When I was introduced to it in the late '70s, it was the coaxial machine gun in the M60A1 tank. A coax machine gun was supposed to track with the main gun and give the tank gunner the ability to change switches and go from the main gun to a light machine gun to a medium machine gun to engage personnel of materiel targets that are amenable to machine guns.
Developed by Rock Island Arsenal and produced by General Electric, this little gun had the reputation of being a steaming pile of crap. The one in my tank, (C-21, aka Cap'n Crunch) would only fire single shot, which made it one of the more reliable guns in the company. Most would not even fire single-shot. We finally learned, just before tank gunnery, that if the loader would open the feed tray and and pour about a pint of ATF into the innards, it would reliably fire a complete belt of ammo, which got us through gunnery tables.
Of course, then it heated up, the ATF started to burn off, and we had to vent the turret from the noxious fumes of burnt ATF. This machine gun may have been the worst ever fielded in the US Army. Oh, it sucked.
Just after I left active duty, the M73/M19 was replaced by the M240, a gun produced by FN Herstal. The M240 quickly gained a good reputation as a gun that would reliably go bang, and they were still being used in the M1A1 Abrams when I got back into the Cav during '97-98. The M240 could be configured as either a tank-mounted coaxial machine gun, or as an infantry-style squad machine gun bu the simple expedient of installing a butt-stock.
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| M240 mounted as a coax in the M1 Abrams. |
3 comments:
You have my agreement on this abortion.
We knew the 'cherry juice trick' but then if it actually fired too long, bits and pieces broke.
It was perhaps the worst gun issued to American soldiers since the French blessed us with the Chauchat in WW I.
Fully converting the coax version of the M240 (M240C) into a fully functional infantry machinegun (M240B or 240G) is slightly more involved than you said.
You could make a barely functional infantry MG by swapping out the 240C buffer plate for the M240B/G suttstock, but it won't be much good for more than area fire, and you'd have to sit it on something or hip shoot it (and you'd need an asbestos glove to hold it - the barrel and gas tube get quite hot.)
The other things that need to be swapped out to make it functional in the infantry role:
-pistol grip/trigger assembly. The 'pistol grip' on the 240C isn't much longer than the trigger itself, so a full size one is needed.
-barrel. The 240C barrel doesn't have a front sight.
-feed tray cover. The 240C feed tray cover lacks the rear sight. I don't know about the tank version of the 240C, but the Bradley version was right-side feed. The infantry version is left side feed, so you need to replace the feed tray as well.
You'll also want to add a bipod, unless you've got a tripod and T&E handy.
Interesting story on why the Marines use the M240G while the Army uses the M240B:
Back in the late 80s/early 90s, the Army had a bunch of extra M240Cs FN tried to sell the Army conversion kits to make them into infantry MGs - the M240G. The Army wasn't interested, even though the M60s were rapidly becoming the badly worn-out collections of stoppages and malfunctions I remember from ROTC and Ranger School in the mid-90s.
The Marines were interested - and they took advantage of a law which allowed one .gov department to acquire the excess property (in this case, the Army's extra M240Cs) of another department, at no cost. Purchase the necessary conversion kits from FN and presto! The Marines have (almost) new MGs for their grunts.
Several years later, the Army opens a competition for a new GPMG to replace the M60 MGs - and the competition is won by FN's M240B, which is almost identical to the M240G, plus the addition of heat shielded handguards on the barrel and gas tube.
(The ultimate irony being that the M60 was replaced by, for all intents and purposes, the MAG-58, which had lost the army's GPMG competition 40 years prior - to the M60.)
Here is a good video on the Chauchat,
https://www.forgottenweapons.com/the-chauchat-shooting-history-and-tactics-video/
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