M8 Greyhound

The M8 began life as a wheeled tank destroyer. The US Army wanted a fast six-wheeled vehicle carrying a 37 mm gun that could find German armour and kill it, and the design that emerged from Ford in 1942 did the first half well. By the time it reached production in 1943, the second half had become fantasy: the 37 mm could not penetrate the frontal armour of a Panzer IV, let alone a Panther, at any useful range.

Rather than cancel it, the Army changed the job. The M8 was reclassified as a light armoured car and sent to the reconnaissance units, where its speed, its radios and its quietness mattered more than its gun. It is one of the war’s cleaner examples of a weapon being saved by the honest admission that it could not do what it had been ordered to do.

On roads it was very fast — around 89 km/h — with six-wheel drive, a low silhouette and, by armoured-vehicle standards, quiet running. A cavalry reconnaissance troop’s job is to locate the enemy, report accurately, and survive the discovery, and for that the Greyhound was close to ideal: it could get somewhere quickly, look, and be gone before the response arrived.

The British, who received numbers of them under Lend-Lease, gave it the name Greyhound for exactly that quality. The Americans never officially adopted the nickname, and it stuck anyway — as crew names generally do when they describe the vehicle better than the designation does.

Its notorious weakness was underneath. The hull floor was very thin, and a mine detonating beneath an M8 was frequently fatal to the crew — a serious matter for a vehicle whose whole purpose was to drive down roads nobody had yet cleared.

The field solution was universal and unofficial: crews lined the floor with sandbags, and often piled more on the front, accepting the weight and the loss of performance in exchange for a chance of surviving a mine. Photographs of Greyhounds in Europe show it so consistently that the sandbags look like part of the design. They were not: they were the crews correcting it.

The turret was open-topped, which is the usual reconnaissance trade: excellent all-round observation and hearing, no protection from air burst, grenades or anything dropped from above. It carried the 37 mm M6 with a coaxial .30 calibre machine gun, and most vehicles added a .50 calibre on a ring mount for aircraft and for the ground work the 37 mm could not do.

Against infantry, trucks, gun positions and light vehicles that armament was entirely adequate — and those were the targets a scout car actually met. Against tanks the doctrine was explicit and correct: report the contact and withdraw. The M8 was not there to fight; it was there to know.

The Greyhound first saw action in Italy in 1943 and served in every subsequent Western campaign, from Normandy to the Rhine, as the standard vehicle of American cavalry reconnaissance squadrons — the units that screened the flanks of armoured divisions and found the enemy before the tanks arrived. Free French, British and other Allied forces used it too.

It outlasted its war comfortably. 8,523 were built, and French M8s went on to serve in Indochina and Algeria into the 1960s, while others soldiered on in a dozen armies for decades — a vehicle that had been declared a failure at its intended job in 1943 and then proved almost impossible to retire.

The M8 is a study in the difference between a weapon and its role. Judged against the specification it was built to — destroy German tanks — it was obsolete before the first one was delivered, and no amount of speed would have fixed that. Judged as what it became, it was one of the best reconnaissance vehicles of the war and the one the US Army built in the largest numbers.

It also fills a category that armies routinely under-value: the vehicle sent forward to find the enemy before the tanks arrive. The M8 equipped the cavalry reconnaissance squadrons from the first actions in Italy in 1943 through to the Rhine, 8,523 were built, and the doctrine issued to its crews stated the design’s limitation in four words — report and withdraw.

• Steven J. Zaloga, M8 Greyhound Light Armored Car 1941–91 (Osprey, New Vanguard).
• Peter Chamberlain & Chris Ellis, British and American Tanks of World War Two (Arms & Armour Press).