“Cleaning up After WWII”, 2017-02-20 (; backlinks):
[Extensive photo album covering the aftermath of WWII: where did all those hundreds of thousands of tanks, airplanes, vehicles, and ships go, and the hundreds of millions of guns, bullets, helmets, mess kits etc go? They went in all sorts of directions: many were repurposed on the spot by victors and used against their makers, while others were salvaged by crews on the battlefield, then leftovers stripped by locals. Military vehicles might be detonated on the spot to prevent reuse. Others would wait until after the war to be salvaged for rebuilding, or dumped at sea. Much of Japan’s air force was destroyed after surrender by a specialized tank battalion which would run over airplanes, or light them on fire with gasoline from a passing vehicle. (The Netherlands’ air force would bomb Japanese planes manned by Indonesian separatists.) Much was simply dumped at sea as by far the easiest and most expedient mass disposal method. On remote islands, they would be left in place to rot, now making picturesque ruin porn. The biggest challenge was dealing with the enormous amount of left-over ammunition, bombs, land mines, chemical weapons (stockpiled in enormous amounts though never used), and especially naval mines, which could break free and drift on the sea—vexing Iceland. Chemical weapons were dumped at sea as well, and would drift ashore.]
One of the reasons WWII battlefields did not remain littered with vehicles for long was that, with the lone exception of the USA, all of the major warring powers made some official level of combat usage of captured enemy arms during WWII. The most formal was Germany’s Beutewaffe (literally, ‘booty’ or ‘loot’ weapon) effort, which encompassed everything from handguns to fighter aircraft with an official code in the Waffenamt system; for example FK-288(r) (the Soviet ZiS-3 anti-tank gun), SIGew-251(a) (the American M1 Garand rifle), and Sd.Kfz 735(1) (the Italian Fiat M13/40 tank). Captured gear was assembled at points called Sammelstelle and then shipped back from the front lines for disposition.
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