During my periods of service at Fort Hood, Fort Knox and in Germany, I had an M60A1 tank. Now I know that the old M60A1 doesn’t compare with the M1 series, but at the time, the M60A1 was a very competent piece of equipment. It did have a few quirks and flaws.

I always counted the coaxial machinegun as a big flaw. For those who don’t have a lot of tanking background, this is a machinegun mounted alongside, or coaxially with, the main gun. The idea was that it would be used against “soft targets”, i.e., troops, thin-skinned vehicles, and such as that. It could be sighted using either the same sights as the main gun, or it had its own dedicated sight. This is a great idea, and “co-ax” machineguns are found on most models of tanks.

Now, before the M60 tank came into use, this machinegun was a modified Browning MG, a time-tested and very reliable weapon. I used them. Set up properly, they’d perform almost flawlessly. But they had a couple of characteristics which the Army deemed less than satisfactory for tank use: First, the Browning gun has a long receiver which takes up a lot of space in the tank’s turret, where space is at a premium. Second, to change the barrel of the Browning, you had to dismount the gun and work on it, and even under ideal conditions this took a few minutes. It was good, but not the best.

so the Army adopted the M73 machinegun, a 7.62mm NATO caliber weapon which “corrected” those shortcomings. the receiver was half as long as the Browning, and you could swap out barrels in a matter of less than a minute. Only one problem. It never worked well. Hell, lots of times it didn’t work at all. In the course of firing several thousand rounds through the M73, and later, its “improved” follow-on, the M213, I NEVER saw a complete exercise where there wasn’t at least one failure.

And it was creative about them. It lacked the strength of operation to self-feed, so the loader, in addition to all the other things going on, had to “help” the belt along into the gun, or it would stop firing. The operating mechanism as finicky about lubrication and cleaning. And parts broke with astonishing regularity. Fortunately, it was easy to disassemble and swap out parts. The opeating mechanism was basically recoil, assisted by the action of gas on the muzzle of the barrel as it slid in its barrel jacket. But too often, the fit between the barrel and the jacket was too loose, and the action didn’t get enough help from gas action. If you were blessed with a loose barrel and jacket, you had one pig of a weapon.

Well, this was the hand we were dealt, so we had to play it. And we learned a few tricks.

Normally, lubricating ammo is a big no-no, as it places unusual stress on the breech mechanism of a gun. But in this case, we found that the increased stress was the lesser of two evils. Without some lubrication, the gun would not feed well. therefore, we lubed.

Some of us were more meticulous than others, using hydraulic fluid (it was red, so naturally it was called “cherry juice”) and a parts cleaning brush or a piece of rag to apply a small amount of lubricant. But I remember one instance where we simply dipped the belt of ammo into an open can of lube and let it drip from one end to the other.

Using this procedure, instead of one malfunction every twenty or so rounds, I was able to shoot 1500 rounds without a malfunction. Of course, round 1501 resulted in a broken extractor, so the gun got to me anyway.

I don’t think there was a tanker who served on the M60 series who didn’t scream for a better gun, but that damned M73/M219 was still in use all the way through the life of the M60 series tank. and it was ultimately the experience of the Israeli Army with this gun that got our army to look for a replacement, and that replacement is what ended up on the M1 Abrams…