Tanks, other vehicles, and artillery were first moved to primary assembly points which were demined and clear of UXO (unexploded ordnance), usually railroad sidings, paved highway junctions, etc. This M26 is moving a recovered Jagdtiger inside occupied Germany at the end of WWII.Īs the Allies advanced upward and east from Normandy in 1944, a basic pattern for cleaning up battlefields was established. Above, a M26 moves a destroyed M4 Sherman in Italy during the latter part of WWII. The M26 tank transporter was ideal for moving heavy loads cleaned up from battlefields. Despite being officially “replaced” in 1944, M31s served until the end of WWII. This photo shows the dummy gun to give it the look of an actual M3 Lee from a distance. The vehicle which the M32 replaced was the M31, itself based on the M3 Lee tank. This one is towing a recovered Panzer IV off a battlefield. The Sherman ARV Mk.I was the British equivalent of the M32. The highly successful M32 served in WWII, the Korean War, and beyond. Based on the M4 Sherman tank chassis, it had a 30-ton deadlift A-frame crane and a front-mounted winch. The M32 is a good example of a WWII vehicle dedicated to recovering and towing wrecked tanks. Once the destroyed German tank was right-side up, it could be towed or dragged away by other vehicles. The M1’s boom crane had a 10-capacity so even with two working together leverage was needed to lift the 25-ton tank. After the end of WWII and then the end of the Chinese civil war, the PRC was still using ex-Japanese weaponry into the 1950s.Ībove a pair of US Army M1 wrecker trucks right the tipped-over wreckage of a Panzer IV during a battlefield clean-up. Above, a Chinese serviceman holds salvaged Arisaka Type 38 rifles and a Nambu Type 11 machine gun. Meanwhile in nationalist China, civilian scavenger corps were allowed to follow units in exchange for turning over militarily valuable things like guns or truck parts, they could keep whatever else they found. The Soviet and American armies were very adept at this, in both cases not only were there specialized recovery units but some themselves were sub-specialized in taking equipment off “hot” battlefields, even stripping or towing vehicles under the cover of darkness. All of the major armies had repair & recovery units specializing in getting salvageable equipment off the battlefield. More common than capturing enemy weapons off a battlefield, was each side salvaging their own equipment. One of Becker’s creations (above) was a Czechoslovak Škoda A6 anti-tank gun inside a German enclosure set on a French Renault R35 tank hull.Īfter Germany invaded the USSR, use of captured Soviet weapons became widespread so much that photos of German infantry with a PPSh-41 or PPS-43 are barely worth mentioning. Becker designed no fewer than 25 different adaptations of Allied vehicles, including French hulls with Czechoslovak guns, Dutch trucks towing French guns, British hulls with German guns, and so on. After Erwin Rommel met Becker and was impressed, this ad hoc effort gained official sanction as Baukommando Paris (Paris Building Command). This was located at the former Hotchkiss factory near Paris. On his own time, Becker established a central office for cataloging, collecting, and modifying Allied weapons. The Wehrmacht was at the height of it’s hubris, and quality captured gear was being taken as personal or unit trophies, junked, pushed into rivers to clear roads, etc. After the 1940 fall of France, Becker was alarmed at the fate of Allied weapons. Captured gear was assembled at points called Sammelstelle and then shipped back from the front lines for disposition.Ī notable figure during WWII regarding captured weapons was Major Alfred Becker, commander of the 200th Assault Gun Battalion of the 21st Panzer Division. 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(i) (the Italian Fiat M13/40 tank). 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. For the latter, I was surprised at how very little is written about it so perhaps this will be of interest. These are wide-ranging but two in particular seem very popular: WWII weapons in the Vietnam War, which has been touched on several times and a general question of how the world “cleaned up” WWII battlefields after the war. ![]() Since starting wwiiafterwwii, I receive from time to time suggestions for topics.
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