World War II Database

Contributor: C. Peter Chen

ww2dbaseSU-100 tank destroyers were designed by a team of engineers under the direction of L. I. Gorlitskiy as an effort to replace the SU-85 design. The designing process began in Feb 1944 and the first prototype, code named "Object 138", was completed in the following month. After extensive testing, the D-10S guns developed in Constructors Bureau of Artillery Factory No. 9 were chosen as SU-100 tank destroyers' main weaponry. this was largely due to the D-10S guns' ability to penetrate 125-millimeter vertical armor from a range of 2,000 meters and 80-millimeter sloped armor from a range of 1,500 meters. When mass production was approved in Sep 1944, they were built at Uralskiy Mashinostroitelnyy Zavod ("Urals Machine Building Plant"), or Uralmash for short, in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg or Ekaterinburg) in Asia. Although they entered production relatively late in the war, large numbers were produced, and they played a significant role in the final Soviet campaigns of the European War. By Jul 1945, 2,335 SU-100 tank destroyers were built. In the Soviet Union, production continued until 1947 after 2,335 examples were built. Soviet military placed them in reserve in 1957; several are still in reserve status in Russian Army depots at the time of this writing.

ww2dbaseCzechoslovakia license-built SD-100 tank destroyers between 1953 and 1957; 771 were built, 311 of which were exported to other Communist-friendly nations. Under the Egyptian banner, SU-100 tank destroyers saw action in the 1956 Suez Crisis, the 1967 Six-Day War, and the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Vietnamese Communist forces also used a number of them during the Vietnam War. Other Communist forces that had operated SU-100 tank destroyers included Angola, Communist China, Cuba, and Yugoslavia. In 2014, Houthi forces in the 2014 Yemeni conflict operated at least one SD-100 tank destroyers.

SPECIFICATIONS

SU-100

Machinery	One V-2 12-cylinder diesel engine rated at 500hp
Suspension	Christie suspension
Armament	1x100mm D-10S gun, 1x7.62mm DT machine gun
Armor	75mm front, 45mm side, 45mm rear, 20mm top
Crew	4
Length	9.45 m
Width	3.00 m
Height	2.25 m
Weight	31.6 t
Speed	48 km/h
Range	320 km

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