Some of those pics are amazing...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3710334/Million-dollar-waste-Amazing-photos-reveal-expensive-military-equipment-dumped-bottom-Pacific-Ocean-Second-World-War-expensive-bring-home.html

What a shame. Even a minimal financial return on the taxpayers' investment would been better than this. Same things occurred in Vietnam, Iraq and A-stan.

It may have been a minimal return to the taxpayer but the collapse of most of the economy as no new manufacturing would have been needed with a lot of that equip,ment taking the place of new purchase equipment in industry and little new manufacturing taking place.
In hindsight it proved to be a very wise decision

Al

Also the cost of shipping it all back is huge, usually costing more than replacing the equipment with new versions. From Iraq and A'stan, the environmental cleanup would have also been through the roof. It isn't as easy as just bringing the equipment back.

A friend who flew C-47s in the PTO told me how disgusted he was at the end of the war, watching squadrons of planes bulldozed together and burned in the Philippines. We did the same in Europe.

Reading Rupert Red One by Col. Jack Broughton (and another one I don't recall - perhaps No Guts No Glory by "Boots" Blesse) recounts how, after VE/VJ Day, we just wanted to forget war and move into a bright future of Pax Atomica; we just wanted to get rid of everything war, and not re-arm other countries. So just destroy it all. Heck, just before N. Korea started the Korean War, Congress blocked selling 100 P-38s to S. Korea.

All USA wanted to do after VJ Day was to disarm, and NOT do anything to make the Soviets think we wanted to provoke them. We knew we needed a nuclear deterrent and continued conventional R&D, but by and large, if it was OD, it was unwanted.

I have seen those studies and have to concur.

At $500,000 for a round trip of an Antonov from Canada to Afghanistan, it was indeed cheaper to turn AFV (and lots of other stuff) into scrap metal.

This stuff on Vanuatu is truly the tip of the iceberg, and pales in comparison to entire ships sunk, installations abandoned and equipment dumped in other areas of the Pacific. Part of my job was to catalog and supervise recovery of chemical munitions in the Pacific in the 80's. It was ironic that my Father-in-law was responsible for scuttling three Liberty ships in the Bay of Bengal at the end of the war. Don't look at the value of the equipment, but think of the cost of bringing it back to the States, inventorying it, then getting it back to "new" levels of maintenance after four years of conflict--that's why it was not worth bringing back. And by 1946, much of it would have been obsolete in the "new" atomic and jet age anyway.
VR, Russ

Not New News!

This is a direct lift from a Commercial photo site scource.

Great photos and at least this text is a considerable improvement on the Daily Fails usual bad science & bad facts!

While I understand the costs were high to bring this stuff back. But as a person actively looking for a budget WWII vehicle project this is very disheartening. I have missed out on a CCKW and a International M24 so far. But on a bright note I have learned of a halftrack that blew a track off in the 80s on a hunting property and from the square shape of less trees in the aerial photos I believe it may still be there. My wifes grandfather told me a story of the Marines driving vehicles into the ocean when he was in the pacific during and after WWII. Guess those stories were always right. By the way the article states they couldn't reach a price with the local gov. Why not just leave the non weapon vehicles for them considering all we and the Japanese put them through. Seems like we would take whatever they offered rather then trash them.

What WE put them thru Adam ??? You have to be kidding !!

What WE put them thru Adam ??? You have to be kidding !![/quote]


That isn't exactly what I meant or I should say not how it should have been worded. I've been at work since 3am so cut me some wording slack. I am a military brat via the USMC and My wifes grandfather was a marine in the pacific in WWII. We all know the shenanigans that the Marine boys can get into in there downtime. All in good fun and harmless it may be. Liberating the island of Japanese should have been enough but it wouldn't have hurt to say hey heres some truck for putting up with us while we were here. No harm or offense intended.

Lots of 2.5-ton trucks by the look of it. Bulldozers and excavators, too (not tanks, as the captions state).

Weird, wild stuff.

Pat
MMiR

Looks like a case of "We'd rather destroy it than give it away!". Or maybe a narrow-minded interpretation of "government property" and to be disposed of (in this case, destroyed) only in the prescribed manner, whether or not it may be useful to someone else.

There are actually federal laws that prevent the US Govt from just giving military equipment away to other countries or groups. It is way more complicated than it sounds. It is easier in the end to dispose of/destroy out-dated military equipment.

Folks, just to set the record straight here-- there were no "governments" or even populations located in many of these island archipelagos to give "materiel" to in 1945. In the case of Vanuatu, it was a French/British (mostly French) possession until 1980, and the Solomons Islands were I spent a lot of time in 1989 was a British possession administered by the Australian Governent until 1978. The issue of "dumping stuff at sea" is not new either-- there was a great article in a 1988 (?) issue of National Geographic called "Ghosts of the Pacific" which talked about war relics left all over the S. Pacific. We used it for research in planning missions to the Solomon Islands in 1989. These Pacific islands which were formerly colonial possessions are not the only place to find this stuff-- tons of war materials were dumped off the Hawaiian Islands after the war, notably munitions, since there was really no more use for aging munitions. It was a different world then, and environmental science was either non-existent or in its infancy, so nobody was concerned with the effects of these war materials, except to get rid of them.
When I went to the Solomon Islands in 1989, it was a very remote site. We had to destroy our protective equipment after use to prevent it falling into hands that might be injured by it or used for nefarious purposes. Due to environmental rules governing the transport of hazardous material, we couldn't leave it or transport it away from the site-- so it had to be destroyed there. The destroyed equipment was later picked up by an Army LSV along with munitions and transported to Johnston Island for ultimate incineration. So even in 1989, there were reasons for leaving stuff behind.
VR, Russ