Morning Lang:
Thank you for the corrections to my impressions. I should have left it at "redeployed" as I am aware of the Australian campaigns in New Guinea,New Britain etc.
So much history to read and so little time.
I did do a little reading on Gallipoli after seeing the film with Mel Gibson and that gave me a little understanding of the relationship between England and the Colonies in wartime.
The words "cannon fodder" easily come to mind.
Not that that did not continue and does to this day. Hitler was probably outmatched in guile by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin as they probably spent as much time trying to get the other guy to take the casualties as they did on other aspects of the war.
Bush the Elder and Bush the Present also are quite fond of "Coalitions".
Anyway, to the vehicle points you raised, yes, I agree that those parks resulted in the main from the re-equipping of Australian forces with US and Canadian vehicles. According to some of the captions, some of those huge parks were more or less held in reserve or perhaps used for training and not released for sale until after the war.
The whole story of scrapping vehicles and other items is really quite fascinating, particularly in the Far East. The use of the Atom Bomb and Japan's subsequent rapid surrender rendered moot "Plan B", which envisioned a huge air sea and ground effort against the Japanese Isles. This resulted in huge stockpiles of virtually everything you can imagine sitting on islands and ships all over the Southwest Pacific. In a matter of a few days, it was all more or less redundant.
In Europe, it was possible to recycle most of this kind of stuff to the allies but in the Pacific, it was overkill on the one hand and too far away from allied countries to be economically feasable to transport it. Aside from Australia and New Zealand of course and to a degree the Netherlands forces there for a short while.
As a short footnote to this whole discussion, the US Marine Corps brought back as much as it could carry and stored it at a huge desert base, Barstow, California. So the story goes, they convinced the Navy that since all the ships were returning to the US West Coast anyway, let us fill them up with vehicles and other stuff. The Marine Corps leadership were well aware that President Truman was dead set to get rid of the Corps and that their budgets would be slashed without mercy from 1945 on.
This proved to be true and when in 1950 Truman sent in the Marines to Korea they were able to mount out within days with full complements of vehicles and kit thanks to this foresight.
Note here that many of those same vehicles were ex Army/Navy/Air Force vehicles.
Just some thoughts.
Bill