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 antitank 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 antiarmor 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...