Reviewed by Michael Peck
The Military Book Review

"Killing tanks is fun and easy" was a U.S. Marine Corps maxim. Armor buffs might respond that only Marines would be crazy enough to say such a thing, but the fact is that as long as tanks have been around, people have tried to find creative ways to destroy them.

The U.S. Army faced that problem just before World War II. What to do about Hitler's panzers, which seemed unstoppable as they carved up Europe under their treads? The Army's answer was to create a large force of tank destroyers (TDs) — essentially fast, hard-hitting, lightly armored vehicles that would swarm over the flanks and rear of the German leviathans. Or at least that was the way it was supposed to work.

"The U.S. Army's Tank Destroyer Force in World War II must rate as one of the most successful 'failures' in American military history," writes Harry Yeide, author of The Tank Killers. That's a heck of a way to begin a defense of the tank destroyer concept, but Yeide tries to explain why it wasn't as bad as it seems. The problem was the U.S. Army was (not for the first time) preparing to fight the wrong war. Planners thought they would be attacked by phalanxes of German tanks, and so they would counter them with masses of tank destroyers nipping at the panzers' heels. TDs would dispose of the German armor, freeing U.S. tanks to concentrate on the soft infantry. Yet by the time the United States entered the war, Germany was on the defensive — and so were the panzers. It was the United States on the attack, using poorly armed tanks and lightly armored tank destroyers (TDs didn't even have armored roofs — a definite downside during a mortar barrage). Instead of swirling mobile action, combat was grinding battles of attrition in the mountains of Italy, the hedgerows of Normandy, and the snow and mud of the Ardennes. The end result was that tank destroyers were used like tanks in toe-to-toe combat that they were never designed for. Soon after the war ended, the U.S. Army abolished its tank destroyer arm.

Yet Yeide argues that tank destroyers killed a lot of German tanks, as well as pillboxes, bunkers, machine guns nests, snipers and anything else that got in the way of the American advance across Europe. The crews were well-trained (they were taught to stalk German panzers on foot, if they had to), and more important, they devised new tactics.

Though it tries to be positive — perhaps too positive — The Tank Killers isn't exactly a feel-good book about the U.S. Army. The mistakes were monumental, from General McNair, who believed guns towed by trucks would dominate the battlefield, to the ordnance experts who assured the tank and TD crews that their guns were powerful enough to penetrate the panzers (they weren't). But the TDs improvised, learning everything from how to stalk camouflaged Tigers, to welding metal plates on their open roofs.

In the end, the crews accomplished their mission by junking the old manual and coming up with a new one. Despite the difficulties, they lived up to their motto: "Seek, Strike, Destroy."