Since then, most of such vehicle proposals (for example to build such a vehicle on Leopard 1 chassis or even a Leopard 2-based one) remained in experimental stage and the Taifun II prototype was, more or less, the last hurrah of this class. Few post-war gun Tank Destroyer designs achieved any significance – the best-known example would be the German Kanonenjagdpanzer, designed to utilize the obsolete 90mm guns the Germans were left with after the older Patton models were pushed out of service.
Best tank buster in hots series#
On the other hand, the Soviet SU-152 and ISU-152 series were quite successful thanks to their ability to act as artillery and remained in service in such role for a very long time (some of them were for example still used by the Iraqi during the Gulf War).Īfter the war, the Tank Destroyer class was rapidly replaced by a universal combat vehicle – the Main Battle Tank. While their guns were deadly, the limited experience of their crews and logistics issues made them simply not worth it (this sub-class disappeared with the end of the war).
These vehicles were also extremely expensive and relatively fragile. These were heavily armored but slow and ponderous monsters, whose reputation in combat was vastly overblown by both propaganda and soldier stories of fighting them (and defeating them, of course – some written “partisan” accounts contain more Elefants destroyed than were actually built in total). 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.
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