IJA project HT-6 (3)

Another AU tank from post WWII. 
This photo was taken in December 1945 and is archived in three museums: AAF tank museum, VA, USA, Kubinka tank museum, Kubinka, Russia, and Yushukan Military History Museum, Japan.

HT No. 252 is a very peculiar looking tank with a very familiar hull similar to Soviet heavy tanks. All we know is that is was an IS-6 sent to the Vladivostok coast as a moving pillbox days after the fall of Nazi Germany and stolen by the IJA. After NKVD agents linked the heist and leaked it to both President Harry Truman and Premier Joseph Stalin. Truman mobilised all battalions to find and terminate the Japanese superheavy program, meanwhile the Soviet leader was enraged to see his one of his premier heavy tanks stolen and told the PM of Japan, Hideki Tojo, to tell the IJA to either scuttle or return the tank, or risk the Red and US Army and Marines razing the Japanese island to the ground. They did scuttle the tank, but not before documenting and hiding plans for the IS-6 to be upgraded into a moving fortress, away from prying eyes, foreign or insular. The Japanese were not the only ones to lose this little scuffle; Stalin was forced to eat his words after hearing of the US nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, prompting him to plan a nuclear program of his own.

Now these plans are decommissioned in 1974, and copies were sent to AAF Tank Museum,US and Kubinka Tank Museum,USSR. 

If the US and USSR never found out the program, we would probably see these tanks rolling around not only Moscow and Washington DC, but might be the ones to topple Allied resistance and change the war in favour of the Axis. However this project went down similar to the Maus of Germany, and is kept alive only in tank model forms.

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