Hello Tony,
>we were told that it would cost more to rebox and store the ammo
>than to discard it.....
And don't forget what they did off of Okinawa after WWII. The US Army
had been amassing stuff for the invasion of Japan that never happened.
After Japan surrendered it was obvious that the Army would be radically
downsized since the war was (finally) over. Shipping all that stuff
ANYWHERE, not to mention to the US, would have been enormously expensive
and time consuming. So into the ocean it went. My dad was in the 503rd
Airborne Rgt. in 1960 and was stationed there for quite a while. He was
also a diver and they were forbidden to dive in certain lagoons due to
the risk of entanglement on the wrecks + live ammo.
I don't know if the Army did such things in the ETO, but with all our
newly liberated unarmed friends around, we had an easy place to resell
the stuff instead of shipping or trashing it. At least soft skin stuff
like trucks, Jeeps, and Weasels.
It is also my personal opinion that a lot of this stuff was never brought
home for political/business reasons. How happy would Dodge, GMC, Ford,
etc have been if all that stuff they made in 1944/45 came back home to a
hungry civilian market? :-)
Steve
T24/M29/M29c Weasels x 7
M274A4 MULE
M43 Ambulance
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