The Most Unlikely Tank Kill of World War II
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 20 January 2026
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, during the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, an American reconnaissance armored car faced one of Nazi Germany’s most feared weapons, a massive Tiger tank. By every measure, it should have been an impossible fight.
Our regular contributor, The History Guy, shares the tale of how a lightly armed U.S. M8 armored car encountered a German Tiger tank near the crossroads town of St. Vith, Belgium, and how quick thinking, timing, and nerve turned the encounter into one of the most extraordinary armored victories of World War II.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed Human. |
| 0:14.0 | This is our American stories, and our next story comes to us from a man who's simply known as the History Guy. His videos are |
| 0:22.1 | watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. The History Guy is also heard |
| 0:28.4 | here on our American stories. Here he is telling the story of the tank duel during the Battle of the |
| 0:35.3 | Bolge at San V, Belgium. |
| 0:38.3 | Today we're going to talk about an event that was described in an after-action battle report on December 18th, |
| 0:45.3 | 1944, where a U.S. light armored car engaged to destroy a German heavy tank in combat, |
| 0:51.3 | which is something so unlikely that you might not even think it was true, |
| 0:54.5 | except that there were multiple witnesses and an official army report. And while it really is |
| 0:59.4 | an interesting and exciting story worth telling, it is also an interesting microcosm of the |
| 1:03.8 | world-shattering events that were going on in the winter of 1944. And an interesting life lesson |
| 1:09.1 | is well. But before we talk about this duel between armored vehicles, let's talk about the events that led up to it. |
| 1:17.0 | The Germans launched one of their last major offensives of the Second World War on December 16, 1944. |
| 1:23.5 | They were attacking a heavily forested section of Belgium called the Ardennes. |
| 1:34.3 | It was lightly defended by the Allies because they believed that the terrain was so impassable that there couldn't be an offensive there. The goal was to drive all the way through to the Belgian port of Antwerp that would split the Western Allies in half, isolate entire army groups, and Hitler hoped, inflicts such a defeat on the Western |
| 1:45.8 | allies that they would have to sue for peace, allowing him to concentrate on the war with the Soviet |
| 1:50.8 | Union. It was a massive attack that included 206,000 troops, 1,200 tanks, and 4,000 artillery |
| 1:59.0 | pieces. The goal was to use surprise and speed to move so quickly |
| 2:03.4 | that the Allies would not be able to mount a defense or a counterattack. That required a very |
| 2:09.2 | aggressive tithing table where the German army needed to take certain towns that had crossroads |
| 2:13.4 | necessary for moving those numbers of troops. One of those was the town of Bastogne, and the defense of Bastogne by the 101st Airborne is pretty well known. |
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