American WW2 Tanks: The Complete US Army List of Tank Names

The United States Army fielded dozens of distinct armored vehicle types during the Second World War, from a 7.4-tonne airborne tank that could be dropped by glider to a 95-ton super-heavy prototype that never left the proving ground. This American tanks list covers the US tanks WW2 armies met in every theatre. It is a complete list of American WW2 tanks, organized by class, with the designation, name, production years, main gun, weight and number built for every type the US Army put into service or tested between 1939 and 1945.

Unlike the German or Soviet armies, which built relatively few tank families in very large numbers, the US Army fielded a wide range of airborne, light, medium and heavy designs alongside a separate branch of tank destroyers and self-propelled artillery. Nearly all of them carried names rather than bare model numbers: Stuart, Lee, Grant, Sherman, Chaffee, Pershing, a naming tradition that began with the British Army and was later adopted by the Americans themselves.

Full List of American WW2 Tanks by Class

This American tanks list groups every US Army tank and tank destroyer of the war into seven categories: airborne, light, medium and heavy tanks, tank destroyers, self-propelled artillery, and the small number of experimental super-heavy designs that never reached full production. Each table gives the official US Army designation, the name assigned to the type, the years it was built, its main armament, combat weight, and the total number built.

Airborne Tanks

The M22 Locust was designed to be carried inside a glider and dropped behind enemy lines to support airborne infantry. Its low weight came at the cost of armor and firepower, and it saw only one significant combat deployment, Operation Varsity, the Rhine crossing of March 1945, where several of the British-crewed tanks that landed by glider suffered damage to their tracks and suspension before they could be used.

Light Tanks

Light tanks were built for reconnaissance and infantry support rather than head-on combat with enemy armor. The M2A4 was the last pre-war design before the US Army adopted the British-style naming convention; its successor, the M3 Stuart, became the most numerous American light tank of the war and served in every theater, including with British Commonwealth forces in North Africa before American troops arrived there. The diesel-engined M3A1 and M3A3 hulls used the same 37 mm gun as the gasoline versions. The M5 Stuart replaced the M3's radial aircraft engine with two Cadillac car engines, and the M24 Chaffee, arriving in late 1944, finally gave light tank crews a 75 mm gun in place of the increasingly outdated 37 mm.

Medium Tanks

Medium tanks carried the main weight of American armored operations. The M2 and M2A1 were obsolete by the time the US entered the war and never saw combat, but the assembly lines built for them were converted directly to produce the M3 Lee. The M3 mounted its 75 mm gun in the hull rather than the turret, an awkward layout forced by the lack of a turret ring wide enough for the gun; the British ordered their own version with a redesigned turret and no rear machine-gun cupola, and named it the Grant rather than the Lee. Both were replaced from late 1942 by the M4 Sherman, built in far greater numbers than any other American tank of the war across six major hull variants powered by four different engine types, and armed over its production life with a 75 mm gun, a 76 mm gun or a 105 mm howitzer. The M26 Pershing, the US Army's first tank to mount a gun in the same class as Germany's late-war 88 mm and 75 mm weapons, arrived only in the final months of the war.

Heavy Tanks

The US Army designed only one heavy tank that reached production during the war, the M6, and never sent it into combat. Ordnance began work on it before Pearl Harbor, but by the time the first vehicles were ready in late 1942, the Armored Force had concluded that a heavy tank offered little advantage over an up-gunned medium tank while being far harder to ship and maintain overseas.

Tank Destroyers

US tank destroyer doctrine kept these vehicles administratively and tactically separate from the tank force: they were built to use speed and a powerful gun to defeat an armored breakthrough, not to lead an advance the way a tank did. The M10 was a Sherman hull fitted with an open-topped turret and a 3-inch gun; American crews had no widely used wartime nickname for it, despite the "Wolverine" name that appears in some modern references but was never official US or British usage. The M18 Hellcat, the fastest US tracked armored vehicle of the war at 55 mph on a road, carried a lighter 76 mm gun on a purpose-built chassis. The M36 mounted a 90 mm gun, the same weapon later fitted to the M26 Pershing, on a Sherman-derived hull; the Ordnance Department assigned it the publicity name "Jackson" in late 1944, though troops in the field rarely used it.

Self-Propelled Artillery

Self-propelled artillery gave US infantry divisions mobile fire support that could keep pace with advancing armor. The M7, nicknamed Priest by the British because of the pulpit-like machine-gun ring on its hull, mounted a 105 mm howitzer on a Sherman chassis. The lighter M8 did the same job with a 75 mm howitzer on a Stuart chassis, and the M12 mounted an older 155 mm gun on an M3 Lee hull for direct bombardment of fortified positions, used most notably against the Siegfried Line in late 1944.

Experimental and Super-Heavy Tanks

Late in the war, Ordnance also worked on a super-heavy design intended to smash through the concrete bunkers of the Siegfried Line: the T28, briefly redesignated the 105 mm Gun Motor Carriage T95 because its thick, sloped hull left no room for a rotating turret. Only two hulls were completed, and neither was finished before Germany surrendered; both were used afterward for armor trials at Aberdeen Proving Ground.

