Deliveries

 "Table of arrivals of tanks at the front lines in 1941, by type

Via Alexey Isayev

This data is interesting on its own, but it's also interesting to compare to deliveries of foreign tanks. The first Matilda and Valentine tanks began arriving during the Battle for Moscow and were thrown into battle with little preparation. As you can see in the above table, once the situation stabilized a little bit it took some time before new units with British tanks could be properly outfitted. Large deployments of Matildas and Valentines only take place in April, four months after deliveries began.

A similar picture can be seen with American tanks. The first shipments arrived in January of 1942 and we start seeing a small number of these tanks on the battlefield in April-May, 4-5 months later. Once the pipeline was set up, it was not as hard to deploy new tanks. A bump shipments that came in May hits the front lines in June. A lot of tanks were tied up in delivery by the end of the year: 3875 foreign tanks were delivered to the USSR in 1941-1942, but only 2530 were actually fielded before the end of 1942.

You can see the same pattern with Soviet tanks. Evacuation of factory #183, the USSR's largest producer of the T-34 tank, began in September of 1941. The factory began to set up in the Urals in December-January, and by May of 1941 you see a spike in deliveries of T-34 tanks. Similarly, production of the T-70 was authorized in March of 1942 and we see these tanks begin to arrive on the front lines in July.