40th Tank Battalion, 7th Armored Division, M3 Half-track with jeep, tanks in background during desert maneuvers, 1943. The U.S. half-track is usually perceived as having been a sturdy, reliable, well-designed and well-protected quasi-tank. In actuality, it was anything but. And while it’s true that U.S. half-tracks were not underpowered as was the German Sd.Kfz. 251, that was about their only virtue. Their armor plating (and most everything else) was continually vibrating loose (one writer described driving one on an improved road as “rather like driving a ten-ton kitchen cabinet on a washboard”). Their floors were unarmored and gave no protection against mines—unlike their German counterparts; their side armor could be pierced by .50-cal. armor-piercing rounds at over 1,000 meters, and even by .30-cal. AP rounds out to 350 meters (the figures for the more heavily armored and ballistically well-sloped Sd.Kfz. 251 are about 600 meters and 30 meters respectively). And their tracks ...