M3 Halftrack

"The most dangerous weapons the Germans have are our own armored halftrack...because the boys in it go all heroic, thinking they are in a tank."

– George S. Patton

"Floor it Johnson they're right on our tail!"

The M3A1 Half Track was the primary American Mechanized troop transport utilized throughout World War II.

Mid war

The stats

In Real Life

The US Army began using halftracks with the M2 artillery tractor, which was essentially a modified M3 scout car. An enlarged version was proposed as an infantry transport, and this was accepted as the M3. The M3 spawned dozens of subvariants with everything from mortars to Self-Propelled Artillery, but the two most iconic ones were, first the baseline M3 with a single .50 BMG (like in the picture) that was meant to ferry a squad of groundpounders around. Second, the Orkish M16 which sported a quad-mount .50 cal BMG's on the back, originally intended to deal with any enemy CAS airplane trying to get rowdy. In the end, with so few German airplanes around, they dealt with absolutely everything else on the ground but tanks and concrete pillboxes, because four goddamn Ma Deuces spewing lead at something not heavily armored at once tended to make it suffer critical existence failure really, really fast! The M16 version did get the nickname "Kraut Mower" for a reason!

By 1942 it was clear that WMC was not going to be able to produce M2's and M3's in the quantities that the US Army needed, so International Harvester was brought into the project to add capacity. However this required a redesign of the frame to work with IH's factories; these modified variants were issued new model numbers for the prime mover (M9) and transport (M5) to differentiate them from the WMC versions (the different frames meant parts were only partially compatible), and they were both of the larger M3 size. So an M5 is an M3 with an IH frame, and an M9 is an M5 with the radio and shell storage of an M2.

In spite of the decent combat record of the halftrack, many US troops hated the vehicle, with complaints ranging from being too exposed to airburst artillery to being not armored enough against Machine Gun fire. General Omar Bradley seemed to disagree, and instead thought the bad reputation of the vehicle was earned through troops being inexperienced, incompetent, or a mixture of both.