US Army Tank Naming Conventions: Where the Names Came From

American tank names such as Sherman, Stuart, Lee and Grant were not invented by the US Army. The practice began with the British Purchasing Commission, which needed a quick way to refer to American vehicles bought under Lend-Lease without confusing them with British designs carrying their own model numbers. British officers had already taken to naming their own tanks (Crusader, Churchill, Cromwell) and extended the habit to American imports, choosing American Civil War generals: the M3 light tank became the Stuart, after Confederate cavalry general J.E.B. Stuart, and the M3 medium tank became the Lee or the Grant, after Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, depending on which turret it carried.

When the M4 arrived in 1942, Winston Churchill personally decided it would be named Sherman, after Union general William Tecumseh Sherman. The name proved so useful for radio traffic and press reporting that the US Army adopted it too, even though "Sherman" never became the tank's official designation on its own paperwork. By the time of the M24 and M26, the practice had become a home-grown one: the US Army itself chose Chaffee, honoring Major General Adna R. Chaffee Jr., a founder of the US Armored Force who died in 1941, and Pershing, honoring General John J. Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. American tank names had, by 1945, shifted from a British wartime convenience into a US Army tradition in its own right.

American Tank Production During World War II

The full production history of American WW2 tanks reflects the scale of US industrial mobilization after 1941. General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, Cadillac, Baldwin Locomotive Works and more than a dozen other manufacturers together built roughly 88,000 tanks and tank destroyers for the US Army between 1940 and 1945, a total larger than every other Western Allied nation combined. Production of US tanks WW2 industry delivered was concentrated overwhelmingly in the M4 Sherman family, which alone accounted for more than half of that output and freed American factories to also supply Britain, the Soviet Union, France and China under Lend-Lease. Unlike many other WWII tanks built in smaller, specialized production runs, the M4 Sherman was designed from the outset for mass assembly on converted civilian automotive lines.

A detailed month-by-month account of how American industry converted from civilian manufacturing to tank production, including the individual plants and their output, is covered separately on the USA Tank Production During World War 2 page. Germany's more fragmented, multi-model approach to tank manufacturing is described on the German Tank Production in World War II page.

How the US Army Used These Tanks in Combat

US Army armored doctrine before 1941 assumed tanks would support infantry directly, spread thinly across the battlefield. Combat in North Africa exposed the weakness of that approach against concentrated German panzer formations, and by 1943 the Army had shifted toward massing tanks in dedicated armored divisions, each built around three tank battalions, three armored infantry battalions and a mix of self-propelled artillery. General George S. Patton's Third Army, described in more detail on the General George S. Patton page, became the clearest example of how these divisions used speed and mobility rather than armor thickness to punch through and exploit gaps in the German line during the drive across France in 1944.

Tank destroyer battalions operated separately from the armored divisions as an Army-level reserve, meant to be rushed wherever a German armored attack threatened to break through. In practice they were used just as often to support infantry advances with direct fire, and by 1945 many battalions functioned almost interchangeably with tank units. By 1944, US WW2 tanks were also being repaired and returned to front-line units within days of battle damage, thanks to standardized parts shared across the entire Sherman family.

American Tanks Compared to German and Soviet WW2 Tanks

American WW2 tanks generally traded armor thickness and gun power for reliability, ease of production and mechanical simplicity, a trade-off that becomes clear when they are set alongside German and Soviet designs of similar weight class. The M4 Sherman was lighter and less heavily armored than Germany's later Panzer IV variants, and outclassed in armor and gun power by the Tiger I. US WW2 tanks were also expected to operate thousands of miles from their home factories, which shaped decisions like standardizing on widely available automotive engines rather than purpose-built tank powerplants. The Soviet T-34 matched the Sherman for mobility while carrying thicker, better-sloped armor, and by 1944 both nations had moved to bigger guns — the Soviets to the 85 mm-armed T-34-85, the Americans to the 90 mm-armed M26 Pershing, a rough contemporary of the Soviet IS-2 heavy tank. Compared with other WWII tanks fielded by Germany late in the war, including the almost 200-tonne Panzerkampfwagen VIII Maus, every American design in this list looks modest. That was a deliberate choice: a tank that never reaches the front line because it broke down or could not cross a bridge contributes nothing to a battle.

Where to See Surviving WW2 US Army Tanks Today

Museums across the country preserve WW2 US tanks in running or static condition, covering nearly every type in this list. The U.S. Army Armor & Cavalry Collection, now housed at Fort Moore, Georgia, holds more than two dozen Sherman variants alongside an M26 Pershing and other Army armor. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans displays a Sherman as part of its permanent collection, and the American Heritage Museum in Hudson, Massachusetts, has both a Sherman Jumbo assault variant and a Pershing on public display. The National Museum of Military Vehicles in Dubois, Wyoming, covers the light tank lineage from the M2A4 through the M24 Chaffee in detail.

Collectors restoring WW2 US tanks often source engines, transmissions and hull castings from the same handful of manufacturers that built the originals, since Chrysler, Cadillac, Ford, Buick and General Motors produced enough spare parts during the war that complete drivetrains still surface today. The M22 Locust is rarer: only a small number survive worldwide, including a running example at The Tank Museum in Bovington, England, alongside a handful of others in the United States and the Netherlands.