The M-60 Main Battle Tank is 11 feet, 11 inches wide. I didn't know that when I first met one. I was a young Private with no real Army experience when I arrived in Bad Kissingen, Germany in December of 1964. I had never been near a tank before; had never heard a tank's engine, had never felt the ground shake as one went by, had never been stunned by the muzzle blast from the main gun, had never experienced the clanking and squealing of tortured steel as it rolled along on its tracks...all that would come in time...but the day I arrived in Bad Kissingen I was so green that my new squad leader commented that I still smelled like CIF (Clothing Issue Facility, where new soldiers are issued their uniforms and equipment; the smell is a blend of moth balls, new canvas, boot leather, and fresh linen). I spent the next two weeks processing in, getting a driver's license, being issued my field equipment, getting assigned to my truck, learning my job, finding out where the PX and Snack Bar were, and other important things. And what to do if the Russians came calling.
The vehicle I was assigned to was an M-49C 2 1/2 ton fuel truck. Not real big in the world of trucks, but it had a tank on it that held 1200 gallons of fuel and it seemed pretty big to me. My tanker was filled with gasoline (MOGAS in Army parlance). Since the M-60's ran on diesel, the only interaction I would have with them was getting out of their way when they were moving around.
I was fascinated the first time I saw an M-60 in motion. I was a Southern California boy so when I feel the earth vibrating I brace for an earthquake. This earthquake came by with the ground-shaking, ear-splitting, almost breath-taking presence of a modern- day dragon. And it was BIG. As I mentioned before, almost twelve feet wide, twenty-some feet long (thirty-some with the gun pointed forward), and almost eleven feet tall. With a combat load of ammunition it weighed in at about 60 + tons. You know how a tracked vehicle turns itself so you will understand that when they go around a corner the noise and vibration triple while it struggles to lock one side and race the other. I remember being awe-struck as I watched the tank move away.
Bad Kissingen is the home of (or was the home of) the Armored Cavalry that guarded the East-West German border. When I was there it was the 2nd Squadron of the 14th Armored Cavalry, or 2/14 Cav or as we said "Second of the Fourteenth". We knew (it was drilled into us) that we would be nothing more than a speed-bump if the Russians really did come across. We trained hard to go from zero to combat-ready in two hours. That doesn't sound too difficult, does it? We had a bell in the hallway, kind of like the bells that signal class-change time in high school. When we had an "alert", the bell would go off about 0330 or so (that's 3:30 am ) and that meant that by 0530 (5:30 am) I had to get up and dressed, put on all of my field equipment plus steel pot (helmet) grab my two duffel bags full of field equipment (in the neighborhood of 60 lbs each), go to the arms room and draw my weapon (an M-14 rifle), carry it all about a half a mile to the "fuel dump" (where all the fuel trucks were parked), load all my equipment onto the truck, do a pre-operation inspection, then start the truck. While the it warmed up I had to help the sergeants load the platoon's equipment onto the platoon sergeant's 3/4 ton truck. Then all the trucks got lined up, were given a final inspection, and convoyed out of the kaserne to our alert assembly area, about five miles out of town. That is a full two hours worth of work and then some.
The first alert that I experienced blew my mind. 2/14 had about 44 tanks in the squadron. Remember the impact I described when one tank went by? Can you imagine what it was like to watch forty tanks roaring past you one right after the other? The thought that filled my seventeen year old head that morning was, "How could anyone stand against this kind of power?" We had designated routes to follow to get to our assembly areas in the woods outside of Bad Kissingen, routes chosen to accommodate the width and turning radii of the amored track and wheeled vehicles. We had an "order of march" to follow: "H" Troop was the last combat unit to leave the post. The Support Platoon, my platoon, followed behind them, spraying gas and planting destruction charges as we went out; destroying the post was the first mission for us.
One of the things I should probably share with you at this point is the fact that every time a unit, any unit, leaves the gates of its kaserne there are a number of eyes watching what it does, every single tiny what-it-does; eyes that belong to farmers who worry about what will happen to their fields and properties, shop keepers and businessmen who are concerned about how the military movements will affect their businesses, policemen who worry about accidents or other damages that the military vehicles will cause, wives who worry and wonder about what will happen to their husbands and when they will be back, and oh yeah...the communist agents who take notes and report every move we make. It was disconcerting to be in the middle of a pretend war when some forestry official would walk through our firefight inspecting the damage we had done to the trees. Manuever damage was a big business in Germany; a multi-million dollar business. Of course we were told not to damage anything if we could help it, but no one really paid any attention to that; we would roll through fields, knock down trees, even bump down fences on occasion, but that was all "in the field". We were always super-cautious in towns; you could get in a lot of trouble screwing up the towns.
