Reising M60 (.45 ACP)
February 16, 2006
8:14 AM CST
What do you do when you have to rush into a war for which you’re ill-prepared, your raw materials are tied up in other, more important munitions, and your soldiers need firepower, in a cartridge which is already in stock?
You ask a man called Eugene G. Reising to design you a submachine gun, make it out of substandard steel, and rush 100,000 of them out to the US Marine Corps in the Pacific campaign.
Which is exactly what the War Department did back in 1941 with Reising’s submachine gun, giving the manufacturing contract to Harrington & Richardson. Here’s a post-WWII model, the M60, which alone among the various Reising variants, is semi-automatic:
Only a few thousand of the M60s were ever made, and they were used by law enforcement.
The earlier Reising models (M50 and M55) were, by most standards, a complete dog. The design was complicated, and it was made with very tight tolerances. The cheap non-ordnance steel rusted easily in the moist tropical air; the magazines tended to malfunction, as they were made of even cheaper steel than the gun itself; and the action, as it was fitted so tightly, was a jam-o-matic with the slightest appearance of any dust or dirt. It was also horribly unsafe: one hard smack of the butt would fire a chambered round, so part of the training involved serious muzzle discipline (always a Good Thing, mind you). One would have to go as far as, oh, the 1960s-era M16 to find a gun which malfunctioned so badly in its initial period of issue.
The Marines on Guadalcanal absolutely hated the Reising, and it was often tossed in the rivers and swamps of Guadalcanal, to be replaced by either M1 Garands (if available) or even Springfield ‘03-A3 bolt-action rifles.
The only thing in the Reising’s favor, perhaps, was that it fired the wonderful .45 ACP cartridge, which (unlike the M16’s 5.56mm varmint ammo) tended to stop the enemy in its tracks. The Reising was also far cheaper to produce, and 4lbs lighter than the other GI submachine gun of the time, the M1927 “Tommygun”. Its rate of fire was 450rpm.
As a compromise weapon, though, this hastily-produced gun was probably the best that could be done under the constraints of time, quality and quantity which the occasion demanded. (It should be noted that Eugene Reising had an impeccable pedigree as a designer: he’d worked with John Moses Browning in the design of the 1911.)
The Reising was phased out of front-line service in 1943 when the M1 Garands and M1 Carbines were produced in number, but was used for years afterwards by sentries and garrison troops back in the U.S.A. After WWII ended, the Reising was scrapped in great numbers.
Here’s a non-soldier with the Reising (yeah, the gorgeous Carole Landis):
