Very Good Mid 60s M60 & M60A1 Documentary

[John Kettler]

This circa 1966 US Army training film on the Patton (really Patton II) M60 and M60A1 presents the tank in the context of. the development of the tank and armored warfare. There is extensive coverage of the manufacture and testing the M60 and M60A1, with most of the visuals focusing on the latter. The res on this doc is so poor it gave me an eyestrain headache, but this may not be as big a deal for those of you with better vision than mine. Contrary to the keyframe, the whole thing is in black and white. There are also segments on the bridge layer and CEV versions, as well as mention of the missile firing M60A2. There is also highly unusual footage of M60s conducting an assault, which is far more common when seeing  Soviet and Warsaw Pact combat exercise footage.

Regards,

John Kettler

Edited December 2, 2021 by John Kettler

[Halmbarte]

The M60, the evolutionary dead end of a series of stop gap tanks going back to WWII. 

 

I'm very glad that the US Army never used these in a general war. 

 

H

 

 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

That's harsh.....I've always been fond of the Pattons, they're just so 'Post-WWII America'. 

[Halmbarte]

The M60 would have been a great tank, in 1950.

 

My general impression is that the US Army missed a generation of development due to the reliance on nukes before the Sov had their own deterrent capability. They really didn't recover the technological edge again until the M1 & M2 were in service. 

 

H

[chuckdyke]

M47 looked good in the Battle of the Bulge the Chaffees brewed up right left and centre. No arguments please the movie was put together with military advisers. 

[LukeFF]

27 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

M47 looked good in the Battle of the Bulge the Chaffees brewed up right left and centre. No arguments please the movie was put together with military advisers. 

Please say you're not being serious. 

[chuckdyke]

1 hour ago, LukeFF said:

Please say you're not being serious. 

Ok I say something very serious: Patton Movie I was off topic and better to stay on topic the M60 made its debut but I could be wrong or it could have been the M48 with the new cupola. We were not nitpicking in those days. M60 almost looked like a Pzr IV it had tracks and return idlers what else do they want? Left or right on which cheek do I press my tongue?

Edited December 2, 2021 by chuckdyke

[MikeyD]

In an infamous speech in 1950 (just days before the Korean war started) the US Secretary of Defense in a speech before the graduating class at West Point predicted the end of the battle tank. The Pentagon considered tanks an obsolete concept. This belief may have been influenced by the astronomical tank losses suffered just 5 years before in WWII. If you add all combatants together in all the theaters something on the order of two hundred thousand tanks were lost in WWII. No wonder they considered tanks a dead end.

When they did get back into the tank business poor old US was designing tanks in a vacuum. M60 is a great tank for the threat we thought we were facing. We didn't have a clue that the Russians had taken every good tank idea we had from our 1950s T95 program and implemented them in their T64

[Sgt.Squarehead]

7 hours ago, MikeyD said:

We didn't have a clue that the Russians had taken every good tank idea we had from our 1950s T95 program and implemented them in their T64

That's pushing it a bit! 

The Soviets had a major hindrance to advanced tank design too.....Kruschev. 

[BeondTheGrave]

Yeah I'm not sure I would agree with some of the analysis here. The M60 shouldn't bee seen as a restart of American tank design or even a break from old designs. Like Herr Kettler suggest, really the M60 is just the M48 mk2, the M48 being an M47 but good, which is itself an M26/46 hastily upgraded thanks to the crises of the late 1940s. If there was a missed generation of tank development during the early Cold War, it was for the US equivalent of an T-55, a role which the M26/46 struggled to fill. The M-48 did a great job in countering that generation of Soviet tank, and likewise the M60 was an excellent tank in its generation, which also includes the T-62. As anyone who plays my first By the Book scenario will quickly learn, in a lot of ways the M60A1 and T-62 are good matches for each other, with the T-62 maybe holding some edge but not a decisive one. And of course the M60A3 itself will smoke a T-62 more often than not. 

