Historical Collection Highlights

After World War II, the United States Army began experimenting with replacing the thirty-pound Browning 1919 machine gun with one that would be more portable. The Ordnance Corps used features from German weapons to assist in designing the new weapon. In 1957, the M60 was adopted to fill that role; it proved itself in Vietnam and is still used today.

In May 1941, the German airborne, Fallschirmjäger, landed on the Greek island of Crete. The German doctrine at the time was for paratroopers to jump armed with only pistols and to collect their rifles from separately dropped bundles. On Crete, a large number of the bundles were scattered leaving the Germans to fight the Commonwealth defenders with sidearms. Following Crete, the German Air Force, Luftwaffe, requested manufacturers to design a weapon that was capable of serving as a machine gun, a rifle, and light enough to be jumped with. The Rheinmattal company presented the Fallschrimjägergewehr 42, literally Paratrooper Rifle 42. The rifle saw limited use during the war and a second type, with zero interchangeable parts to the first type, was designed in 1944. Most notably the grip angle was changed to vertical and the bipod was moved to the muzzle. The second type saw virtually no wartime use.

Beginning in 1946, the Ordnance Corps used captured German weapons to create the T44 which was a Type II FG42 fitted with a MG42 top cover on the side, both weapons were made of a majority of stamped steel making them relatively light. The modified FG42 was found to be too light for sustained fire, something the German paratroopers also noted. More developments were made and the new T52 model began to resemble the M60 but it lacked the required changeable barrel. The accepted model, T161E3, is the M60 that we recognize today: it features many stamped parts, weighing in at only twenty-three pounds, a vertical grip and a gas-operated rotating bolt borrowed from the Type II FG42, and a changeable barrel and camming feed mechanism borrowed from the MG42.