The M50 Ontos

Because nothing says 'Murica like a tank covered in bazookas.

Ladies and Gentlemen, say what you will about the American Military Industrial complex, I have to marvel over the fact that no matter what the unhinged things I used to come up with when I was twelve, they have probably already built it. For instance, I’ve already talked about the M16 Multiple Gun Motor Carriage, which presumably came about when someone asked what if we put a psychotic amount of .50 caliber machine guns on a halftrack?
Then someone, somewhere saw that, said hold my beer and my favorite tank of all time was born. Ladies and gentlemen… I present the M50 Ontos aka The Thing:

I mean, look at it! It’s so awesome! It’s like someone took that poorly drawn sketch I made in seventh grade art class that almost got me another sit down in the councilor’s office and put it in a time machine, then sent it to DARPA. Then, after doing a lot of cocaine about it, they actually decided to build the metallic murderbeast.

The M50 Ontos came about when a bunch of engineers realized that the Army’s M40 106mm recoilless rifle was pretty good at blowing up tanks. However, moving one around required a Jeep and a bunch of dudes to jump out and set it up (see the above picture) at which point the enemy tank might either just… you know… leave or blow them up, which would just be rather inconvenient for everyone involved. So said engineers said “Hey! What if we just strapped a bunch of them to a tank!” And that’s pretty much exactly what they did. The first prototype had four M40s bolted onto it, however that was deemed not awesome enough and two more were later added. Once it was actually fielded, they also upgraded the engines to make it a little faster.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. How the heck do you even aim that thing, anyway? Glad you asked! You see, each recoilless rifle could be calibrated so that they all would hit at a certain point of aim. However, that would be pretty time consuming to get perfectly right every single time when you’re mass producing dozens and dozens of these things. Also, the M40 already had a solution for that. It’s got a smaller spotting semi automatic rifle mounted to the tube that fires a .50 caliber tracer round calibrated to match the trajectory of the 106mm round. Basically, you just start plinking away with the spotting rifle until you hit the thing you want to violently and spectacularly reduce into its component parts, then fire the 106mm recoilless rifle.

Eventually, they took their prototype out to Aberdeen Proving Ground to show it off for a bunch of Army generals. Things were going great right up until they wanted to see all six recoilless rifles get fired at once (and, I mean… let’s face it, who could blame them!?). The resulting backblast not only knocked bricks out of the walls of the building the generals were standing in, but shattered the glass in every vehicle they drove out there. This didn’t impress the Army generals for some reason, however a Marine Corps general who was presumably drawn to the area by the earth-shattering ka boom immediately ordered three hundred of the things on the spot.

And things just got more psychotic from there.

You see, it was designed to blow up tanks. And it did! During the Dominican Civil War in 1965, it was used to explode those…two tanks…the bad guys had. But it worked! However, when they sent the Ontos to Vietnam…well… It wasn’t like the North Vietnamese had a lot of tanks. Or really any at all. And I should point out that, at the time, there was no real battle doctrine as to how to use this monster. There wasn’t even a specific Military Occupational Specialty assigned to train guys up on it. So the U.S. Government basically just sort of sent these guys out there, where they figured out fairly quickly that these anti-tank guns work pretty well as anti-everything-the-heck-else guns too. Especially when you loaded the recoilless rifles with fléchette rounds, which basically turned each one into a gigantic shotgun full of hardened steel nails. Because heck you, Charlie and everything in your general direction that’s why. The enemy got to fear the Ontos so much that crews could clear entire buildings by firing a few spotting rounds at them. The bad guys knew to bug out because if they were still there after the tracer rounds hit, the building wasn’t going to be and their new pronouns were soon to be Over There and Over Here.

All good things must come to an end, however. Advances in tank armor technology eventually made the Ontos’s 106mm guns all but ineffective. By 1970, the Ontos was officially removed from service and the vast majority were decommissioned and cut up for scrap or sold as farm equipment. There’s still a few kicking around in museums around the US, but that’s it. One’s at the Field Artillery Museum at Fort Sill, which I got taken to when I was in Basic, but I don’t remember seeing it.

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