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In theory TDs would use terrain for protection to fight defensively against enemy tanks. Although a TD could knock out most enemy tanks, it lacked protection from anything greater than small arms fire. TDs were lighter and faster than tanks, while their guns were larger than main guns on contemporary American tanks. Most TD battalions were originally equipped with armored personnel carriers mounting a flat trajectory artillery gun. As Yeide explains in his introduction, he avoids the Pacific theater, on the grounds that the employment of TDs in that theater was more ad hoc and had little to do with the evolution of doctrine. He includes two appendixes, the first showing which TD battalions fought in each campaign, and a second giving a brief combat history of each battalion. Yeide emphasizes the almost constant divergence from doctrine over the five years the force existed. Tank Killers follows the development and employment of TD doctrine, equipment, and units, in North Africa and Europe. While he occasionally relies too much on Army slang to add realism, such as his repeated use of the term "doughs" for infantrymen, most of the writing is clear and concise. Yeide combed After Action Reports, unit histories, and award citations from TD units to reconstruct the operational history of the force. References to TDs abound in secondary literature, but aside from unit histories, no overall book-length history of the TD force existed until now. Army had something using available hardware that could defeat enemy tanks.Īuthor Harry Yeide closes a gap in the historiography of the American military in the Second World War. It allowed American strategists to believe the U.S. To fill the gap between doctrine and reality, the TD force was born. Observations from Europe after September 1939 indicated that this plan for antitank defense would not work well in battle. Interwar doctrine held that American tanks would accompany the infantry to demolish strong points such as bunkers and trenches. The tank destroyer (TD) force was a stop-gap measure created in haste by the U.S.