In the early-to-mid Cold War US development programs were highly iterative. Unlike in the late Cold War or today, the US never tried to develop wunderwaffe, weapons capable of delivering a knockout punch and imparting a decisive advantage. Such programs are often high-risk (in that the program may well fail)/high reward. Through the 1950s the US had conceptualized a number of 'cutting edge' high tech tank designs, including swimming tanks, submarine tanks (lol), and atomic powered tanks (also lol). Ultimately though the Army consistently chose low cost, low risk programs which would maintain a relative parity in capabilities and which delivered improved but proven technologies. Unlike the Abrams, nothing about the M60 was earth shattering. But it did its job well enough and maintained a rough parity with most of its early adversaries. All this fell apart in the 1960s. Kennedy and Flexible Response, plus late Vietnam, rescued the Army from the horrors of the atomic budgeting process. If the Pentatomic era spelt the end of the American tank, it wasnt because the tank itself was a bad idea but because Congress and the public didn't want to fund anything that didnt have a rocket motor or an atomic payload. Right around the Kennedy era this changed, but you also see the way in which program planning changed too. This was the era of the dreaded 'Systems Analysis.' Ask anyone in the Pentagon, even today, and theyll shudder at the mere mention of that accursed concept. Making distilling something super complicated down into one sentence, SA was the attempt to flatten all kinds of complicated and political budget questions into simple data points, charts, and computer models. Rather than have some guy with a shoulder full of stars tell the engineers what he wants, the design gets fed into a million computer simulations to figure out if five road wheels or six produce better overall combat performance. Or if metric sized bolts or standard produce a higher kill ratio. The horror, the horror, the horror...

Combined with Vietnam, which sucked in the majority of the Army's focus and funding, these budgeting processes shifted procurement from low risk/proven reward to high risk/high reward type programs, ala the MBT-70. Lot more to this story. But if the US missed a generation of weapons development, it was in the mid-to-late 60s. The MBT-70 would have been the tank to take on the T-64, if it had worked. But it didn't, and so the M60 had to do that job when really they should have been phasing out. Things got better after 1968, Vietnamization created a mini peace dividend which found its way back to weapons programs like the XM803, eventually the XM1, and the TOW, among many others. But the problem was the failure of the Johnson era programs created a break. Unlike with the M48&M60, there was no longer a good platform to build on. Iterative development was replaced, permanently, with innovative development. Upgrades to the M60 then, including the A2 and A3 packages, were intended only as stopgaps until the new revolution was delivered. Problem was the while the US puttered around from the 1960s until 1980 trying to draft that revolution, the Soviets continued to pump out their own iterative programs, which ultimately gave them a major advantage against the now long-in-the-tooth M60. Comparing the M60 to the T-64 or T-72 is a bit unfair as neither were a twinkle in a Russian eye when the M60 and its competitors were drafted. Nobody realized it at the time, but the M60 was a tank that was going to have to last several design generations. But in its time and in its place, the M60 was a good design. Not fantastic, but not bad by any means. It was a match for the T-62, its first rival. Unfortunately Vietnam changed a lot of things, and in ways people at the time had a hard time grasping. It wasn't until the war was coming to a close that people in the Army started to realize what exactly the war cost them. 

[MikeyD]

M48 is actually a T43 heavy tank chassis that's been shortened by one road wheel and given a much smaller turret. So it was less an offshoot of M26/M47 than people are making out. When the Korean war started T43 was basically the only suitable chassis the Pentagon had under development so it was either borrow from that or start with a blank sheet of paper. That's one reason why M48/M60 are such monsters, they were born from a heavy tank program. 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

1950s & 1960s heavy tanks rock.....We really need them in CM:CW. 

Hull down (if that's possible with a mobile cathedral) Conquerors & M103s slugging it out with hordes of IS-3Ms & T-10s.....Who wouldn't want to play that? 

PS - Just imagine the noise! 

Edited December 2, 2021 by Sgt.Squarehead

[EvilTwinn]

The M60s are certainly capable of competing against most of the tanks of their day, with CMCW coveringn the short period at the end of their lifespan when they could be truly considered outclassed as the next generation of Soviet armor comes in. The TTS being a slight exception due to the sheer utility of thermal optics. T-64s are a big jump up comparatively, but their own teething issues really keep them from being as big competitors as they could be until the late 70s, when the others come around. When the other guy suffers 10-20 percent attrition by the time he reaches you just due to mechanical issues, that's a pretty significant disadvantage.

