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M36 tank destroyer

German tanks had continued adding armor and a gun with considerable more penetration was required by tank destroyers. On the 29 December 1943, Army Ground Forces directed the Tank Destroyer Board to undertake and report on service test of this 90Om GMC T-71. Subsequently, on 18 February 1944, after e:xtensive tests, the Tank Destroyer Board recommended through the Tank Destroyer Center that the 90mm GMC T-71 be considered suitable for use as a Tank Destroyer.

The M36 is a modification of the 3" Gun Motor Carriage Ml0Al, mounting a 90mm gun in a conical 3600 turrent, traversed by hand and power, The turret is balanced in design, requiring no counterweights as in M10, and is therefore approximately 1000 lbs. lighter. Crew of five; 47 rounds of ready ammunition. The 90mm, M3, gun used on this vehicle could penetrate 4.8 inches of armor with standard armor piercing capped ammu-nition, and 7.8 inches of armor with the high-velocity, tungsten carbide ammunition, at a range of 19,000 yards. Armor penetration was 6" at 1000 yards; reinforced concrete penetration, 5 ft at 100 yards with 2 rounds (compares with 10 rounds for same penetration with the 3" gun), rate of fire slower than other GMCs due to bulk and weight of round and space limitatione in turret. Gun recoil mechanism same as the 3".

Late in the war the US Army replaced the three-inch gun in the M10 tank destroyer with a high velocity, 90- millimeter antiaircraft gun to create the M36 tank destroyer. The increased firepower capability did not arrive in the European theater with any significant increase in protection. While the M36 was an improvement over the M10 tank destroyer it still suffered from chronic lack of armor.

The M36 Jackson arrived in Europe September 1944 and proved to be an immediate success. Its 90-millimeter gun made it the most lethal armored vehicle in the American arsenal and more importantly, capable of defeating German heavy armor. One of the lessons learned, however, through a study of past achievements and battlefield reports, was the necessity for more gun power which, considered from the standpoint of highest velocity possible, indicated that the ideal maximum caliber consistent with mobility, rate of fire and capacity for volume of fire, was the 90mm gun motor carriage, M36.

The only real limitation of the M36s, survivability not withstanding, was their limited numbers. Despite arriving with the troops in September, only 236 M36s were in combat by 20 December. During 1944 and 1945 American soldiers found their weapons inadequate to deal with German tanks. The reason for this was a combination of two factors: doctrine and knowledge of the enemy. Doctrine dictated that American tanks should not be armed to fight other tanks. A poor evaluation of the enemy coupled with very limited experience in fighting his tanks provided no reason to change doctrine.

The M36, because of its 90-mm gun, was often misused as a main battle tank, despite its lack of crew protection. When the Normandy battles showed the 90-mm gun of the M36 to be the only weapon capable of dealing with heavy German armor, demand from the front lines for. the tank destroyer increased dramatically. More than 1400 of the 90-mm tank destroyers were produced by the end of 1944. However, they were used not in the role for which they were intended, but as main battle tanks in their own right.

Tank destroyer crews suffered heavy casualties as a result. Crews improvised turret covers ranging from canvas shelter halves to deflect hand grenades, to a folding steel top, which was standardized in August 1945; nothing but a fully-armored top, however, would have protected the crews against the preferred German tactic of calling in artillery airbursts against the tank destroyers.

Although losses were heavy whenever the tank destroyers were employed in the front lines in direct support of armor and infantry forces, commanders had no choice; nothing else could defeat the German armor. In the tank battles of the Roer Plain in November 1944, the three battalions of Sherman tanks in the 67th Armored Regiment killed only five Panthers. The 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion assigned to the 67th Armor claimed 15.

Some assessment of the 90-mm. as an antitank gun was possible after the commitment of the 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion's M36 tank destroyers in the November Roer plain battles. The shell of the 90-mm. gun would ricochet off the 7-inch front armor plate of the Tiger tank at 3,000 to 3,500 yards; to be effective, the tank destroyers had either to get closer or attack the more vulnerable sides, and this fact the enemy evidently knew, for he had usually managed to keep his Tigers at a distance and expose only their heavily armored fronts.25 But to say that the 90-mm. would not defeat the frontal armor of the Tiger is not to condemn it as an antitank gun. The Tiger, cumbersome and underpowered for its great weight, was mainly valuable when the Germans were in a commanding position, as at Puffendorf, dug in on the defensive. Against the Panther, which most experts considered the Germans' best tank, the 90-mm. gun was far more effective than the 76-mm.

Hitler, in talking to his generals 16 September 1944, is reported to have said “cross the Meuse and go to Antwerp.” This became the decisive objective of the German plan of attack in December 1944. In December 1944, Army Group B launched an offense through the Ardennes with twenty-four divisions, ten of which were Panzer. With combat power including 1,500 tanks and self-propelled guns this would culminate German armor offensive capability for the war.

General der Panzertruppe Hasso von Manteuffel, the German commander at the battle for St. Vith, believed that a successful German operation on the Western Front in December 1944 required that German progress had to be rapid and undelayed through and beyond St. Vith. The timetable for the German attack called for St. Vith to be captured by 6 p.m. Dec. 17. Due to the mobile defense by Combat Command B (CCB) of 7th Armored Division and associated units, St. Vith was not captured until the night of Dec. 21, and the area surrounding St. Vith was not under German control until Dec. 23, This delay was so severe a setback to von Manteuffel’s schedule that he recommended on Christmas Eve to Hitler’s adjutant that the German army give up the attack and return to the West Wall.

The delay was inflicted upon a vastly superior German force by a weaker defensive force of engineers, tanks, armored infantry and reconnaissance units. These units are the true heroes of the battle, although their deeds were not generally recorded at the time. The tank destroyer that received the most publicity out of the Ardennes fight was the M36. Three tank destroyer battalions the 610th, the 703rd, and the 740th, each equipped with the M36, proved capable of stopping the best tanks the Germans could throw at them.

Despite losses of up to two-thirds of their original strength in four or five days, several times units had to be ordered to draw back to prevent being cut off. The major factors in this successful defense-and-delay situation were a base of direct fire made up of 90mm tank destroyers and a counterattack force of a part of a tank battalion concealed near St. Vith. These tanks would attack a German thrust and, after reducing it or re-establishing the American defense, they would return to their original position and await the next threat. This tactic was so successful that Manteuffel stated in 1964 that he faced a corps instead of a thin force of units.

As the after-action report from the 703rd states: "The entire situation proved conclusively that the fundamentals of many Tank Destroyer Doctrines are well founded.... The advantages of a highly mobile reserve were brought out in the ability of the reserve units to take favorable positions in depth, and move quickly to threatened areas. ... Exploiting their mobility of self-propelled TD’s can effectively assist in stopping a tank attack."

With the defeat of German armor at the Ardennes, Germany forever lost the ability to mass armor against the Allies. The M36 emerged as the “only American weapon that could consistently be counted on to knock out a Tiger. As a testament of the success of the M36, a month after the landings in Normandy, “The European Theater of Operations requested that all battalions equipped with the M10 be converted to the M36.