World War 2 In Review

Every man but the driver has a machine gun on this vehicle—clearly, snipers were more to be feared. The vehicle commander, standing alongside the driver, has a .30 caliber machine gun, and there are at least two .50 caliber machine guns; the fourth gun, the barrel of which is barely visible in the original photograph, mounted at the right rear, may be a .30 caliber machine gun. The ammo cans, non-standard for such weapons, were issued to the Navy for anti-aircraft machine guns. Although it is an M3 GMC, the carriage is actually an M2 Half-track. This vehicle has a front winch and is crudely painted in brown, green and yellow camouflage; note that the camouflage is carried over onto the inside of the side armored window cover, to match the overall pattern when it is folded down. Shown disembarking from an LST on the island of New Britain, 26 December 1943. by Ned B. Barnett With the outbreak of World War II on the European continent, the United States began a rapid re-evaluation of ...

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 ...