In service, the M8 proved less agile off-road than had been hoped, but its speed, stealth and reliability made it an essential part of the Allied war machine right until the end of the war. Right: an M8 with one of the many late-production mounting rings, which places the gun much closer to the front of the vehicle. Left: an M8 with the early pintle mount, raised for use as it is in War Thunder. The M8's derivative, the M20 Armoured Utility Car, used the same ring mount design as the standard M8, albeit mounted onto the superstructure rather than a turret. In search of a better design, later vehicles fitted one of several similar designs of ring mount, all of which noticeably raised the vehicle's silhouette but allowed a much better field of fire, as well as the ability to fire while mostly protected by the M8's armoured turret. Early vehicles used a pintle mount on the back of the turret, similar to that of an M10 or M36 tank destroyer, which had the advantage of being low-profile but suffered from fairly limited firing angles and could only be fired from outside the vehicle, putting the machine-gunner at risk from sniper fire and shrapnel. Once started, production ran at an impressive rate and wouldn't stop until June 1945, by which time the 8523+ M8 Greyhounds built far outstripped any armoured car produced before or since, not even export successes like the Alvis Saladin and Panhard AML. Another roadblock on the Greyhound's way to the field was that the US had never built an armoured car on the scale they were planning with the M8, so it wasn't until the following year before production lines had been properly set up, by which time the Greyhound's 37mm had been proven ineffective against the newest German armour and its role had changed accordingly from tank destroyer to "Light Armoured Car". The path to production was not so simple, however: the T22 prototypes were put through extensive testing at Aberdeen which didn't end until March of 1942, nearly a year after the design request was put out, and which had guided the vehicle's evolution from the original T22 to the final T22E2 model which was eventually accepted for mass-production.
Right (in order): the Studebaker T21, Ford T22 and Chrysler T23 prototypes. Left: the M6 "Fargo" GMC, which the M8 was designed to replace. Ford's T22 proceeded alone into the next stage of the program, which would lead it through the usual testing into mass production and, from there to the field to relieve AT crews operating the stop-gap M6 "Fargo". Because of the specificity of the requirements, all three competitors produced roughly similar vehicles, but out of Studebaker's T21, Ford's T22 and Chrysler's T23, the Ford design was deemed superior. 50 Cal secondary armament to ensure it could sufficiently defend itself in close combat.
The US needed a more capable tank-hunting vehicle and put out a requirement that threw out nearly every feature of the M6 besides its 37mm gun: the new vehicle would have six wheels, not four, have improved protection and off-road capabilities, and would combine a. In July 1941, the US Army began a program to develop a replacement for the lightly-armed and even more lightly-armoured M6 "Fargo" GMC, whose deficiencies as a design were abundantly clear. Many players were disappointed when the M8 was implemented only as a limited-availability vehicle, so with the addition of the Chinese version in the main research tree, I feel that this is a good time to reintroduce the vehicle to its native nation, although in a slightly different form. Most M8 Greyhounds produced, however, fitted a much higher-profile ring mount for the M2HB, which can be easily seen in the many period photos of the vehicle the ring mount also proved a handy mounting point for other weapons in postwar conversions of the M8, allowing recoilless rifles and even ATGM launchers to be fitted to the trusty armoured car. While the M8 is already present in War Thunder as a 2017 event vehicle for the USA, this M8 Greyhound, along with the functionally identical M8 LAC recently added as a Chinese Reserve, is an early model with a "low-profile" pintle mount for its. The M8 Greyhound was the most significant US armoured car of WWII and, with 8523 built by Ford, also the most mass-produced armoured car of all time.
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