[Halmbarte]

7 hours ago, EvilTwinn said:

The M60s are certainly capable of competing against most of the tanks of their day, with CMCW coveringn the short period at the end of their lifespan when they could be truly considered outclassed as the next generation of Soviet armor comes in. The TTS being a slight exception due to the sheer utility of thermal optics. T-64s are a big jump up comparatively, but their own teething issues really keep them from being as big competitors as they could be until the late 70s, when the others come around. When the other guy suffers 10-20 percent attrition by the time he reaches you just due to mechanical issues, that's a pretty significant disadvantage.

The T64's engine was a reliability problem. That and shear cost (and ego conflicts) lead to the development of the T72. 

 

OTOH, the M60 series were not paragons of mechanical reliability. The chief reason for the alphabet soup of versions were field modifications for better reliability. And that's leaving out the poster child for unreliability, the M60A2. The tank so bad even the Army decided to salvage the hulls for useable variants. 

 

H

[Codreanu]

I think a lot of players are very glad reliability is not modeled, there's enough frustration when your tank gets bogged in a field, can you imagine the forum posts from people who could only use HEAT on their M60A2s because the missile control system was broken or lost a T-64 because the engine died out in the open? 

[The_MonkeyKing]

57 minutes ago, Codreanu said:

I think a lot of players are very glad reliability is not modeled, there's enough frustration when your tank gets bogged in a field, can you imagine the forum posts from people who could only use HEAT on their M60A2s because the missile control system was broken or lost a T-64 because the engine died out in the open? 

I think this should be reflected by the scenario makers adding understrength tank formations

[Halmbarte]

3 minutes ago, The_MonkeyKing said:

I think this should be reflected by the scenario makers adding understrength tank formations

To be sure, that would add a measure of reality to the game. But can you imagine the player complaints when the WWII German player buys a platoon of Panthers only to have two catch fire on the way to the fight while the third breaks the final drive, immobilizing it? Meanwhile, the American player's 'inferior' tank company of Shermans all show up to the fight...

 

H

[Vergeltungswaffe]

22 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

1950s & 1960s heavy tanks rock.....We really need them in CM:CW. 

Hull down (if that's possible with a mobile cathedral) Conquerors & M103s slugging it out with hordes of IS-3Ms & T-10s.....Who wouldn't want to play that? 

PS - Just imagine the noise! 

So much this!!!

[MikeyD]

Quote

Unlike in the late Cold War or today, the US never tried to develop wunderwaffe

We could have a debate on that point.
From my perspective the US was burdened with the unreasonable expectation of creating wonder weapons. Within weeks of the start of the Korean war the US started the 'Questionmark' armor design conferences where, apropos of the conference name, some very questionable design ideas cam up (including the infamous nuclear reactor powered tank). The Pentagon started one over-ambitious program after another and each was a failure. T95 would've been a great tank concept for the 1950s if only they didn't opt for an exotic very long thin-tubed smooth bore gun mated to a recoilless gun mount. The history of US post-war light tank projects reads like a comic farce. To think they tied themselves into knots trying to match the achievement of, of all things, the PT-76 light tank! On the surface the US tank force looks like a series of incremental improvements, but that was driven by their chronic inability to field their countless 'revolutionary' design projects.

[chuckdyke]

Compared with other countries the US was OK in my opinion. M4 Easy Eight Sherman was the mainstay in the Korean war. The bogey tank the Soviet IS3 was not an efficient tank at all. Egyptian service in the Sinai outmaneuvered by Israeli Shermans which could go from A to B without dehydrating the crew. The IS3 was relegated to static defense positions. The new Soviet tank on the block was the T54 like an SU100 with a turret all WW2 technology. US armour was at least equal fortunately we never found out how the Soviets would have handled their armor. The North Koreans and the Arab Nations didn't exactly promote it. probably unfair to judge the Soviet export models with western technologies. 

