Historically, the Tank Destroyer branch was disbanded after WWII as redundant. Yet its original concept (dedicated defensive antitank reserve units) was viable, and the rise of recoiless guns and ATGMs gave specialty platforms a return in a decade. So if for some reason, the Tank Destroyer Branch was retained after World War II, how would American armor doctrine/design/etc... be different?
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WI: US keeps Tank Destroyer branch postwar
- Thread starter Coiler
- Start date
I was just reading about this in Ogorkiewicz's book the other day.
You would think that there would have been more appetite for it in the US, given the worries about the Soviet IS series of heavy tanks before Khrushchev eventually abandoned them. I've seen it attributed to postwar doctrine favouring a single main battle tank, but in fact I don't think that came about until a good few years after the war - I think the US was initially still working on both medium and heavy tanks in concert, and it took the UK a while to abandon the doctrine of cruiser and infantry tanks. So what was the main reason why the US abandoned tank destroyers?
You would think that there would have been more appetite for it in the US, given the worries about the Soviet IS series of heavy tanks before Khrushchev eventually abandoned them. I've seen it attributed to postwar doctrine favouring a single main battle tank, but in fact I don't think that came about until a good few years after the war - I think the US was initially still working on both medium and heavy tanks in concert, and it took the UK a while to abandon the doctrine of cruiser and infantry tanks. So what was the main reason why the US abandoned tank destroyers?
So what was the main reason why the US abandoned tank destroyers?
Biggest was just money in the immediate postwar crunch (remember, the early Korean War-era US Army was in a terrible state).
Von Callay
Getting Grilled by Special Agent Nixon
If you want to get into an interesting (but probably silly) essential physical point about it, US tank destroyer design evolved vehicles that were essentially tanks, but less well-protected. You have German and Soviet tank destroyers and assault guns that are casement style, a big metal box built around a heavy gun, but the M10, M18, M36 are all turreted vehicles that can act much more like a conventional tank than those other designs. The difference between a tank destroyer of that kind, and, say, the Pershing tank, is that the Pershing tank has a roof on it, and so can take more than small arms fire and be useful on the offense as well as defense. I'm not surprised that, in the downsizing of the armed forces after WW2, they looked at the Army branch that mostly didn't do what it was supposed to do in the war (independently blunt German armored offensives) and decided to cut it in favor of tanks with the same firepower but better protection.