Death to the occupiers |
| На Берлин | To Berlin |
| Бей Гитлеровцев | Crush the Nazis |
| На Запад | To the west |
| Вперед! На Запад | Forward! To the west |
