Monuments are peculiar things. They serve no practical purpose, are usually large and impressive and serve to remind us of something noteworthy that happened in the past. In that regards, it’s rare to see monuments to failure (at least intentionally), but the Army not only built one, but currently has it on display.
For starters, you might see the T95 referred to as the T28. You might ask, “What’s the difference?” and “Which one is correct?”. Well, this program is nothing if not characterized by stupid decisions that make little sense, so both are correct and there is no difference. It was originally called T28 when they thought it would be a heavy tank. Then, they decided it was a self propelled gun, so it got reclassified as T95. Then, when it was pretty obvious to all involved that it had no future, they reclassified it back to T28 because it had too much armor to be a self propelled gun.
You’ll also see pictures of the T28 with 2 sets of tracks and pictures with 4 sets of tracks. These are not actually variants, but the same vehicle. It was recognized that this thing was getting a bit too wide, so the outer tracks of the T95 could be unbolted, tied together behind the tank and drug along like a happy little albatross around its neck. If you see a photo with 2 tracks, the other 2 might also be in the photo or just out of shot.
Development of this tank actually started really late in World War 2, at a time when the Army definitely should’ve know that something this massive just wasn’t going to work. It was envisioned to assault fortified positions like the Siegfried Line and was even equipped with a 105mm gun that was known to be effective versus concrete installations. Then when the Allies blew past the Siegfried line, they were still pretty optimistic that this tank would find a use in the invasion of Japan (although how it was supposed to navigate the mountainous terrain that characterizes the home islands was anyone’s guess). The first model made it into testing in late ‘45…like after VE and VJ day late. At this point it begs the question as to why they were even still testing the thing and really it’s anyone’s guess. It appears as though the attitude was “well, we have it, so we might as well.”
To give some brief context for this tank, the US Sherman tank had 2 inches of frontal armor at about 37 degrees for an effective thickness of about 3.5 inches. The German Tiger had a frontal armor of 4 inches with no slope of note. The T28 had frontal armor 12 inches thick and its side skirt alone was a full 4inches. One of the heaviest tanks on the modern battlefield is the M1 Abrams at just shy of 70 tons. The T95 weighed almost 100. This thing was an absolute behemoth (although it was super low to the ground at less than 7 feet to the top of the roof).
Now, the T28 passed Army testing (although all that really means is that it basically mechanically works and does what the designers claim), but at the time there was no need for it and the Army was pretty confident that it had no way to transport the T95 (something they definitely knew when they designed it, but disregard that). For the last few months of its service life, the T28 was used to stress test other equipment and components probably with the mindset that if that equipment can handle this 100 ton monster, they can handle anything. Then the Army was done playing with its toy and ordered both of the prototypes of this absolutely garbage use of taxdollars destroyed in ‘47…and now all of the readers paying attention in the first paragraph are thinking “WTF?”
This tale of wasted time and money doesn’t end where it definitely should have. In 1974, Ft. Bellvoire Virginia received a phone call from a farmer saying basically that he found a giant tank in a field and asking what he should do about it. The staff at Ft. Bellvoire, not being familiar with esoteric WW2 prototype vehicles, had to ask around to find out what the hell this thing even was. After some digging, they found out that it was 1 of the 2 T95’s. Even after a lot more digging, they were still pretty baffled as to both how the hell it got there and what it had been up to for 27 years. It moved around a little, but currently resides in Ft. Benning where it’s scheduled to go in Patton Park.
To recap the misadventures of the T28, it was designed for a mission it never got to do, had a size a weight the Army knew was unusable, got tested even after it was clear it was obsolete, was ordered destroyed and then found not to actually have been destroyed and will be featured prominently next to far more sensible pieces of equipment because that’s what you do with tanks that never did anything but eat taxpayer money and technically shouldn’t exist if you had done your job right.