What happened to all the wrecked vehicles, tanks, airplanes after WW2?
When you look at the number of planes, tanks, vehicles, etc that the Axis and Allies had, and knowing a lot of them were destroyed on the battlefield, what happened to them all?
Was their a effort to clean all that up by the respective governments?
Did they get stripped by scrap collectors?
Are there places still littered with old vehicles?
I know they still pull tanks out of swamps in Eastern Europe and there are planes buried in the beaches of Normandy, but I’ve never read anything about the the massive clean up required post-WW2.
Posted Sep 3, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC
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When a tank gets knocked out on the battlefield, one of the following happens within a few days or even immediately after its been hit:
It gets recovered and repaired
Gets captured and studied or used against its makers
Recovered and scrapped
Recovered and put in museum
Recovered and used in misc roles like range target
Or its left where it is for one reason or another.
Which one of these options actually occur depends on the country, a country like the US wouldn't mind a single sherman getting destroyed so they wouldn't put too much effort in recovery but a country like Germany would put massive effort into recovery because of how expensive production was.
Any tanks not immediately recovered or scrapped get recovered or scrapped immediately after the war unless they have been sent to perform some misc roles as described earlier.
Idk much bout planes or normal vehicles but id assume its the same as tanks.
There's a reason why you dont see fields of destroyed tanks in Eastern Europe and thats cuz they have all been scrapped/repaired/sent to museums
Nice! That all makes sense. Thanks for that.
Thinking about Germany in particular where there wasn’t even enough food to go around post-war, was the clean up quick? Or were tank hulls lying around for a decade?
To your point the scrap metal would be highly valuable in post-war Germany, so I assumed they were recycled pretty quickly. But did they have working factories to actually recycle the metal?
It only occurs to me based on the magnitude. Germany produced tens of thousands of tanks and I assume most were inoperable after the war, so the clean up effort must have been a huge amount of work.
My guess is that the wrecks and operational tanks were sent to the countries that controlled the area where the wreckage was found, for example, if the Germans find a broken Panther in eastern germany that would go to the USSR.
It would have taken them a few years and i guess a scenic drive through eastern europe would be a Tank fan's dream for some 10 years, but after that it would've all been scrapped or sent somewhere.
Fun fact, one of the first produced Tiger 2's was sent to Sweden after the war, the swedes wanted to test their AT weapons so they bought a working Tiger 2 that was found abandoned in Germany
Makes sense about the occupying powers doing the clean up.
And considering the level of destruction across Europe, I would imagine the scrap metal was in high demand.
There is so much focus on WW2 itself, it’s always interesting seeing what the immediate post war years were like.