The US Army Never Built Tank Destroyers

The term "tank destroyer is a common use term. Most military-minded people understand it, and yet they are using it wrong, technically speaking.

The US Army coined the term "Tank Destroyer" to get away from the term "anti-tank gun". They formed units tasked to deal with hostile armor and called them "tank destroyer" units to differentiate them from the anti-tank guns infantry units were issued. (If you are wondering why they didn't just rely on tanks, the answer is: they were caught up in philosophy, which means common sense was trumped by various romantic schemes which had very little to do with reality...)

There were two types of tank destroyer units: those armed with towed guns and those armed with motorized guns. In Army parlance, a motorized gun is a "Gun Motor Carriage" (which can be abbreviated GMC, but that acronym can be confused with General Motors Corporation, so lets keep it formal).

At the very beginning of the Tank Destroyer forces career, the decision was made to skip the towed units: the motto of the Tank Destroyer command was strike fast, strike first, strike hard (seek, strike, destroy). Towed guns were not mobile enough (a fact learned in exercises before the USA even entered the war) and there was too much overhead involved with using them.

Without enough time to build and produce a proper vehicle, the Army improvised two vehicles to provide motorized tank destroyer units with their weapons: the 37-mm armed M6 Gun Motor Carriage (a truck with a 37mm in back) and the 75-mm M3 Gun Motor Carriage (a half track with a 75mm gun in back).

The truck was pitiful and gotten rid of fast. The half-track soldiered on.

The half-track served until a made-to-order vehicle was designed and produced for the tank destroyer units. This was the 3-inch M10 Gun Motor Carriage. It served well enough (especially since it had a better anti-armor gun than the Sherman tank's 75) but the Commanders of the Tank Destroyers wanted a fast, nimble machine. Which resulted in the 76mm M10 Gun Motor Carriage (the Hellcat). The Ordnance Department wanted a vehicle with a better gun on it than the 75, 76, or 3-inch and as such they adapted the M10 to use a 90-mm gun to create the M36 Gun Motor Carriage.

These were all tank-like vehicles that lacked coaxial and bow .30-caliber machine guns (vital for use in self-defense against infantry and for general assault; the lack of them discouraged crews from acting like tanks) and had an open roof (claimed to be a feature that allowed the crew a better view and quick escape route; if that was a useful feature the tanks would have had them, too; again, it discouraged the crews from acting like a tank). Because the tank destroyer units were equipped with these vehicles and few people were going to chew over the term Gun Motor Carriage (and many people didnt know better), people began to call them tank destroyers.

So you see, the US Army never built any tank destroyers. They built Gun Motor Carriages which everyone else called tank destroyers.

It is interesting to see how the US term tank destroyer has been coopted to refer to the armored fighting vehicles of other nations. Such as the German panzerjagers armor hunters or tank hunters. If the USA writers call them tank destroyer, they must be tank destroyer, goes that bit of logic...