During World War II, the US Army had tanks and they had tank destroyers.

Logically, you’d think that the tank destroyers were supposed to be better at destroying tanks.

It turns out they weren’t.

In fact, the whole thing was such a disaster that by the end of the war, every single tank destroyer battalion was dissolved and the entire branch and idea were scrapped for good.

And who had it the worst? You guessed it right, the tank destroyer crews.

So, what went wrong? Okay, so let’s start with the problem that would bring the tank destroyers into existence and then go from there as we like to do in logical and chronological order.

It all started when America watched the French army, which was by the way at the time considered the strongest army in Europe, get literally annihilated by the German Vermacht.

And what shocked the American planners was not really the outcome as much as the new threat on the battlefield, tanks.

But not just tanks, also the way they were being used by the Germans, which was revolutionary at the time and had proven extremely effective.

The Germans were concentrating their tanks in so-called armored spearheads, and these would penetrate even the strongest defensive lines or just use their mobility to bypass them and attack at the weakest point, like RML would later perfect in North Africa.

Toad anti-tank guns that were the primary way of fighting tanks back then were simply not mobile enough to get where they were needed in time and set up for action.

They were bypassed, surrounded or overrun by the tanks in quick, decisive, aggressive charges.

So this created an existential crisis for the US Army because at the time their most modern anti-tank weapon was this little thing, the 37 mm towed anti-tank gun and basically they didn’t have anything to counter this problem.

They also didn’t prioritize tank development in the interwar period, nowhere near as much as the Germans did.

And on top of that, they thought that tanks were supposed to support the infantry and not to fight other tanks, at least not if they didn’t really need to.

So there was nothing they had that could counter German Blitz Creek tactics centered around the armored spearheads.

That was the problem that would lead to the creation of tank destroyers.

But it wasn’t going to be really smooth, as you’re about to see.

One of the ideas that would bring up the tank destroyer concept was that the brains of the army argued it was stupid to use a medium tank worth about $35,000 at the time to destroy another tank when the job could be done by a gun that cost just a fraction of that.

They got the idea to create a specific branch that would be tasked with handling enemy tanks.

Because the static anti-tank defenses couldn’t be on the front line in all places at the same time and in sufficient numbers to fight off the enemy tank charges.

The doctrine they came up with was something like a fire department, just with tank destroyers instead of fire trucks.

They were originally called anti-tank battalions, but you’d have to agree that tank destroyer sounds way cooler and more terrifying.

These battalions would be held in reserve behind the lines.

And when the enemy armor appeared and had most likely already broken through the front lines, the tank destroyers would then move in as quickly as possible to meet the armored spearhead.

They would maneuver into favorable positions and ambush, flank, and destroy enemy tanks with their superior firepower and move the hell out before the enemy could even know what had hit them.

The tactic known as shoot and scoot.

Crews got their shoulder patch with a Black Panther crushing an enemy tank in its jaws.

And because of this, the tank destroyers wouldn’t even need armor to stop anything more than rifle rounds and shrapnel because speed would be their protection.

So they tested the tank destroyer concept in rigged field exercises with ridiculous rules where they came out looking like the perfect solution.

Everything worked out great in theory, but now given that times had changed, they had to find a way to make the guns move quickly and to give at least some protection to their crew instead of just sitting in the open like with the towed guns.

The first tank destroyers, if we can call them that, were actually the gun motor carriages.

The first workhorse tank destroyers, before they could build one on purpose like they wanted, were hybrids of whatever guns and vehicles they had lying around.

That’s how the M6 gun motor carriage was born.

It had a 37 mm anti-tank gun mounted on a 3/4ton truck with the gun facing backward because when they tried mounting it forward, the muzzle blast injured the driver and shattered the windshield.

So, the thing literally had to back into its firing positions, and they made about 5,000 of them at just a little over $4,000 each, making them the cheapest American tank destroyer of the war.

However, they were so good that after Tunisia, surviving units were converted back into cargo trucks.

Since the 37 mm was already obsolete by this point, they put a World War I era 75 mm gun onto an M3 halftrack, creating the M3 gun motor carriage.

They added a few steel plates to stop small arms fire, but only from the front side, so the crew wasn’t much more protected than with a towed gun.

