The Story of America’s Legendary M60 Machine Gun
BY PGF
1 year, 9 months ago
I’ve never shot the M60 though I wanted to the first time I saw one, which was in a Navy unit I briefly served with. The M2 is another story. The readers here probably know some interesting details about the weapon.
Photo found without attribution. Appears to be news stock, Vietnam Era.
Some of the links provided in the story are better than the source of this brief overview.
The M60 is one of the enduring symbols of the American firearms industry. Born out of a fusion of two WWII-era German designs, the original M60 had several engineering flaws that lead to its replacement by the M240. But in 2014, Denmark adopted the M60E6 as the standard light machine gun of its armed forces, and the design continues to be manufactured and sold today. How did the M60 go from its rushed original design to the gun it is today?
The story of the M60 begins right after the end of WWII. During WWII, U.S. soldiers faced down the advanced MG42 machine gun and FG42 automatic rifle. While some may say the MG42’s rate of fire was too high, the weapon was far more suitable for infantry use than the American M1919A6, with superior ergonomics and lower weight. They also faced the FG42, an advanced box-fed automatic rifle that was lighter and more flexible than the American M1918A2 BAR.
Both of these weapons impressed American evaluators, who ordered Saginaw Steering Gear Division of General Motors to produce a version of the MG42 in the American .30-06 caliber. This did not go so well, with many engineering errors such as making the receiver too short. The final gun was highly unreliable, and the project was canned.
The U.S. Ordnance Corps then investigated the possibility of converting the FG42 into a belt-fed machine gun. A variety of prototypes were made. The T44 was a relatively standard FG42 converted to use the MG42’s belt feed, but the basic FG42 barrel proved too light for sustained automatic fire. The T52 came later, incorporating a heavier barrel. Later iterations of the T52 added a quick-change barrel and a new gas system.
The Army also began development of the T161 around this time, which was a variation on the T52 design, but modified for mass production. The T161 and T52 competed with each other throughout 1953 and 1954. In 1954, both guns were adapted for the new 7.62x51mm NATO round and M13 belt link, though they were not called that at the time. The T161 eventually won and went through several iterations before its final field trials as the T161E3 in 1955 and 1956.
The results of the T161E3 trials were impressive. Soldiers preferred the gun over the M1919-series of guns as it was far easier to maneuver, aim, move, and maintain. The gun weighed almost ten pounds less than the M1919A6, tipping the scales at around twenty-three pounds. The T161E3 was adopted as the M60 on 30 January 1957.
The M60 would see its first combat use in the Vietnam War in 1965 with the U.S. Marines. While it served well for many soldiers, providing heavy, accurate firepower, it also revealed many more flaws in the design.
In the door gunner role, M60s could fire upwards of 5000 rounds a day, laying down constant suppressing fire onto landing zones before helicopters came in. This caused the lightweight receivers to stretch and even crack, and gages were issued to armorers to determine when replacement should occur, which usually happened around 100,000 rounds or so. In contrast, the heavier M240 has been known to go for upwards of two million rounds without receiver repair.
More at the source.
Here’s one going for six figures at auction. That price is entirely the NRA’s fault under the NFA; its members covet control of high prices for their automatic rifle investments. The video source is Rock Island Auction, 2023 Gun Prices and Trends, which details many collectibles for this coming year.
On February 21, 2023 at 12:25 am, Frank Clarke said:
Doesn’t the M60 have reputation for ‘running away’?
On February 21, 2023 at 1:25 am, Georgiaboy61 said:
@Frank Clarke
Re:”Doesn’t the M60 have reputation for ‘running away’?”
Yep, sure did! Although the engineers and designers strove long and hard to finally make a serviceable general-purpose machine gun out of the system, it is yet another one of those pigs that required a lot of lipstick to make it presentable. In fact, it’s nickname was – and maybe still is – “The Pig”… although I don’t know if that is because it is ornery or because it is heavy. Maybe one of the pros reading this can fill us in on that one.
“Not Invented Here” Syndrome is real, I suppose, because when the NATO alliance was formed, the Germans simply rechambered/rebarreled their MG42 into a weapon in 7.62x51mm NATO which they call the MG3. It works great, so well in fact that it has been adopted by other nations, including Italy. But the U.S. ordnance establishment, not content to use something already proven to work, borrowed some features from the MG42, but proceeded to screw up the subsequent design to such an extent that it took decades to fix.
On February 21, 2023 at 1:49 am, Miles said:
The M60 was a maintenance hog, but that wasn’t where it got its nickname.
I was stationed at Ft Lewis when the ‘senior’ ROTC summer camp was still held there and our unit was responsible for weapon maintenance for the ranges.
An aside, that let us maintain a stock of parts to support the ROTC’s M16A1ven after the 9th division had drawn the then new M16A2, so we had the parts to convert the crappy 3 shot burst back to automatic
On February 21, 2023 at 2:28 am, Miles said:
Bad comment board, bad boy,
Some of those A1 parts were kept in baggies for us smallarms repairer’s and some selected senior NCOs of the ground support platoon’s A2s in case we were ever mobilized.
back to the M60
On the days the cadets fired the crew served weapons, besides the M2s & M249s provided by one of the supporting infantry battalions, there was a pool of 18 M60s, 6 extra on the float, to keep 12 functioning on the firing line for a pair of cadets to fire a belt each. I estimated that each M60 fired ~12 to 15,000 rounds each day.
We did not have a large supply of parts, so most of the time we could only replace extractors, ejectors, sears and deburr chipped bolts, but we did notice that when we took the time to totally gut a gun that continually malfunctioned, it didn’t come back.
I experienced the same problems when I was stationed at Fort Knox many years later as a DAC and the Armor School’s weapons pool still provided M60s for overhead fire on the basic training night infiltration course before the mounts to use M240s were verified as being safe to use.
Bottom line is that when the M60 has proper maintenance and a good supply of the small parts, it can be a reliable machinegun, but compared to the M240, it’s only advantage before the lightweight M240L came out was it’s lighter weight compared to the M240
On February 21, 2023 at 1:51 pm, Grunt said:
I had the distinct pleasure to hump a ’60 for close to two years in the airborne battalion in Europe ’80-’82. Most guys got rid of it as soon as they could due to it’s weight. I finally had to give it up to be promoted. It is something like 27lbs unloaded, so it’s a bear to carry as once we landed we were in the walking mans army! It became a matter of pride to carry that load, but not sheer pride alone. On the rare occasions to actually live fire, it was an incredible amount of firepower and for a young man, bonerific! After going through a tree line after a live fire, it made this young trooper wonder how anyone lives in combat. But that is why the enemy goes for the machine guns and radios first.
On February 21, 2023 at 7:13 pm, Bill Buppert said:
Only America could take the MG34/42 Maschinengewehr designed by Heinrich Vollmer, arguably one of the finest machine-guns in history, and create the M60.
On February 23, 2023 at 1:40 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
@ Bill Buppert
Re: “Only America could take the MG34/42 Maschinengewehr designed by Heinrich Vollmer, arguably one of the finest machine-guns in history, and create the M60.”
The old saying “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” certainly seems to apply in this instance. Rather than leaving alone a very successful design and maybe converting it to 7.62x51mm NATO (as the Germans ultimately later did) and calling the job done, the busy-bodies at army ordnance and elsewhere couldn’t resist trying to make an outstanding design better, and instead made it worse.
On February 23, 2023 at 5:03 pm, Bradley A Graham said:
…..Nothing inspires more confidence in a weapon than having to safety wire the gas plug….