War salvage in Europe

[Bill Murray]

A truly fascinating subject to be sure.

I am not making a political statement here, but this aspect of history really brings out the truly staggering costs of modern warfare.

WWII is a particularly good example of this, where almost the entire GNP of the major combatants was devoted to making things, training troops which meant building bases, transporting said troops and things sometimes halfway around the world which meant a need for trucks, railroad equipment and ships and so on and so on.

And, in the case of the Allies at least, we way over produced these things in the sense that we never truly knew when the war would end and we did not want to get caught short handed.

So, here are some photos I snatched in the last days to illustrate the magnitude of this phenomenon. I should also add to something several others pointed out, in the case of soft skin vehicles, the US manufacturers did lobby fiercely against bringing back said vehicles but there were some clever folks that still managed as I will show in a photo.



First three are a salvage sale in the US in the late 1930's as we were changing to the generation just before the first "real WWII softskins". Second photo is a bike park in the UK selling off conscripted bikes and the third is a salvage yard in Italy postwar.