So it's about pretty much exactly what you'd expect from the title.
In a parallel world where Japan has entire girls' schools on floating aircraft-carrier-like cities for no adequately explained reason, there is some sort of martial art or practice called "sensha-do" literally "the way of the tank" that young women engage in which basically means they drive WW2-era tanks into battles with each other. Despite the fact that they use live rounds and take place in real terrain and sometimes real urban areas, these battles are considered completely safe and nobody ever gets hurt. Nishizumi Miho transfers to a school without a sensha-do club to get away from her attachment to the sport but is promptly convinced that she should take it up despite her direct desire not to because her only friends thus far think it sounds fun and because the student council says she should.
Really, I can't help but draw parallels to Saki, in that the entire thing is haphazardly thrown together to create a world in which high school girls are totally obsessed with the same thing that the manga author is totally obsessed with. And, while I'm not a big fan of historical tanks (though I do like to read WW2 history on wikipedia sometimes), y'know, the show kind of makes me want to go download World of Tanks and give it a whirl. So I guess that's a point in its favor. Tanks are cool, girls piloting tanks is cute and cool. Right?
The real problem is that G und P is badly written and poorly executed. The characters are flat, the story is transparent, the pacing is a mess. There is no verisimilitude, the cast is too big for anyone to really have an arc or a personality, and the major plot twist is the most blatant, weak attempt to raise stakes I've ever seen. The real tragedy is that in the action sequences, the visual tension of just sharing the girls point of view as they look down the barrel of a tank gun while speeding through empty cities is tense enough that we don't need the arbitrary stake-raising.
There's also some bizarre cultural stereotyping where the other schools that we spend the majority of the story fighting against in the tournament are all inexplicably themed after foreign nations, despite being Japanese, so we have the British school, the Russian school, the German schol and the American school... even though the main characters aren't particularly Japanese-flavored, they're just regular girls.
But I can't hate Girls und Panzer, it's just so derpy and utterly lacking in anything worth praising that it's almost cute. (Also it has Kana Ueda in it, <3.) And it's not offensively bad like Sekirei or Infinite Stratos 2, and there's no single glaring error like Utawarerumono, Alter Memory or Mondaiji, it's just overall a weak show with weak characters and a weak, predictable plot and... actually pretty competent animation.
If you want to watch some animated tank battles interspersed with girls, sure, go ahead, I guess. I won't make fun of you for watching Girls und Panzer unless you try to tell me that it was objectively good.
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