The Tank Killers: A History of America's World War II Tank Destroyer Force (review)

The tank destroyer (TD) force was a stop-gap measure created in haste by the U.S. Army in the late 1930s. Interwar doctrine held that American tanks would accompany the infantry to demolish strong points such as bunkers and trenches. Artillery would destroy enemy tanks. Observations from Europe after September 1939 indicated that this plan for antitank defense would not work well in battle. To fill the gap between doctrine and reality, the TD force was born. It allowed American strategists to believe the U.S. Army had something using available hardware that could defeat enemy tanks.

Author Harry Yeide closes a gap in the historiography of the American military in the Second World War. References to TDs abound in secondary literature, but aside from unit histories, no overall book-length history of the TD force existed until now. Yeide combed After Action Reports, unit histories, and award citations from TD units to reconstruct the operational history of the force. While he occasionally relies too much on Army slang to add realism, such as his repeated use of the term "doughs" for infantrymen, most of the writing is clear and concise. Tank Killers follows the development and employment of TD doctrine, equipment, and units, in North Africa and Europe. Yeide emphasizes the almost constant divergence from doctrine over the five years the force existed. He includes two appendixes, the first showing which TD battalions fought in each campaign, and a second giving a brief combat history of each battalion. As Yeide explains in his introduction, he avoids the Pacific theater, on the grounds that the employment of TDs in that theater was more ad hoc and had little to do with the evolution of doctrine.

Most TD battalions were originally equipped with armored personnel carriers mounting a flat trajectory artillery gun. TDs were lighter and faster than tanks, while their guns were larger than main guns on contemporary American tanks. Although a TD could knock out most enemy tanks, it lacked protection from anything greater than small arms fire. In theory TDs would use terrain for protection to fight defensively against enemy tanks. After studying the experiences of TDs in North Africa, the Army decided to replace most self-propelled TDs with towed guns, but as Yeide demonstrates, that arrangement had serious flaws when employed in Europe, and the Army recommitted to self-propelled TDs in 1944.

General George S. Patton, Jr., was unenthusiastic about the TD concept, arguing that effective TDs would evolve until they became another tank, which is essentially what happened by 1945. Unlike armor or artillery, which remain subject to ongoing debates, the TD force was abolished shortly after the war. As such, Tank Killers provides an excellent case study in the life of a tactical concept, useful not only for studies of the American military in World War II, but also for the development and fielding of any new concept, such as the modern Stryker Brigades.