Officers might serve in an Ontos unit for a tour, but then they’d move on to something else and whatever they’d learned from it never really entered into the institutional memory. There was never a military occupational specialty for Ontos crews. It meant there weren’t enough Ontos to engage the tactician’s imagination and so it never featured in tactics problems in the basic schools. The reason has less to do with the Ontos’ battlefield performance, which at times was stellar, than it did with the fact that only about 300 were ever built, a little more than half of which survived up to the time of the Vietnam War. The M50 Ontos had to have been the strangest armored vehicle ever to make it into the American military inventory.Įxcept for some Marine Vietnam veterans, the Ontos is, today, almost wholly unremembered. With its tiny chassis, tinier turret and six, massive, externally mounted recoilless rifles, the M50 Ontos had to have been the strangest armored vehicle ever to make it into the American military inventory. Instead, the name it got handed was Ontos, the Greek word for “thing.” It was an apt name. But there was one armored vehicle that was so singularly odd and strange looking, it didn’t get named after anyone, lest perhaps, some insult might be taken. Over the years there has been the Stuart, the Grant and Lee, the Sherman, the Patton, the Pershing, the Abrams, t he Sheridan, the Chaffee, and the Bradley. Army to name its tanks after great generals.
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