Overshadowed by the United States Army’s armored divisions, the separate tank and tank destroyer battalions had the difficult mission of providing armored support for US infantry divisions in the 1944–45 campaigns. Although infantry support had been the traditional role of US tanks in World War I, there was considerable controversy about US tank doctrine through World War II. Tank destroyers were a new concept first established in 1941, and ultimately an unsuccessful one. The tactical doctrine for tank destroyers was so flawed that the numerous tank destroyer battalions deployed in Europe in 1944–45 were not used as intended, but instead were assigned an infantry support mission similar to that of the separate tank battalions.
Infantry support had been the traditional mission of tanks since their birth in World War I. The vulnerability of exposed infantry to the lethal weapons of the modern battlefield led to static trench warfare. The infantry could not advance in the face of overwhelming enemy firepower and tanks arose as a means to break this stalemate. The tank could survive against machine guns and indirect artillery fire, and facilitate the advance of the infantry by knocking out machine-gun nests and tenacious defensive positions. Tanks helped even the odds in favor of the attacking infantry over the previously dominant defense.
A classic image of tank support in World War II. An M4 medium tank of the 746th Tank Battalion supports Co. I, 60th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division, during fighting near the Belgian border on September 9, 1944. (NARA)
Every new tactical innovation prompts a response, and the growing influence of tanks on the battlefield after 1918 led to various attempts to repel the tank threat. During World War I, anti-tank methods were improvised and awkward. Field guns were deployed in the forward trenches but every gun removed from the artillery role diminished the division’s artillery firepower. Furthermore, these field guns were large, conspicuous, and vulnerable, and there were seldom enough available to halt a concentrated tank attack. In the inter-war years, new approaches were made to deal with the tank threat. The best solution was a dedicated anti-tank gun, small enough to be easily moved by the infantry, but powerful enough to deal with most tanks. The most influential of these weapons was the German Rheinmetall 37mm gun, which was first used extensively in the Spanish Civil War.
Although anti-tank guns proved to be very effective against the small numbers of tanks deployed in Spain in 1937–38, the evolution of tank tactics undermined their effectiveness. Instead of viewing the tank simply as an infantry support weapon, visionary military thinkers in the 1930s began to see tank divisions as a means to reinvigorate the offensive and return mobility to the battlefield. Since armored divisions could concentrate large numbers of tanks against a single point, for example a regiment of tanks against an infantry battalion, the small number of anti-tank guns available to the infantry would inevitably be overwhelmed. The inability of infantry anti-tank guns to ensure a defense against tank attack was made very evident during Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, and even more clearly in the stunning defeat of the French Army in 1940.
If the infantry anti-tank gun could not provide a sufficient barrier against the tank threat, then what could do so? This was a critical tactical dilemma for most armies during World War II, and a dilemma that was never entirely solved. Some armies, such as Britain’s, viewed armored divisions as being the best antidote to German panzer divisions. The Germans eventually relied on a blend of infantry anti-tank weapons, bolstered by a divisional assault-gun battalion. The US Army came up with its own solution, the Tank Destroyer Force, a semi-independent combat arm deployed specifically to deal with the panzer threat.