What became of all the leftover WWII airplanes, guns etc.?

Question

I know that some of the 1940's bombs were dropped on N. VietNam in the 60's but what of the Axis powers stuff?

Answer 1

As mentioned, a lot of it was scrapped. The allies (most importantly) united states bragged about its production numbers but failed to tell people that a lot of it was obsolete. Many of the weapons were sold or eventually deccomissioned. Note: My Jrotc trained with retired m-1 garrands. The weapons got a long service life. We were using the weapons and ammunition through N. Korea and Vietnam. So in answer a lot of things happened to these weapons and i am sure millions of them are all over the world to this day. My father recalled seeing the old British Einfield rifles all over Afghanistan in 2003.

Answer 2

Most Axis equipment ended up in the worlds scrap dealers. For that matter so did most of the Allied. That's why the wrecks are big business to find, recover, and rebuild today. Places like North Africa and Western Europe were largely picked clean in a few years after the war. Of course relics still turn up. But most equipment left is in the Pacific or the former USSR. Small arms were reused as far along as Vietnam. Some tanks like Shermans were being rebuilt and used in the Middle East as far down the road as the Yom Kippur war. You can probably find M-1 carbines still in use some where. They used to be as common as AK's today. By the way we had so many aircraft at wars end some were just left sitting to rot on remote fields. Others were chopped up with bulldozers and buried in pits. Thailand and China used some captured Japanese equipment for several years after the war. I think the Communist Chinese used a captured IJN Destroyer up till the middle 1960's.

Answer 3

Most axis ordnance was destroyed. Some however were sold to other countries that already had German equipment in their service. An Ex; Syria had the panzer Mk4 and needed the ammo and spare parts they used these tanks until the 1967 war in which they held their own against Israeli Sherman's. The MP-40 was used all through Europe as the 9mm ammo was common. Some countries adopted all Nazi equipment like Spain which used the Me-109,He-111 and Ju-52 as the back bone of their air force even Israel in the early days of 1947 used ME-109's. The reason was they were cheap and other countries wanted to get rid of this old equipment. Other Balkan nations used the left over Nazi gear to rebuild their forces some countries even going so far as to build the equipment under license Yugoslavia,Sweden and Spain being the most important countries.

Answer 4

It went all kinds of places - we're talking about a *lot* of stuff here. Some went to surplus stores - primarily uniforms and personal equipment; other such items went home with the GI's or were kept on military bases for use in training. (In the 80's my unit wore 'pickle greens' left over from Korea.) Some vehicles were sold, either to the public or to foreign governments. Many aircraft were kept for training, others were shrink-wrapped and sent to a desert boneyard, others were sent to museums, many were simply scrapped. Most usable firearms were kept and used for training and actual combat units until they became obsolete; again, many were sold to foreign countries.

What was left of the Axis war materiel was largely scrapped or destroyed. A few items were kept for museums or picked up by collectors - in particular, Americans were fond of sneaking home Lugers as souvenirs.

If you need better details, the first step would be to narrow down which subset of stuff you're looking at. It's impossible to generalize about literally billions of items from buttons to aircraft carriers...

Answer 5

Most of it was probably scrapped with a few going to collecters and stuff. Their are examples from both the allies and the axis powers stil around mostly in museums.

Answer 6

Much was scraped, some used for target practice, some sold off to museums and private collectors. As a former soldier was surprised to find however, that some WWII era items are still in inventory.

Answer 7

The DOD allows the GAO to auction most of it off, they also sell what cannot be reused for scrap while some of the old airframes sit in desert scrapyards rusting and corroding.

Answer 8

those guys at myth busters and junkyard wars have it all.