The US Army Never Built Tank Destroyers

The term "tank destroyer is a common use term. Most military-minded people unders
tand 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-tan
k gun". They formed units tasked to deal with hostile armor and called them "tan
k 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 answe
r 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 th
ose 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 let s keep it formal).
At the very beginning of the Tank Destroyer force s 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 the
re was too much overhead involved with using them.
Without enough time to build and produce a proper vehicle, the Army improvised t
wo 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 G
un 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 fo
r the tank destroyer units. This was the 3-inch M10 Gun Motor Carriage. It serve
d 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 machi
ne. Which resulted in the 76mm M10 Gun Motor Carriage (the Hellcat). The Ordnanc
e 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 machin
e 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 ro
ute; 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 w
ere equipped with these vehicles and few people were going to chew over the term
Gun Motor Carriage (and many people didn t know better), people began to call them
ank destroyers .
So you see, the US Army never built any tank destroyers . They built
ages which everyone else called tank destroyers.

Gun Motor Carri

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 panzerjage
rs
armor hunters or tank hunters . If the USA writers call them tank destroyer , they m
st be tank destroyer , goes that bit of logic...