The Germans, on the other hand, built several superheavy Tank Destroyers such as the Elefent and the dreaded Jagdtiger. Its extreme speed did it, however, little good as it was often slowed down by the terrain or the other vehicles it was bound to escort. The extreme case of this would be the M18 Hellcat, one of the fastest tracked vehicles of the Second World War. They were often faster but less protected with the top of the turret open.

The American Tank Destroyers such as the M36 were turreted and, to a degree, behaved like actual tanks. Such a vehicle would then wait hidden in ambush to surprise the enemy, fire and then bail out because its thin armor could not sufficiently protect it. Many of these wartime vehicles used existing chassis (for example the Panzer II or the Panzer 38 (t) for the German Marder series, the Panzer III chassis for the StuG III series or the T-34 chassis for the Soviet SU-85 and the SU-100) fitted with a more powerful gun than such a vehicle would normally be able to carry – there was a price though: the gun was almost always fixed and could only aim forward in a certain limited angle (called gun traverse angle). Americans in particular created a whole military branch and doctrine dedicated to this goal, while possibly the most effective German vehicle of the war, the StuG III, was in fact a self-propelled gun as well as a capable tank killer in some of its iterations. The Tank Destroyer class saw its golden days during the Second World War, where various dedicated or improvised vehicles were devised to fight the seemingly unbeatable hordes of German Panzers (and – vice versa – the unstoppable Red Army tide in the second half of the war). Whether designed from scratch or converted from another existing vehicle, their battlefield role remained the same for a long time – to engage the enemy at long distances (ideally so long that the enemy cannot retaliate) and to retreat (or advance) afterwards to repeat the process.

The Tank Destroyers (albeit many were not called as such) are vehicles specifically designed to kill enemy tanks on a budget. The intricacies and various details of the tank destroyer doctrine would cover many page – we’ll have to do with a shorter summary. The history of the real life Tank Destroyer vehicles is quite complex and it would probably take a whole book to describe it – in fact, many books do just that.

British wheeled tank modern