Chinese Tank Soldiers close up

In Romanian army witch is equipped with T-55 and TR-85, the crewmen has pistols but in the tank inventory is two rifles. Probably the situation is similar in every country witch use T-55 (or his derivates) tanks.

Looks very well-maintain even they are obsolete tank. A fresh paint of coating on 40yrs old vintage.

adeptitus said:

These are T-59 / WZ-120's right? They look to be in decent condition. Can anyone tell if these are the upgraded variant with 105mm gun?

Since these guys are using older equipment, is this a Cat B unit?

The PLA has a lot of T-59's, I'm surprised that they haven't converted some of them to combat engineering vehicles like the VIU-55 Munja, or IDF Achzarit HAPC (or Russian BTR-T HAPC).

Click to expand...

PLA still need many tanks protecting its huge borders against smaller countries like Vietnam,Mynamar and some former soviet bloc countries. T-59 still proves useful and adequate....

The T-55 series of tanks are a weary successful ones, witch is obsolete only for modern standards but the rest of the world use similar techniques and this situation will not change at least 10-20 years. In a low intensity conflict where not clash regular armies, and the tank forces is use for area defense and patrol this tanks could be weary useful.

This is not Cat B! This is the 113th division of 38th army. Look at the batch, it's this one:



The words at the bottom is the Chinese pronunciation of "flying tiger division". In Korean War, this division once marched 70 km in one night and had combat several times during the march, then successfully cut the rear of a group of US army. There was a movie called "flying tiger" for this event. That's why they use it as the nickname of the division.

I think these are old pictures, and not taken by normal soldiers, but by some professional photographers. It's very rare for Chinese soldiers to have cameras. I also don't think normal solders are allowed to take cameras in a drill.