However, the real deal began at Camp Hood, which became a factory producing tank killer crews.

They trained extensively there with these new tactics in mind.

But it was obvious that they couldn’t drive in reverse on cargo trucks and halftracks against German armor, which was arguably the best in the world at the time.

They needed something that was an actual purpose-built tank destroyer.

So, this led to none other than the M10.

It was built on the proven M4 Sherman chassis, but with stripped down armor to save weight and an open top turret for better visibility.

Because whoever saw the enemy first would fire first, and that is usually what decides the outcome of the battle.

Unlike the Germans with their assault guns/tank destroyers, the Americans wanted turrets.

And for armament, they had a 3-in gun derived from a World War I era anti-aircraft gun.

The M10 even got higher production priority than the Sherman.

So, you see just how seriously they took this concept.

Now, the M10 was supposed to be lighter than a Sherman, so it could be faster, right? The upper front hull was 38 mm, sloped at 55° compared to the Sherman’s roughly 51 mm at a similar angle, while the hull sides were just 19 mm, half of the Sherman’s.

But then the first problems appeared.

The gun weighed about 2,000 lbs and sat at the front of the turret, which made the whole thing severely front heavy, so it couldn’t even traverse without counterweights.

They added 2,500 lb of counterweights on the opposite side to balance the turret, which neutralized the weight savings from thinning the armor, and the resulting vehicle weighed just about 3 tons less than the standard Sherman, but now with far less protection.

And if you know anything about tanks, you’d know that the Sherman wasn’t really the best protected tank in the world.

And now the M10 was even less protected with the open turret that on top of that wasn’t powered but handc cranked.

A full 360°ree rotation took about 80 seconds at best while the Sherman could turn its turret in about 18 seconds.

It didn’t have an auxiliary unit to charge batteries like the Sherman.

So it had to run the engine to charge them.

And there goes your silent ambush advantage.

Speed was not drastically greater than the Sherman’s, just about 5 mph higher top speed.

By the way, if you get confused with the names for the M10, Achilles, and Wolverine, the thing is that the M10 that the British got through Lendle was rearmed with their powerful 17 pounder anti-tank gun, the same one they were cramming into Sherman Fireflies, and that was called Achilles.

The Wolverine was used after the war for the M10 and was never really a nickname during the war.

However, the M10 wasn’t ready in time for Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa to fight the Germans there.

So, these Frankenstein improvised gun motor carriages would be the first quote unquote tank destroyers to see combat.

And the result was, as you might expect, the 37 mm was almost completely useless against German medium tanks.

Not to mention the lack of protection for the crews.

The 75mm could do the job, but the crews trained to advance aggressively without any armor against the best tank crews in the world at the time, quickly learned that this wasn’t the smartest and safest thing to do.

At Casarine Pass, tank destroyer units were deployed in exactly the scenario they trained and were built for to stop a massive enemy tank spearhead.

But the inexperienced crews tasted reality for the first time.

What followed was the first major American defeat.

And among the most beat up units were exactly the tanks and tank destroyers.

So they learn, they reorganize, and they try again one month later at Elgetta, where the tank destroyer crews knocked out about 30 German tanks.

Not bad until you hear that they lost 21 gun motor carriages and suffered 72 casualties in that same fight.

Although the concept had worked, if you look at it, it worked at a horrible cost.

But we can say that they had the wrong tool for the job, right? So the M10 arrives in North Africa, but already at the end of the campaign, barely seeing any action.

Then came the next campaign, the invasion of Sicily, where M10s could prove themselves.

But here is when the whole tank destroyer idea fell apart completely because the Italian terrain with mountains, narrow valleys, and tight streets made the kind of armored spearhead they were designed to counter impossible.

So the vehicle designed to fight tanks gets loaded with about 10 high explosive shells for everyone AP round and goes into the support role working as mobile artillery or assault guns.

They were now used as the real tanks, just with the nice benefit of the tank destroyer’s open top, thin armor, and shells that were less effective than standard Sherman high explosives.

The M10’s high explosive shell had almost half the explosive content of the Sherman’s shells.

As for the anti-tank role, when German tanks appeared every now and then, the 3-in gun itself was well regarded, reliable, accurate, and effective against Panza 3es, fours, and most other German vehicles they encountered, at least until the arrival of the Panther.

