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| 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 its armored warfare policy and the equipment it had on hand to fight an armored war. The success of Hitler’s panzers in Poland in 1939 underscored this need and the invasion of France ended doubts once and for all. After rejecting the notion of producing British-designed tanks—a wise move considering the problems Britain had with its tanks in 1940 and 1941—the Army began casting around for workable designs.
The M2 medium tank, a vehicle designed with trench warfare in mind, was upgraded and revised as the M3 Lee and Grant tanks, which featured a hull-mounted 75 mm gun of French design, an excellent America 37 mm dual-purpose gun, and several machine guns. This in turn led to the M4 Sherman, which continued to see service long after the war.
The M2A4 light tank, itself an outgrowth of the “Combat Car,” an all-machine gun armed tracked vehicle, led to the M3 and M5 Stuarts, which were fast, mobile, and adequately armed for the reconnaissance role—although it proved under-armed and under-armored to fulfill the battle tank role.
Under U.S. Army doctrine, this left a hole—there was a need for an anti-tank weapon, a tank destroyer. For unlike the Germans, the Russians and the British, the U.S. Army believed that tanks should fight infantry, not other tanks; hence, a tank destroyer was required.
The first such vehicles were authorized on 31 July 1941. Time was short, and the immediate solution seemed to be an “off-the-shelf” con-version of existing vehicles and weapons. The vehicle selected was an M3 half-track, and the weapon, the 75 mm gun M1897A4, which was based on the French 75 of World War I. This weapon had a commonalty with the weapon selected for the M3 Lee/Grant and the later M4 Sherman, an important consideration. Another important consideration was its immediate availability from stocks.
After more than 30 were built as test vehicles, designated T12, the Army standardized them and ordered them into production on 30 October 1941. By 31 December, 86 production vehicles had been delivered, pointing up the wisdom of ordering the weapon system from available components—the vehicle had been ordered, tested, approved and deliveries began in just six months! In 1942, 1,350 vehicles were produced, and in 1943 an additional 766 were produced, all by the Autocar Company. However, combat experience in North Africa showed the folly of sending lightly armored half-tracks against German tanks and also illustrated the inadequacy—in 1943—of a gun that was clearly inadequate in 1941. As a result, Autocar was contracted to convert first 113 M3 gun motor carriages back to M3A1 half-track personnel carriers; then it was ordered to make the same conversion to an additional 1,247 vehicles. Ultimately, only 842 M3 GMCs were available for combat.
Conflicting reports exist concerning use of the M3 GMC on Guadalcanal, but it is clear that many such vehicles were committed to use in North Africa and later in Sicily and Italy. In 1943 and early 1944, surviving vehicles were turned over to the British in this theater of war. At that stage, they were being used primarily as fire support vehicles, as were many of the M4 Sherman tanks, and their inadequacy against German armor was unimportant in that role.
In the Pacific theater, where the enemy fielded relatively fewer tanks and lighter weapons, the M3 GMC proved to be an effective vehicle and was used through the end of the war. Its mobility enabled hard-fighting Marines and soldiers to have close-range artillery on hand to tackle bunkers, and the crews often festooned the vehicles with light and heavy machine guns to provide covering fire. The Marines appeared especially adept in locating and mounting machine guns, and more than one vehicle had a .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun for each crew member except the driver. In a fight, no one wanted to be without a gun!
The weapon system proved itself to the Marines in the hard fighting in the Solomon Islands, on Bougainville and New Britain, and carried it with them in other battles throughout the Pacific.