The T-28 Super Heavy Tank: The Doom Turtle

For those of you who didn’t know, during WW2 the U.S. Army developed a Super Heavy Tank for one specific purpose.

You see, Nazi Germany had this thing called the Siegfried Line. Which was basically Germany’s version of the French Maginot Line and ran for almost 400 miles along the border between the town of Kleve on the border with the Netherlands to Weil am Rhein on the border with Switzerland.

Now with plans to invade Europe in the works, the U.S. knew that they would have to eventually deal with the Siegfried Line and its many defensive emplacements. From the propaganda the Germans had released, the Siegfried Line was designed with the full intent of chewing out any and all would-be attacks from the west, and to be fair, it looked like it could do just that. So to counter this, the Americans did the most American thing you can think of and designed a “tank” just to punch through the German defenses and leave a gap for allied troops to break through into Germany. Thus… The “Doom Turtle” was built.

Design and Specifications

Designed and built by the Pacific Car and Foundry, the Doom Turtle was an absolute beast. Weighing in at a monstrous 95 tons, the tank (which was more like an assault gun) had 12 inches of armor at the front and was armed with a 105 mm T5E1 anti-tank gun that could punch through anything, and I do mean anything.

The plan for the T-28 was to drive headlong into one of the few gaps the Germans used to move their troops and lay down suppressing fire on enemy gun emplacements and bunkers. All the while just absorbing enemy fire because, like I said, 12 inches of armor at its thickest. Unfortunately, someone thought it would have been a good idea to use the same V8 gasoline engine used on the M-4 Sherman. As a result, the T-28 could only reach a top speed of 8 miles per hour, and that was if the engine didn’t catch fire, which happened during testing and resulted in the loss of one prototype.

Operational Challenges and Program Cancellation

Still, the Army wanted 25 of these things and there were talks of using them for the possible invasion of Japan. But as we all know, that never happened. As during testing, it was discovered that the Siegfried Line was not as formidable as it was made out to be and just using bulldozers to cover some of the defensive lines was effective enough. And as we all know, the Invasion of Japan never happened.

So as you can guess, the program was canceled and the surviving Doom Turtle was used to test new heavy transport vehicles for the Army before it was parked in a field and was actually forgotten about for decades. Before a hunter rediscovered it near Fort Belvoir in Virginia and now resides at the U.S. Army Armor & Cavalry Collection in Fort Moore, Georgia.

~NC