Anti-Tank Weapons guns starting with the Panzerjäger (“tank hunter”) and Jagdpanzer (“hunting tank”), moving to the more dubious because lumbering Elefant (or Ferdinand) The Wehrmacht named other heavy anti-tank or self-propelled guns after animals, including the Jagdpanther (“hunting panther”) and Nashorn (“Rhinoceros”) Mobile antitank guns were much more lightly armored than the heavy tanks they faced Most were fixed: lacking any turret, the weapon was aimed only by moving the vehicle so that it had to face an enemy tank to fire upon it That meant anti-tank guns were best fought by crews who took up preset, static defensive positions Self-propelled or anti-tank guns accordingly carried most armor at the front, making them more susceptible to flank fire or close infantry assault than comparable medium tanks So why build them? Germany built mobile anti-tank guns because they were a quick and cheap alternative to tanks: they required less complex engineering, less assembly line time, and took much less weight of steel to complete The latter consideration was especially important to German production from 1943, despite the oddity of Germany producing super-heavies like the Elefant and wasting vast amounts of steel on a late-war U-boat construction program that hardly led to action at sea The logic was quite different in the U.S Army, which called mobile anti-tank guns “tank destroyers.” The United States produced and deployed massed tank destroyers as a prewar doctrinal response to Blitzkrieg The idea was to counter German armor with fast, massed, high velocity anti-tank guns that would “seek, strike, and destroy” Panzers The Army was ordered by General George C Marshall to organize a Tank Destroyer Force in November 1941 Units were equipped with towed anti-tank guns as well as self-propelled M-1, M-3, M-5, or M-10 Wolverine tank destroyers The latter had a main weapon with a 3-inch bore, the standard U.S tank destroyer gun from 1943 The British refitted Lend-Lease M10s with their superb 17-pounder gun They called this hybrid “Achilles,” an unfortunate and unintended—but perhaps not inaccurate—acknowledgment of thin-armor vulnerability to German tanks and anti-tank guns that these vehicles faced in battle The later M18 Hellcat mounted a 76 mm gun, while the M36 had a powerful 90 mm tube All U.S tank destroyers carried a 50 caliber machine gun for defense against infantry By the end of the war, U.S tank destroyer battalions proved to be much less effective in stopping German tanks than simply using Shermans in a defensive role Anti-tank ammunition evolved with changes in the thickness and sloped design of opposing armor Armor-Piercing (AP) solid shot worked by kinetic energy The Germans improved this by ballistic shaping of the round, then by adding a soft nose cap that prevented a shell from shattering on impact These ArmorPiercing, Capped (APC) shells were further improved by adding a second hollow ballistic cap (APCBC) Another German anti-tank round was the “Hartkernmunition,” or what the British called an Armor-Piercing Composite Rigid (APCR) round This had a hard tungsten core but a narrow diameter, making it somewhat arrow-like in fl ight Some shells thus required fins to stabilize them in fl ight to the target Other armies followed the German lead, until every one deployed Armor-Piercing High Explosive (APHE) shells for large caliber guns Prior to the 58