[Halmbarte]

6 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

Compared with other countries the US was OK in my opinion. M4 Easy Eight Sherman was the mainstay in the Korean war. The bogey tank the Soviet IS3 was not an efficient tank at all. Egyptian service in the Sinai outmaneuvered by Israeli Shermans which could go from A to B without dehydrating the crew. The IS3 was relegated to static defense positions. The new Soviet tank on the block was the T54 like an SU100 with a turret all WW2 technology. US armour was at least equal fortunately we never found out how the Soviets would have handled their armor. The North Koreans and the Arab Nations didn't exactly promote it. probably unfair to judge the Soviet export models with western technologies. 

I don't know that that statement is correct. The US Army's tanks were frequently a generation behind what the Sov was fielding. 

 

In general the US Army was plagued by the problem of waiting on perfection. They wanted the perfect infantry rifle, the SPIW, and continued to field the Garand or product improved Garand (the M14) until being in a real war forced their hand. They also kept mucking about with revisions to the M26 while waiting for a supertank that couldn't actually be built. We eventually get the M1 tank (austere MBT70), but that could have been replacing something more like the Leopard 1 or a tank with silica core composite armor 20 years previously. 

 

The problem I have with the M60 is that it can't do its job. Firepower is either just barely adequate (or barely inadequate) The armor is thick enough that the engine can't move the bloody thing very fast but not thick enough to actually take a hit and protect the crew and systems. In short, it's not fit for purpose. Plus it's a huge and easily spotted target. 

 

Faced with the technological limitations of when the M60 was designed it probably would have been better to acknowledge that you can't put enough steel on a tank and preserve mobility. Take the route that the Germans did with the Leopard 1. The tank should be proof against light auto cannons and shel fragments and that's it. If you can't keep nasty stuff from penetrating the armor it doesn't really matter by how much you can't keep nasty stuff out. 

 

H

[chuckdyke]

The M14 was about equal to the SLR (FAL) the Australian army was using. The Europeans were also using that weapon and the Germans the G3 all  7.62 mm NATO on paper Superior to the AK47. In Israeli hands more to do with their training the M60 and Centurion could hold their own against the Soviet equipment in the Arab armies. I accept with the T64 he Soviets had probably a better tank on paper. Kind regards I come here first to discuss the game and I am not a fan of the Cold War because it never took place. 

[Halmbarte]

24 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

The M14 was about equal to the SLR (FAL) the Australian army was using. The Europeans were also using that weapon and the Germans the G3 all  7.62 mm NATO on paper Superior to the AK47. In Israeli hands more to do with their training the M60 and Centurion could hold their own against the Soviet equipment in the Arab armies. I accept with the T64 he Soviets had probably a better tank on paper. Kind regards I come here first to discuss the game and I am not a fan of the Cold War because it never took place. 

The US jammed the cartridge that became 7.62 NATO down the other NATO members throats*. NATO could have standardized on a ~6.5 or 7mm high velocity cartridge in 1950 instead of the last gasp of full bore .30cal that was 7.62 NATO. 

 

The M14 was so outclassed by the AK47 that the US Army did a rush job of adopting the M16 before it was ready. 

 

The US Army made a series of really bad decisions between the end of WWII and the '70s. The end result was an Army that wasn't equipped with the best weapons. 

 

H

 

*We bullied the British (and therefore NATO) out of a very promising cartridge they were developing for the Enfield bullpup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EM-2_rifle

[chuckdyke]

7 minutes ago, Halmbarte said:

The M14 was so outclassed by the AK47

Maybe but the SLR in 7.62 was not and that is according the veterans not me. 

[Halmbarte]

Every 1st world army that had 7.62 battle rifles has gone on to adopt rifles chambered in 556 NATO as their primary arm. 

 

My main point is that we (NATO) could have had a SLR chambered in an intermediate cartridge in 1950 if the US Army had been making more rational decisions. Imagine an SLR that was actually able to be issued with full auto functionality, in the mid '50s...

 

H