Another aspect of an alert was the difficulty in recalling personnel. Sure, if you lived in the barracks, the bell worked great. If you lived in the military housing right next to the post, you were a short drive away, maybe five minutes. But for the dozens of soldiers who lived off-post, getting notified and making the trip into the post could be problematic. Every now and again, once or twice a quarter, we had what was called a "USAREUR alert", a germany-wide alert that was graded. Teams of officers from Heidelberg would visit randomly-selected units and evaluate their performance during the alert. It was pretty important, especially for the border units, to be sharp and quick and accurate. Screwing up was definitely not an option.
One final thing. There was a huge siren on top of the mess hall building. It was tested every month. It was loud. It was so loud that it resolved all the recall problems. When that siren went off, you could hear it for miles and miles around and every soldier that could hear it knew it was time to drop everything and get to gettin'...because that siren only sounded two times: 1) At the scheduled test times, always well advertised in advance and 2) when the Russians crossed the border. To save time in communicating the emergency, the siren was triggered from our Regimental Headquarters in Fulda...I imagine the local folks could set it off as well. When the big siren went off, it was the real deal, no BS; we called it "The Big Horn"...(we called the bell in the barracks the "Little Big Horn"...a bit of cavalry humor). When the Big Horn was tested, its wail vibrated in the core of our being as strongly as those tanks passing by...the siren represented the deep-down secret fear we all carried, the thunder and lightning of the other guys tanks.
I posted a story a couple years ago about my first Christmas Eve at Bad Kissingen. I will try to put a link to it if you're interested, but now I have you primed for the tale of New Year's Eve. First of all, every night at midnight the Charge of Quarters would walk through the barracks and ensure that every soldier was in bed...it was called bedcheck...go figure. On weekends and holidays the bedcheck was extended to one am. But on New Years Eve, the bedcheck was pushed back to two am. For obvious reasons. Having made a spectacle of myself on Christmas Eve, I determined to play it cool on New Years. Didn't work out quite so well, but it wasn't as bad as the week before. After bedcheck, several of us were gathered in one of the rooms enjoying some cognac and bier that had been smuggled into the barracks (a definite no-no in them days) since New Years Day was a total day off we decided to keep the party rolling in secret until morning and take it back to town. The Big Horn went off. About three am New Years Day. There was a numbed, total-disbelief, silence for about a five-count, then instant bedlam erupted. It seemed immediately that hundreds of GIs were everywhere, in civilian clothes, in their underwear, in various partial uniforms, running for their gear, with their gear, rushing to the Arms Room, commo sections, just everywhere. There was only one common denominator: they were all drunk on their butts.
The next hour or so would have been comical if it hadn't been so scary. Vehicles started roaring out of the gate, but the tank companies just went through the fences and roared out across the farm fields toward the assembly area. The tracked vehicles that went out on the roads soon lost patience with a sedate pace and started re-routing themselves through narrower streets. That is where those measurements come in. A lot of the town streets were twelve feet or less wide...tanks were just short of twelve feet wide...which worked out okay as long as there were no cars parked on the street.
When tanks move around on the roads, they turn the turret around facing the rear and lock the main gun barrel on to a triangle brace, but for combat operations the barrels have to be forward, which makes the tank longer. The barrel sticks our about ten feet in front of the body of the tank. When the tanks are at speed and stop abruptly, they kind of rock on their tracks, and the barrel goes up and down like a club...with enough energy to stove in the roof of a Volkswagen bug...truly. If you saw the video of the guy in San Diego who stole an M-60 and terrorized the town for awhile as he tried to evade the cops. If you saw that, you have some idea of the destructive power of an M-60. Multiply that by 40 and you have a really interesting potential for disaster. Fortunately, most of the squadron's tanks either got to the assembly area without incident or were stopped before they left. See, there is an authentication process that takes place immediately when an alert is sounded and this alert was almost immediately not authenticated. So the officers and NCOs who were on duty, the MPs, and anyone else they could press into service, went around stopping everyone and sending them back to the barracks. Recall codes were send out to the vehicles that got outside the fence, and signals were sent everywhere to round up the stampeding soldiers. I personally never got out of the fuel dump, but some of the platoon got through the fence behind the tanks. We got everything fueled back up and parked in the right places and unloaded. We cleaned weapons and put them away, repacked duffelbags, and did all the stuff the Army calls "Recovery". We had it all about done in time for a late breakfast (holiday schedule in mess hall allowed for a brunchy breakfast). It wasn't the way we planned on spending New Years Day, but it did make for some interesting conversations.
Post Script: Some of you who are not so familiar with the military might want to know who screwed up. How could such a monumental goof happen? I don't know. I was a Private at the time; lowest on the totem pole. When you are a Private, sometimes you just don't get to know.