Possibly the worst weapon ever issued to AMerican troops.
The real irony is that the Marines had been using the Lewis Gun for a number of years in the "Banana Wars" in Latin America, and Marine units sent to France had to exchange their farily reliable Lewis Guns for the that POS weapon known as the Chauchat.
The doughboys soon had some NSFW puns on the name of the Chauchat involving changing the C and the A in the last four letters for S and I. It was so unreliable that soliders would dump it for a bolt action Springfield.
And Lest we be accused of prejudice because the Chauchat was a French weapon, the Poilus felt exactly the same way about it as the Doughboys.
Runner up in the worst firearm competition might be the Reising SMG of World War 2 and for the same reason:it was totally unreliable. The only reasons the Marines issued it was because they needed large numbers ofSMG in a hurry after Pearl Harbor, (their stock of Thompsons was nowhere near adequate for the numbers needed )and the US Army had already pretty much tied up the Thompson production for the foreseeable future.
The Reising did not last long. Although it was not a SMG, as soon as the M1 Carbine became available, it replaced the Reising. Later that year the M3 Greasegun finally gave the Marines enough SMGs.
I don't disagree, but let's not leave out the early M60's and the M73/M219 machine guns.
Here's a wiki on the M73/M219
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M73_machine_gun
Here's my .02 on the early pre-product improved 60's based on having been issued it and having a bunch of different MG experience before I got my hands on it.
The thing starts out with a good premise, and almost immediately goes to **** because of cost cutting in the development and manufacturing process.
The original design basically beats itself to death during use due to the design of the locking lugs into the barrel extension, there was no secondary safety sear cut in the op rod, meaning a sear failure would result in the piece running away till it was empty or a smart operator twisted the belt so that it couldn't feed, the barrel change latch could bail out on it's own volition (you haven't lived till your MG barrel decides to walk off the job while it's at work) the closed bottom receiver design (as opposed to the old Browning 1919 series and the later MAG 58 and M 240 bottom ejection design) serves to collect crud like it's gold, and also serves to make malfunction clearance a real joy. The trigger housing on the originals was held in by a leaf spring not much different than the design used in FAL's and L1A1's on the trigger/hammer pins, except the M60's retainer was
outside the trigger housing as opposed to inside on the FAL, and that little piece of sheetmetal sometime took off for parts unknown at the most inopportune moments - other than those little problems the thing was great.
It only took 20 some odd years to begin to addressing these design flaws - long after my time - and two solutions got us where we are today - one was a complete revamp of just about every single part on the thing that ended up being type classified as the M60 E3 and E4, and the best of the bunch the Navy SpecOps Mk43 Mod 0/1 and similar, designed and built by U.S. Ordnance in Nev.
The other solution is that someone finally got over themselves and adopted the modern version of the MAG - 58, type classified here as the M 240 - pay close attention here as the MAG-58 was in production and was being issued to troops in the Commonwealth and other nations 2 years before the M-60 was type classified, and all the '58 was an adaptation of the original Browning 1918 BAR gas system to a receiver design variant that dates back to the Browning 1919 series .30 caliber belt fed machine guns - but as the '58 "wasn't designed here (!)" the '58 wasn't even considered for adoption back when the U.S. military wanted a GPMG.
