New Vanguard 85: M60 Main Battle Tank 1960-91

by R Lathrop & J McDonald, illustrated by Jim Laurier

Osprey Publishing Ltd.

ISBN 1-84176-551-1; 48 pages

This book gives a good overview of the development of the M60 from the M48 Patton, and also of its engineer and bridgelaying variants. The basic M60, A1, A2 and A3 are covered but this book only deals with US service so don’t expect to find anything about the Israeli M60s. There’s an interesting section on Life With The M60, but nothing on combat use since the gun tanks didn’t see any with the US Army, though their USMC service in Kuwait is mentioned briefly and shown by a couple of photographs and one colour plate. Another section takes us through the several upgrade programmes of the 1970s.
Unfortunately the colour plates, although good in themselves, are not up to the standard of the text. Jim Laurier was obviously not given enough information to show more than two of the nine tanks illustrated with unit markings, and even the USMC M60A1 in Desert Storm, 1991, is only shown in plain sand with chevron identity markings and given no unit identification. This seems particularly odd because plenty of photographs have been published of those USMC tanks with names on their guns and their units identified. To balance this there is a good colour plate of the General Dynamics S102, basically an improved M60 fitted with an Abrams turret which would make an interesting model, and the Panther mineclearer is also included in a side view. Recommended for the text and photographs, however.

John Prigent