Sounds like a tactical error, not training the crew to do field repair. What were they....unionized? lol
They hadn’t gotten around to swearing in with a hand puppet.
“Sounds like a tactical error, not training the crew to do field repair.”
From what I’ve read of the Soviet military it was one of their traditions that it was usually just officers who knew how to conduct field repairs. For some reason the lower ranks were deliberately kept ignorant of technical information.
The typical soviet soldier was basically an agricultural peasant for whom anything more advanced that a horse-drawn plough was high tech.
Stalin's purges of the 1930s cleared out a great many of the Red Army's support officers and technicians. And expecting conscript peasants to perform maintenance at any level beyond that of a collective farm tractor driver was little better than a propaganda exercise.
On the other hand, once some of those former tractor jockeys got out of the 1940-1941 tin cans and into KVs and T-34s, they did pretty good. That was also true of 1940 US tank crews in M3A1 light tanks and M3 mediums who later ran their Shermans from Sicily to Normandy to the Rhein as well.