BTR-60 is the first vehicle in a series of Soviet eight-wheeled armoured personnel carriers.
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12 Facts About BTR-60
2.
Also, all BTR-60 models had three firing ports on each upper side of the hull through which the infantry being transported could fire at the enemy with their personal weapons.
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3.
BTR-60 is fully amphibious, propelled in the water by a jet centrally mounted at the rear of the hull.
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4.
The BTR-60 entered service with the Soviet military at the time when the USSR was arming on a mass scale.
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5.
The BTR-60 proved to be a worthwhile vehicle, although it sustained high losses due to the large number of RPGs used by the Chinese and mistakes made by the commanders of the APCs stemming from their insufficient combat experience with the new vehicles.
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6.
The high losses due to RPG hits wasn't unexpected, as the BTR-60's armour was designed to protect the vehicle from small arms fire and shrapnel, but not specialized anti-tank weapons.
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7.
BTR-60 APCs were employed widely both by the Soviet Army and by more than 30 export customers.
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8.
Operators of the BTR-60 have included Afghanistan, Algeria, Angola, Bhutan, Botswana, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Congo, Cuba, Djibouti, East Germany, Ethiopia, Finland, Grenada, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Hungary, India, Iran, Iraq, Laos, Libya, Mali, Mongolia, Mexico, Morocco, Mozambique, Nicaragua, North Korea, Romania, Soviet Union, Syria, Uganda, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Yemen, and Zambia, as well as many of the successor states of the Soviet Union.
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9.
BTR-60 has seen action in the Yom Kippur War, the 1971 War between India and Pakistan, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Chechen and Yugoslav wars.
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10.
The first armour-to-armour kill of the battle occurred on 9 September 1987, when a lone BTR-60 carrying out reconnaissance on the Lomba River was knocked out by a South African Ratel infantry fighting vehicle.
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11.
In 1991, seven conscripts of the Karelia Brigade drowned when their BTR-60 sank at Taipalsaari during an amphibious exercise because the vehicle was loaded incorrectly and the roof hatches opened.
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12.
The experience gained through reverse-engineering the BTR-60 helped the PRC in developing other more advanced wheeled APCs later in the 1980s.
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