But America was already developing the next generation of tank destroyers because the M10 turned out to be too slow.

They launched a new thing now really built from the ground up rather than on the chassis of something they already had.

This evolved into none other than the M18 or better known as the Hellcat.

Now this one was actually something they wanted all along.

Light and quick with quite a punch.

It had a radial engine with about 400 horsepower and a tormatic automatic transmission combined with a torsion bar suspension.

This made the Hellcat the fastest tracked armored vehicle of the entire Second World War with a 55 mph top speed, which by the way wouldn’t be broken until the M1 Abrams in the 1980s.

It weighed only about 18 tons with half an inch of armor and also an open top turret.

So there was essentially no protection against anything heavier than a rifle round.

Sometimes not even that, but the turret was power traversed, thank God.

And it came with the new 76 mm gun, the one that was going on the upgraded Shermans as well.

It said that a well-trained crew could fire up to 20 rounds in a mad minute.

So, that is some serious firepower for a vehicle that could now finally get in fast, fire a bunch of rounds, cause chaos, then scoot the hell out before anyone can fire back at it.

The downside was that it didn’t have any machine guns, coaxial or bow gun, but just the 50 cal up in the turret.

As the Hellcat arrived in combat in Italy after the M10, although by all accounts it was better for the tank destroyer job, there weren’t really many tanks to fight at the time.

Tank destroyer crews didn’t really look forward to transitioning to a new unfamiliar vehicle with even less armor, and some units outright protested and refused to give up their M10s.

But slowly, as the Hellcat was being tested, crews fell in love with its speed and automatic transmission.

And speaking of thin armor and open turrets, these problems just kept getting worse the deeper the war went.

The open turrets made crews vulnerable to absolutely everything falling from above, from overhead shell bursts and snipers to grenades and molotovs dropped from buildings.

The Germans used time fuses on their artillery shells to achieve air bursts, setting them to detonate about 10 m above the ground.

A standard tank with a roof could deal with this just fine.

An open topped tank destroyer could not.

There is one British anecdote about an M10 that had its turret crew killed and replaced three times while the whole driver survived each time.

The fourth replacement crew declared the driver a Jonah, meaning cursed, and refused to serve with him.

Crews improvised in the field as much as they could, piling up sandbags and logs, sometimes even across turret openings.

They also started cutting panels from knocked out German tanks and welding them into makeshift roofs.

The official solution was a folding steel armor roof kit, which came 3 months after the war ended, so not really solving anything.

And if the open turret wasn’t enough, the air cooled engine design made things even more fun for the crews inside.

The engine drew in air through the crew compartment, which essentially functioned as an air filter.

Now, when you’re driving inside this thing in summertime in Italy, it might not be so bad.

But as the battlefield would shift again, and the war dragged into the winter of 1944, which was the coldest in Northern Europe in 40 years, the cool air constantly being pulled through your compartment created what crews described as a large armored refrigerator.

By this point, commanders across the theater were openly preferring tanks over tank destroyers, and some were calling for the TD branch to be dissolved entirely.

But the biggest test was yet to come.

The invasion of France was being planned.

Most of the tank destroyers prepared for D-Day were M10s with Hellcats just catching up.

However, no one was really worried about what was about to happen once the Allies landed in Normandy because the encounters with the new German Panther tank were rare and sporadic in Italy, and they didn’t yet fully know that the guns on both the Hellcat and M10 were just not going to be enough to reliably take them out.

To make this even worse, almost 40% of the German tanks in Normandy would be exactly Panthers.

That is why the British were converting their M10s and as many Shermans as they could into Achilles and Fireflies with the 17 pounder, which was at the time arguably the only Allied tank gun that could cause real trouble to heavy German armor.

Nevertheless, as the Beach Heads were secured in the following days of the invasion, tank destroyers arrived in France and began their push inland.

Here they encountered yet another type of terrain that made the kind of fighting they were designed for impossible, and that was the bokeh.

Within days of moving off the beaches, American forces entered a patchwork of small agricultural fields, typically no more than 300 ft across, surrounded by dense hedge that might as well have been designed by the devil, specifically to destroy everything the tank destroyer doctrine was built on.

