Dave,
I think you are referring to Espiritu Santo in what is now Vanuatu (New Hebrides). This was the major US base for the Solomons/Gaudalcanal campaign and even beyond. It was one of those weird League of Nations deals that put Britain and France in joint control in a "Condominium".
The Brits got pretty much control of the Public Service while the French dominated commerce (Plantations etc).
I think the overnight dumping story is a bit of a myth. There is a HUGE dump of stuff in the water at Santo - it is even called Million Dollar Point to this day (I have dived on it....Fantastic!).
At the end of the war there was an unbelievable destruction program (The stuff on Santo took a year to get rid of, not just overnight). In places like Australia the motive was to avoid a glut on the market and allow industry to take up again giving jobs to the returning troops and build the economy. For the US to bring back millions of vehicles and equipment and dump them on her own market would also have been a disaster for industry. I suspect most post war US sales were from stocks already in USA and very few overseas items were sold in the country.
Most of the Australian sales were from Australian stocks, a vast quantity of US stocks in Australia was deliberately destroyed. I know for example that barges operated continuously out of Brisbane to deep water for more than two years after the war dumping US equipment. There is a massive pile of trucks, machinery and aircraft just off the coast - some of the planes have recently been recovered but totally corroded.
A fleet of Catalina flying boats was sunk deliberately off Perth and numerous other dumpings took place.
I have dived along the old wharves (about 2 miles long) at Finschhaffen in New Guinea and there are hundreds of trucks, jeeps, guns, barges, aircraft etc all dumped at wars end by US troops. The relatively small Australian stocks were sold at auction/tender sales both in PNG and Australia.
Milne Bay (also in New Guinea) contains numerous landing barges loaded with bulldozers and trucks which were just sailed out and had the plug pulled. In Bougainville it was all too hard and remote so they just left lines of trucks on the shore on the south west coast. A combination of Australian entrepreuneurs with landing barges and tropical weather reduced the stocks to nothing over the followng 10 years.
I am sure similar things happened all over the world.
Lang
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