The fastest tracked armoured vehicle of the Second World War was not designed by a tank builder. It was designed and assembled by Buick — General Motors' car division, the people who built family sedans in Flint, Michigan.
What they produced could do 55 miles an hour. No tracked fighting vehicle went faster for decades afterwards.
A doctrine, not a tank
To understand the M18 you have to understand an American idea that no longer exists: the Tank Destroyer branch.
Before the war, US planners concluded that tanks should not fight other tanks. Tanks were for exploiting breakthroughs. When enemy armour appeared, a separate force would race to meet it, shoot, and leave before the return fire arrived. The branch motto was Seek, Strike, Destroy.
Speed was therefore not a feature. It was the entire specification, and everything else was traded away to get it.
What was traded
The armour on an M18 is 25 mm at its thickest and 13 mm on the sides. A heavy machine gun can hurt it. The turret has no roof, which saves weight and gives the crew visibility, and leaves them exposed to anything falling from above — shell fragments, tree bursts, grenades.
In exchange: a Continental radial aircraft engine, a torque converter transmission, torsion bar suspension and a weight under twenty tons. The result handled less like a tank than like something that should not have had tracks at all.
Did the doctrine work?
Not really. By 1944 tanks were fighting tanks constantly, and the idea of a separate anti-tank arm looked increasingly like an answer to a question nobody was asking. The Tank Destroyer branch was disbanded after the war.
The machine, though, did better than the theory behind it. M18 crews finished the war with one of the best kill-to-loss ratios of any American armoured vehicle — in a vehicle that could not survive being hit. They achieved it by being somewhere else when the shooting came back.
2,507 were built between July 1943 and October 1944.
The model
COBI's M18 Hellcat, set 2679, is a 1:28 model built from 1,026 blocks, with a crew figure. The turret traverses, the gun elevates, the hatches open and the tracks run. Markings are printed onto the blocks, not applied as stickers.
It is available to pre-order. The expected shipping month is shown on the product page, and you can cancel any time before it ships.
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