And the Germans used this as much as they could to prepare all sorts of ambushes for advancing Allied armor from anti-tank guns and panzafouasts to tanks and their own tank destroyers.

Then came July 10th.

The Panza Lair Division, one of the best equipped German formations in Normandy, heavily stocked with Panthers, launches a counterattack near Leair, directly into positions held by the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion.

At 2 in the morning, the Germans start their attack with tanks and infantry with the goal of splitting the Allied beach head.

Tank destroyers sprint into action for what is their original purpose.

But they are about to find out that the 3in armor-piercing round bounces off the Panther’s frontal glaces at 1,000 yd and then at 500 yd and at 200 as well.

80 mm of hardened steel sloped at 55° turned out to be completely immune to tank destroyer fire.

Tank destroyers frantically tried to flank the German tanks and hit them from the sides, but at such incredibly close range, this was not the easiest thing in the world to do.

They managed to take out 12 Panthers, one Panzer 4, and one Stug in two days of literally pointblank fighting, but they suffered heavy losses as well.

Sources, I found, couldn’t say exactly how many, but it was more than enough to send a panic through the Allied command.

HVAP tungsten core ammunition offered a solution on paper, but the rounds were desperately scarce.

Most TD crews went through the entire war without seeing more than a handful of tungsten rounds.

And here is the thing that makes it all even more frustrating.

Because the army had decided that destroying enemy tanks was the job of a separate branch with separate weapons, there was no urgency to upgrade M4 was considered adequate for infantry support.

And if it ran into a Panther, well, that was supposed to be the tank destroyer’s problem.

So, the whole tank destroyer concept not only wasted resources, but it actively delayed the development of the tank they desperately needed.

Now, there is one more tank destroyer that had been in development ever since the M10’s limitations were realized.

But it was now sped up as much as possible after the Panther crisis hit.

The M36 Jackson.

It already existed on paper even weeks before D-Day.

But the brass thought the guns they already had, although far from ideal, were still going to do the job.

Well, the Panthers showed that they were wrong.

So, they were now frantically trying to deploy Jacksons with the new 90 mm gun.

The idea was to take the proven M10A1 hull and chassis and design a new, larger turret that could house the bigger weapon.

The 90 mm M3 gun was derived from an anti-aircraft gun, and it was a massive leap over everything else the Americans had on a mobile platform.

it could defeat the Panthers front at roughly 1,500 yards.

So, they were pushed into service as quickly as possible, but it still took time to prepare and ship them to Europe.

Production was crash prioritized after Normandy exposed the gun crisis, and they were even putting the 90 mm gun and turret on M4 A3 Sherman holes.

It still had an open top turret, which remained its biggest vulnerability, but the turret did have power traverse, which was a major improvement over the M10’s handc cranked nightmare.

The gun was not without flaws, though.

Early M36s lacked a muzzle break, and the massive blast from the 90 mm kicked up so much dust and debris that it blinded the gunner after every shot, slowing down the rate of fire significantly.

But it worked incredibly against the German armor.

There’s even a confirmed kill on a Panther at 4,600 yd, basically the maximum range of its telescopic sight, and another one at 4,200 yd.

90 mm high explosive shells were also much more powerful.

The M36 was well-liked by its crews as one of the few Allied armored vehicles that could actually destroy heavy German tanks at a distance.

That was what the crews had been dying for all along.

As the Allies pushed the Germans back and were advancing through France, soon there was almost no tank-on tank fighting besides some isolated cases that got glamorized later in the movies.

So, people think that they happened much more often than they actually did.

Tank destroyers were once again providing support for the infantry or working as mobile artillery and regular tanks.

When they came to the German border, they met the Seagreed line.

This was a heavily fortified belt of pillboxes, tank obstacles like those so-called dragons teeth dotted with bunkers and trenches that were entangled and combined with the mountainous terrain into just a nightmare to clear and break through.

But tank destroyers helped here quite a bit with their long range accuracy for direct fire, blasting the fortifications one by one.

And then one section of this Seagreed line would bring fresh horrors for the tank destroyer crews, the Hutkan Forest.

The trees there grew so thick that even at midday only a trickle of sunlight reached the forest floor.

Roads were narrow, muddy logging trails where a single disabled vehicle could block an entire column.

