M60 Machine Gun
The M60 was the United States' first general-purpose machine gun: a belt-fed 7.62mm weapon light enough for one soldier to carry on the assault and stable enough on its tripod for sustained fire, adopted in 1957 and made famous in Vietnam, where infantrymen called it "the Pig." It borrowed its gas system and bolt from the German FG 42 and its belt feed from the MG 42, and while its early quick-change barrel and feed tray drew complaints, it stayed the American squad machine gun for forty years and survives in improved forms with the Navy and allied armies.
Also known as GPMG, Pig, M60, The Pig, M60E3, M60E4, M60E6, Mk 43 Mod 0
Origins
American infantry in 1945 had the M1919 Browning Machine Gun for sustained fire and the Browning Automatic Rifle for the squad, and neither did the job the German MG 34 and MG 42 did: one gun for everything. Springfield Armory's postwar T44 program combined the gas system and bolt of the German FG 42 paratroop rifle with the belt feed of the MG 42, and after a decade of prototypes the T161E3 was standardized as the M60 in 1957, in the same year and the same 7.62mm NATO cartridge as the M14 Rifle. Production was by Saco Defense in Maine, later joined by others.
Design & Construction
The M60 is gas operated with a rotating bolt, fires from an open bolt at a deliberately slow 550 rounds per minute for controllability, and feeds disintegrating-link belts of 100 rounds carried in bandoliers or a hanging assault pack. It weighs 23 pounds, and its straight-line stock, pistol grip and bipod let a strong man fire it from the shoulder or the hip. The original barrel change was the design's great fault: the bipod and gas cylinder were fixed to the barrel, so the gunner's assistant had to carry spare barrels complete with both, and an asbestos glove to handle the hot one. The M60E3 of the 1980s moved the bipod to the receiver and added a forward grip; the E4 and the Navy's Mk 43 of the 1990s, and the E6 of 2014, refined the feed, the barrel and the weight.
Combat Use
The M60 was the machine gun of Vietnam War: carried by one man in every rifle squad, slung in helicopter doors, mounted on patrol boats and armored vehicles, its distinctive slow hammering the sound of a firefight. Gunners loved the weight of fire and cursed the weight of the gun, the finicky feed tray and the barrel change, and the nickname "the Pig" carried both feelings. It went to Grenada, Panama and the Gulf, was carried by the US Marine Corps until the M240, the American FN MAG, replaced it in the 1990s and by the Army into the 2000s, and in the E3 and Mk 43 forms remained a favorite of the US Navy SEALs for its lightness compared to the M240.
Legacy
The M60 was superseded in American front-line service by the FN MAG-derived M240, a heavier but more reliable gun, and by the 5.56mm M249 Squad Automatic Weapon at squad level. It remains in use with the Navy, with the Coast Guard, and with dozens of armies that received it as military aid, and US Ordnance still manufactures the M60E6 for export. In popular memory it is inseparable from the Vietnam War and from the films that followed.
Sources
Rottman, Gordon L. The M60 Machine Gun. Osprey Weapon 20, 2012.
US Army Field Manual FM 23-67, Machinegun, 7.62-mm, M60.
Ezell, Edward C. Small Arms of the World, 12th ed. Stackpole, 1983.
Chinn, George M. The Machine Gun, vol. V. US Navy Bureau of Ordnance, 1987.
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