tank destroyer

tank destroyer, a highly mobile lightly armoured tank-type vehicle that was used to fight tanks in World War II. Tank destroyers tended to have relatively thin side and rear armour, and the gun was mounted in an open turret or in a casemate that had only a limited traverse. This made tank destroyers lighter, faster, and easier to manufacture, but it also rendered them more vulnerable to enemy fire. They compensated for this with thick frontal armour and a large long-barreled high-velocity gun that was capable of outranging enemy tanks.

The tank destroyer resembled the assault gun because both armoured tracked vehicles had large mounted guns, but the assault gun invariably had a limited traverse, was relatively slow moving, and was used primarily to attack fortifications or other targets at close range.

Tank destroyers were used by the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union in the war. The American types had fully traversable turrets and extremely light armour and were built for speed. The American M10 Wolverine model, for example, had a 76-mm gun on a Sherman tank chassis, while the heavier M36 model had a 90-mm gun. German tank destroyers more closely resembled assault guns, since they mounted their guns in casemates and tended to be heavily armoured. German types culminated in the Panther tank destroyer, which mounted an 88-mm gun on the panzer (tank) chassis of a Panther (Pz. V), and the Tiger tank destroyer, with a 128-mm gun on the panzer chassis of a Tiger (Pz. VI). The wartime Soviet equivalent of the tank destroyer was the self-propelled assault gun, which carried an extremely large-calibre gun in a casemate mounted on the chassis of a T-34 or Joseph Stalin tank.