Tank Killers: A History of America's World War II Tank Destroyer Force

^{German prisoners pass a camouflaged M10 in the Normandy bocage in July 1944. The terrain forced the self-propelled TDs to operate as tanks or artillery because they rarely had long fields of fire. NA}

^{An M10 blasts retreating Germans at St. Lô on 20 July 1944. NA}

^{A 3-inch gun crew uses building parts for camouflage during street fighting in France, in August 1944. NA}

^{One of the Panthers dispatched by the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion during the battle in Meximieux, France, on 1 September 1944. The panzer ran into a building after being hit. NA}

^{Back in Brittany, an M18 crew in the streets of Brest, September 1944. NA}

^{Black crewmen from the 614th Tank Destroyer Battalion fire their 3-inch gun in England before heading to the Continent, September 1944. NA}

^{The battle for the border begins. An M10 fires on enemy positions at Riesdorf, Germany, on 14 September 1944. NA}

^{The TDs engage in fierce fighting inside Aachen on 15 October. The image graphically illustrates the vulnerability of crews in open turrets to fire from upper stories during urban warfare. The wartime censor’s pen has obscured the unit designator on the M10. NA}

^{An M36 from the 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion in the streets of Metz in November 1944. NA}

^{The crewmen of an 801st Tank Destroyer Battalion 3-inch gun reposition their weapon in Hofen. The battalion lost seventeen guns in the first day of fighting. NA}

^{A Royal Tiger knocked out in Stavelot, Belgium. It appears to be the one nailed by the men of the 825th Tank Destroyer Battalion—who had been assigned to security duties—in their only combat action of the war. NA}

^{The crew of this camouflaged 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion M36 destroyed five panzers during a German counterattack at Oberwampach, Luxembourg, in January 1945. NA}

^{First Army troops clear Cologne on the Rhine River, 6 March, 1945. NA}

Notes

Chapter 1: Seek, Strike, and Destroy

1. Dr. Christopher R. Gabel, Seek, Strike, and Destroy: U.S. Army Tank Destroyer Doctrine in World War II (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1985), 5. (Hereinafter Gabel.)

2. Kent Roberts Greenfield, Robert R. Palmer, and Bell I. Wiley, United States Army in World War II, The Organization of Ground Combat Troops (Washington, DC: Historical Division, Department of the Army, 1947), 74. (Hereinafter Greenfield, et al.)

3. Gabel, 5-7.

4. Greenfield, et al, 74.

5. Christopher J. Anderson, Hell on Wheels, The Men of the U.S. Armored Forces, 1918 to the Present (London: Greenhill Books and Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania: Stackpole Books, 1999), 6. (Hereinafter Christopher Anderson.)

6. Gabel, 8-9.

7. Greenfield, et al, 75.

8. Brigadier General Lesley J. McNair to Adjutant General, AG 320.2 (7-3-40) M-C, 29 July 1940, McNair Files, Box 8, RG 337, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), quoted in David E. Johnson, Fast Tanks and Heavy Bombers, Innovation in the U.S. Army 1917-1945 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 150. (Hereinafter Johnson.)

9. Greenfield, et al, 75.

10. Gabel, 14.

11. Greenfield, et al, 76.

12. Gabel, 12-13.

13. Robert Capistrano and Dave Kaufman, “Tank Destroyer Forces,” http://www.naples.net/clubs/asmic/TD-Forces.htm, 1998. (Hereinafter Capistrano and Kaufman.)

14. Johnson, 148.

15. History of the 628th Tank Destroyer Battalion.

16. Greenfield, et al, 79.

17. Gabel, 14.

18. Greenfield, et al, 74.

19. Ibid., 81-82.

20. Bertrand J. Oliver, History, 602d Tank Destroyer Battalion, March 1941 to November 1945 (Lansing, Michigan: 602d Tank Destroyer Battalion Association, Inc., 1990), 1. (Hereinafter Oliver.)

21. Lonnie Gill, Tank Destroyer Forces, WWII (Paducah, Kentucky: Turner Publishing Company, 1992), 11. (Hereinafter Gill.)

22. Gabel, 14-15.

23. Ibid., 17.

24. Edward L. Josowitz, An Informal History of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion (Salzburg: Pustet, 1945), 4. (Hereinafter Josowitz.)

25. Johnson, 148-149. Greenfield, et al, 81. Gabel, 15 ff.

26. Gabel, 17.

27. Capistrano and Kaufman.

28. Gabel, 18 ff. “The Tank Killers,” Fortune, November 1942, 116. (Hereinafter “The Tank Killers”.)

29. Greenfield, et al, 396 ff.

30. Ibid., 403-404.

31. “The Tank Killers,” 117.

32. Gabel, 22 ff.

33. “The Tank Killers,” 116.

34. Gabel, 22 ff.

35. Ibid.

36. “Tank Destroyers: They Are the Army’s Answer to the Tank Menace,” Life, 26 October 1942, 87.

37. “The Tank Killers,” 181.

38. Study of Organization, Equipment, and Tactical Employment of Tank Destroyer Units (U.S. Army, US Forces in the European Theater, the General Board, 1946), 10. (Hereinafter Study of Organization, Equipment, and Tactical Employment of Tank Destroyer Units.)

39. “The Tank Killers,” 118.

40. Study of Organization, Equipment, and Tactical Employment of Tank Destroyer Units, 9.

41. Gabel, 20. Gill, 14.

42. Gabel, 27.

43. “The Tank Killers,” 116-118.

44. John Weeks, Men Against Tanks, A History of Anti-Tank Warfare (New York, New York: Mason/Charter Publishers, Inc., 1975), 96-97.

45. Harry D. Dunnagan, A War to Win, Company “B” – 813th Tank Destroyers (Myrtle Beach, South Carolina: Royall Dutton Books, 1992), 79. (Hereinafter Dunnagan.)

46. The American Arsenal (London: Greenhill Books, 2001), 44. The Greenhill volume is essentially a reprint of the U.S. Army’s Catalog of Standard Ordnance Items of 1944. (Hereinafter The American Arsenal.)

47. Diary, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion.

48. Jim Mesko, U.S. Tank Destroyers in Action (Carrollton, Texas: Squadron/Signal Publications, Inc., 1998), 8. (Hereinafter Mesko.)

49. The American Arsenal, 45.

50. “The Tank Killers,” 118.

51. The American Arsenal, 51.

52. Telephone interview with John Hudson, May 2002. Gill, 17.

53. Mesko, 13.

54. Study of Organization, Equipment, and Tactical Employment of Tank Destroyer Units, 9.

55. The Story of the 1st Armored Division (1st Armored Division, 1945), 60.