[Bill Murray]

Hi David and all:

An interesting sidebar subject perhaps.

And...I suspect David knows a lot more about it than I do, his being a Registered GM Historian.

In my archives, buried now in the cellar, I remember reading stories from contemporary Industry magazines etc. published here in the US during the period 1944 to 1946 wherein the manufacturers, then many more than today, were lobbying very hard to prevent surplus military vehicles being repatriated to the US.

As I recall the articles, the following were more or less their arguments.

1. A tremendous amount of plant expansion had taken place 1941-1944 to build the "Arsenal of Democracy" These plants would lie idle if all of those hundreds of thousands of vehicles were brought home and sold on the cheap.

2. At the same time, very few vehicles had been released to the civilian market in this huge land mass for more or less three years and their was tremendous pent up demand for both private and commercial vehicles.

In general, their arguments were accepted and with a few exceptions I will mention later, rather few vehicles were brought back to the US.
Most of the surplus you saw sold off in this country 1944-1947 were vehicles that never left the country and were cleaned out from bases where they were used for training or base support or just never got sent abroad.

3. One of their wishes, that all such leftover/surplus vehicles overseas be destroyed met with much less success, at least in Europe/The UK.

I think the concept here was that the US manufacturers felt there was a bonanza market in Europe for US made vehicles due to so much of the European vehicle production infrastructure being damaged or destroyed in the war.

In the end, this bonanza was never realized and the dominant position that the US manufacturers had prior to WWII was never realized again in the majority of the markets in Europe.

4. Rather the reverse was true in the Asia/Pacific theatre where the US sort of had a leading role.

I would have to dig to find them, but I have hundreds of photos of scrapping yards from all over the Pacific area where vehicles were just cut up or stored for some years stacked one upon the other.

As well, photo of vehicles being pushed off of Navy Carriers into the ocean and others of vehicles just being piled up and burned.

Kind of funny in that it did the US manufacturers absolutely no good as they never penetrated the Asian market the slightest bit and now the Japanese/Koreans and perhaps soon the Chinese just about own our own home market.

5. The exception that most stands out was that my beloved US Marine Corps "Dog Robbered" every single vehicle or whatever else they could scrounge and had it shipped back to the US on a Space Available basis at the end of the war.

A great deal of what they took to Korea in 1950 was not original USMC Issue, it was ex-US Army stuff with new serials.

Nothing to do with vehicles, but I lived several times on the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton California in the late 1940s to the late 1950s.

The Marines had warehouses full of "stuff" there ranging from Juke Boxes to sports equipment, restaurant and bar fixtures, just name it.

As a 15-16 year old kid, my mates and I used to break into these unguarded warehouses just too look around.

At some point in time, I guess most of it just got destroyed but I can also say that most of my military vehicle manuals came from those same sources. I didn't steal them, I got permission to enter the warehouses with a "responsible person" and was allowed to take what I wanted.

An interesting time to be sure.

Bill