But the real problem was the trees, and not for the reason you might expect.

The problem was once again the open top turret.

German artillery and mortar shells landed in the treetops and detonated on contact with the dense fur branches, creating what the troops called tree bursts.

Instead of a single ground level explosion, each round sent a shower of steel fragments and wooden splinters downward over a wide area like a lethal rain falling from above.

This took out a staggering number of tank destroyer crews in the open top turrets.

And the problem was nowhere more obvious than here.

And while we are on the strong defensive lines, the Americans were actually trying to come up with a vehicle specifically for breaking these things, but they didn’t quite manage to make one work.

They had a similar idea to what the Germans did with their enormous tank destroyers like the Yaged Panther or even worse, the Yag Tiger.

On the American side, that was the T-28 project.

A super heavy tank designed specifically to breach the Ziggfrieded lines concrete fortifications with more than enough frontal armor to eat German anti-tank hits for breakfast and a 105 mm high velocity gun in a fixed casemate to poke holes in those bunkers.

But the thing weighed over 90 tons with four sets of tracks to spread all that weight and was powered by a 500 horsepower engine that gave it the incredible top speed of 8 mph.

It was initially called the gun motor carriage T95 but was then redesated as the super heavy tank T28 and technically it was something we could put in the same basket but built for a completely different reason.

It never went into combat because the Sief freed line had already been breached by infantry and conventional armor.

On December the 16th 1944 three German armies launched the Arden’s offensive with roughly 200,000 troops and over 600 tanks and assault guns.

For the first and only time, the enemy launched exactly the kind of massed armored breakthrough that tank destroyer doctrine was designed to counter.

25 TD battalions would ultimately be committed to the battle, which was the largest concentration of American tank destroyer power in the war.

Bastonia became one of the critical points where the entire battle could be won or lost.

It was a road junction that seven major roads ran through and the Germans needed it to keep their advance moving.

The 101st Airborne Division was rushed there to hold it.

arriving on December 19th and the town was encircled by December 21st.

What the paratroopers desperately lacked was anti-tank capability.

They were light infantry with nothing heavier than bazookas against an enemy bringing all sorts of armor in large numbers.

But the 75th tank destroyer battalion equipped with M18 Hellcats would answer the call.

Roughly 60 mi away, the Hellcats used their speed to race in and help the paratroopers at the most critical moment.

On Christmas Day, 18 Panzas drove into a devastating crossfire.

Four Hellcats engaged from multiple angles and all 18 tanks were destroyed.

Throughout the entire siege of Bastonia, the 75th Tank Destroyer Battalion destroyed about 40 German tanks while losing only six Hellcats.

What made Bastonia interesting from a doctrinal perspective is that this was on the surface exactly what tank destroyer doctrine had envisioned, a mobile TD force rushing to meet an enemy armored breakthrough.

But it happened exactly once during the entire war if we exclude Casarine Pass where they used those improvised gun motor carriages.

The Bulge also proved to be the end of the toad tank destroyer battalions which were overrun and decimated during the fighting.

It was now obvious that they were simply too heavy, too slow, and too exposed for the new kind of combat.

By the spring of 1945, tank destroyers were pretty much doing the job of regular tanks.

German armor appeared in ones and twos, scattered and without fuel, more often dug in as static pill boxes.

TD battalions spent their days clearing towns, blasting strong points, supporting infantry advances, and occasionally engaging a lone tank at close range in the rubble of German cities.

A force of 100,000 men was built for a doctrine that would work exactly as intended, only one time in the whole war.

By wars end, commanders unanimously agreed that they would much prefer a real tank over a tank destroyer.

The conclusion was that the tank destroyer as a separate branch and a separate concept was completely unnecessary.

And it turned out that the best weapon to fight a tank was a better tank.

Every tank destroyer battalion was deactivated over the following year after the wars end.

What survived, however, was the gun.

The Jackson’s 90 millimeter was the same gun mounted in the M26 Persing and the new concept became the main battle tank.

The idea that one vehicle could do everything from supporting infantry, exploiting breakthroughs, and killing other tanks.

So there was no need anymore for light, medium, heavy tanks, and then tank destroyers.

But the new vehicle would be all that in one.