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Originally Posted by helbent4
Lee,
Do you have something more to go on? I'd like to follow up on. Using captured artillery wasn't all that uncommon for the western allies, but I'm unable to find reference anywhere captured tanks were used. (Motorcycles, trucks, even half-tracks, but not tanks.) In a way, it wasn't worth it. The western allies were never short of equipment and vehicles could be replaced within days or a week at most.
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Official records are really skimpy on this, the best source would be the Signal Corps photo collection, where there are several photos of Panthers with the Allied star painted on. There is a pitfall to watch for, Panzer Brigade 150, the outfit that tried to pass itself off as American armor during the Battle of the Bulge. This is sort of an ongoing research for me, if only because the SC collection is impressive to look over; I've only found three photos that show allied tankers using Panthers, the captions on the photos, however, indicate that this was being done as a training aid for inbound personnel, "know your enemy" sort of thing. The second source is the oral records of the Eisenhower Collection at the National D-Day Museum in New Orleans. There are two soldiers who talk about manning a captured German tank in Italy. Those are the only "official" records that I have seen.
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Unlike the Russians, who trained crews and support personnel on German equipment and organised a logistical chain, Americans/Commonwealth/etc. crews climbing into a Panther would be confronted by a completely unfamiliar and overly complicated machine with no spares and little chance of repair or resupply. Tactically it would seem like only in the most dire situation would a crew bother to man a captured German tank, but not out of the question.
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That's the problem in a nut shell.
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There's also the danger of attack from the "American Luftwaffe". That is, the USAAF. Fratricide from ground-attack aircraft against marked Shermans were common enough, I can just imagine how a captured tank would fare!
At any rate, doing some research I see that that the British did use captured Italian tanks in North Africa and the Australians used both German and Italian tanks, but can't find any references in Europe after Normandy of the western allies or specifically Americans using captured German tanks.
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The only references that I can find are for the late 1940/early 1941 fighting, as things moved into the Crusader battles, the Commonwealth use of captured armor seems to have ended. Records for the Germans do show the use of captured Crusaders (turrets removed and used to move fuel/ammo to front line units) and Stuarts (Rommel's HQ escort unit appears to have used over a dozen).