[Squantos]

Yeah that M85 messed me up .... different links . Whose idea was that FUBAR ? We had to seek out help on a sat phone from a EOD team in Germany to go get us some links off a gunnery range. A pallet full of 20mm cans full of german dirt and weeds and rocks showed up on a C130. We used a cement mixer we stole from Red Horse Engineers to “make a brass polisher” per se to clean the M85 links with all that free Saudi sand.

Then we made a ammo linker with a couple of 10x12 board that we made channels in with or K12 saw. Laid out the links and ammo we stripped from M2 resources, then laid another board on top, Eased the tire on the humvee on the board, click click click click..... perfect belts of M85 ammo.

We used M60A3’s with M9 engineering blades modified for clearing submunition off runways and roads ...... Our Ma Duce on the top worked fine yet when I got down to the M85 it was like WTF ?

I’m the best trained tanker in EOD .... one week of basing around Eglin AFB boonies, replaced the track ONCE.. Got issued a length of string and a wrench to adjust the tension on the track, a old Lincoln grease gun, 5 gallon can of grease and a 5 foot tall stack of manuals and enough “do not remove before use tags” to fill a king size mattress. We were in our element !!!

Pre-positioned ships, operated by the Army delivered 4 of em to my 8 man USAF EOD team on the docks in Saudi, Along with 4 M113’s .......:o) What could go wrong ...:o) We had more armor than we could drive.

USAF EOD using M60A3’s ...
US Army using Navy Ships...

Hell of a quick war....LOL !

[archy]

Yeah that M85 messed me up .... different links . Whose idea was that FUBAR ?

They weren't that bad, and were nowhere NEAR the piece of junk that the M73 7,62mm co-axial mg was. The lo-high rate of fire [for antiaircraft] was quite okay when you had a 10x scope and a 52-ton bipod to lay the thing with, and the chain-attached retracting handle assembly beat the petunias out of that on the M2 turret type, which used a cable that frequently broke and a belt holder with room for only 50 rounds. I liked the M73, though there's not much wrong with the M2 that close inspection of the parts won't catch.

It was unhandy in a headquarters company being a tank crewdog with three M60A1s with M73s, while all the other HQ CO vehicles with .50s had M2 guns. We could usually hedge a couple of boxes off a line company platoon, but the real joy came when I suggested a mod for the recon platoon M114 tracks that were supposed to mount a 20mm autocannon, but they had major ammo problems, so usually a relatively puny M2 .50 was mounted in its place. But that XM114A1E1 power mount was made to take all that weight...so why not mount a pair of .50s on the thing, and use a chopped-oped 5-gallon gas can for an ammo can [225 rounds instead of 100 in the usual .50 tin box] The M73 nicely fed from either right or left side, and a couple of GI duffel bags became brass catchers. And then it hit me: add a third M73 gun forward of the other two, and dead center in the middle of the mount; the combined three M73s on hi-rate actually put out more metal than the old M55 quad .50 of WWII and Korea. I wrote up my bright idea for our battalion CO, he had the motor maintenance officer build one of the setups to my specs, and HQ tank section *donated* its three M73s to the recon experiment. All the paperwork got submitted, and went exactly nowhere: a couple of years later the M114 was declared obsolete [mogas engine] and got replaced by Diesel-engine M113A1s. But in the meantime, 2/70 HQ tank section got to run M2 .50s for half a year...including through the tank gunnery *table 8* exercises. As usual, we waxed all the other tank outfits in USAREUR.

Below: M114 *scout pig* with an M2 .50 in the power gun mount.