Tank Pulled up Perfectly Preserved

Posted by Christopher Eger Feb 25, 2007

War brings us the most amazing stories. Some of them are only brought to light generations later. In 1944 a young Estonian boy poking around in the woods near his house saw a pair of fresh tank tracks leading to a local peat lake and none leading back out. This boy remembered going to that lake for months and seeing bubbles rising up from the bottom. This clue remained nothing but an odd childhood story until the boy, now an old man, talked to a member of the Russian Otsing group which plays something of a battlefield detective all along what used to be the massive and miserable eastern front in World War Two.

The group dived the site and found something. With the help of a tractor they pulled a Soviet-built T34/76A tank up on Sept 14, 2000. This tank was perfectly preserved in the peat and the engine was still sealed tight. The 116 rounds of 76mm aboard were still live and all markings were clearly readable and visible. Most interesting of all it appeared that the tank was captured by the Germans, who used it, and then sank it to prevent it from falling back into the hand s of its original owners.

Who knows whats in the rest of those wooded lakes along that 900 mile front?