     Late on Christmas eve, Lt. Colonel Walter Richardson was commanding a tank battalion at Manhay when the 2nd SS Panzer Division began its attack on the vital crossroads. The timing of that attack was perfect; another tank battalion from the 7th Armored Division was pulling out just as the attack began. In the confusion of the attack, the Germans got across the small bridge before it could be destroyed. Then two German tanks snuck into the retreating American armored column. A few minutes later they swung out into a field beside the road and began pouring fire into the defenseless American vehicles. The Americans scattered. Richardson jumped into an abandoned Sherman and took a shot at a Tiger, but the round bounced harmlessly off the huge German tank and its countershot destroyed Richardson's tank.
     Richardson hopped into a jeep and bugged out, stopping a mile away in Grandmenil. There he found two American M10 tank destroyers. He positioned them to intercept any approaching German armor. Within a few minutes, two Panthers appeared, churning through a field in the blinding snowstorm. The first TD knocked one out with a shot into its side. But a third Panther blew up the American TD with a lucky hit on its ammunition rack. The second M10 now tried a frontal shot against a Panther. It bounced off, and the Panther returned the fire. The Panther's second shot knocked out the TD.
     Realizing that he'd been beaten again, Richardson called down an artillery barrage on the little village and bugged out for the second time that night. In three days of continuous fighting his command had been reduced from 65 tanks to under a dozen.
/The Tank Destroyer
     A tank has five basic parts: a big cannon, a rotating turret so it can shoot in any direction, armor to protect the crew, an engine to power it, and tracks that permit it to go cross-country. It's an expensive piece of equipment that seldom lasts long in combat.
     A tank destroyer is the same thing without a turret. This offers two advantages: first, it's cheaper, and second, there's more room for the gun in an open gun deck. With more room, you can fit in a bigger gun. Thus, for the same amount of money, you can have more tank destroyers with bigger guns. Quite literally, more bang for the buck.
     The price you pay for this is the decreased tactical flexibility of the TD. Its gun can fire only in a narrow arc towards its front. A tank destroyer suddenly confronted with a threat to its sides must pivot in place, a clumsy process that takes longer than a tank's turret rotation. If a tank destroyer and a tank encounter each other side to side, the tank will surely win the encounter.
     For this reason, TD's are not offensive weapons. You don't plow into unknown enemy territory in a TD; instead, you stand back at a distance waiting for the enemy to appear in front of you. Thus, tank destroyers are ideal defensive weapons against tanks. In the offensive role, their greatest value is to provide on-the-spot artillery support to infantry. Armored vehicles designed primarily for this function are called assault guns, but American TD's were often used in this role.
     The M10 was armed with a 76mm main gun and one machine gun; it had 3 inches of frontal armor and 1.5 inches of side and rear armor. It weighed 32 tons and had a crew of five. The M36 was basically the same machine with a 90mm gun. By the time of the Battle of the Bulge there were a great many M36's in service./