At work today, I heard one coworker mention that his grandfather had returned from his service in WW2 and kept his rifle. He claimed it was very common for soldiers returning from the war to keep their rifles or sidearms. Is this true? What conditions had to be met? And if it did happen in the past, when did this practice stop?
According to this gun forum, it was in no way legal but lots of people stole them, and lots of commanders looked the other way. (scroll down a bit, starts as a discussion of present-day military, but they get into the subject of WWII service weapons.)
My great-great grandfather was in the 25th NY Cavalry during the Civil War. According to his discharge papers, he kept his rifle. (I wish we still had it.)
In the movie “The Scent of a Woman” Al Pacino’s character states “an Officer never relinquishes his weapon” when asked how he still has his service pistol.
My neighbor was a doctor in the Army. Retired in 1982. Is now 90. Has a service weapon, or a gun that he says was his service weapon. Obviously he wasn’t in combat when he retired, but he did serve in Vietnam.
I vaguely remember reading a story about a guy who served in Iraq (or was it Afghanistan?). Anyway, the soldier was seriously wounded during combat and rushed off to be treated for his injuries. He was sent to the United States where he received further treatment and was eventually discharged from the service. He still struggled with his injuries, but he was receiving care.
However, he was shocked when he got a bill from the Army for failing to return his gear. His Kevlar, helmet, weapon, etc. were abandoned in place when his buddies dragged him off the battlefield and got him help.
I don’t remember where I saw that.
At the end of WW2, there was an absolute huge amount of military equipment and material which became useless overnight when the Germans and then the Japanese were inconsiderate enough to capitulate. I have seen pictures where there a literally dozens of planes being lined up and then burnt in a field. When establishments were wound up in various places, they often had an open houses where the allowed to locals to come and take whatever (non lethal!) things they needed, like trucks, furniture, crockery and cutlery, rations, bedding, blankets, stationary etc. My grandmother, whose father was in India Command (as a civilian) remembers getting notebooks, chewing gum, and a camera.
In some cases they either turned a blind eye to the theft and in others they expressly signed paperwork letting soldiers take rifles, pistols etc home. After all, one less rifle to worry about.
My father had his 1911A1 .45 auto from WWII. He gave it to my brother, and my brother gave it to me. I’m assuming that in all the confusion of returning people from overseas and discharging them, a lot of gear went missing. He may have just said that it had been lost in combat.
Yeah, I’ve seen footage of them dumping all sorts of captured stuff in the oceans- like thousands of Japanese rifles and machine guns.
Plus, they had just staggering numbers of US-made stuff now laying around in various states of use.
I suspect that the inaccuracy of pen/paper record keeping combined with conscript supply clerks and officers during/after the war who probably didn’t give 2 shits if Sgt. Smith kept his 45 pistol, and just marked it as lost or destroyed.
My grandfather kept his pistol also; it was issued to him as a bomber crewman in 1943, and it was in his dresser drawer in the original holster when he passed away in 1998. My brother has it now- it’s a 1943 Union Switch & Signal M1911A1, so it’s somewhat more rare than the average WWII 45 automatic.
I only wish we had some way to prove that he took it on 25 combat missions over Germany; that would probably up the collector value a little bit.
Wasn’t it formerly permitted for soldiers to keep captured gear? E.g. if you managed to “liberate” a handgun from a dead Nazi, you could keep it as a trophy of war, possibly contingent on your own military not particularly needing it?
I don’t know if it was expressly permitted so much as nobody really cared.
What I’m talking about would be post-surrender stuff; like the Japanese might have had an entire division’s worth of rifles confiscated, and the Navy would just go dump them in the Pacific. It’s not like we were going to use them, and we didn’t like the idea of an armed Japan, so dumping them in the ocean made sense.
The ETO version was running them over with tanks. A relative under Patton had that job and sometimes it broke his heart because you had not just K98s and stuff being destroyed but some fine civilian rifles as well that he would have loved to get home. No such luck though – under the treads.
Issued weapons were supposed to be turned in when one was discharged or transferred. If you had signed out for it, you were supposed to return it. But if you had found or traded for a weapon --gotten it off the books-- no one knew, and then it was another story. But they still were not going to let you walk off with a submachine gun.
Finding enemy weapons on the battlefield is one thing, carrying them away is another. It’s not like soldiers didn’t have enough to carry as it was, so anything except the most valuaeable and most portable stuff got left behind. For a lot of guys, funding a Luger didn’t necessarily mean a cool keepsake, it meant a form of currency that could “purchase” the good stuff that the rear echelon guys always had first and in greater quantities.
Nowadays, one is not allowed to have issued weapons in barracks or quarters except as assigned for specific duties.
Handguns were easy to hide in one’s duffel bag, so they tended to walk away quite a bit. Some enterprising people managed to take larger weapons. When the FBI still gave tours of its HQ building, they exhibited a WW2 Japanese machine gun (the one that takes the magazine in the top) which had somehw been taken back from the Pacific and used in a bank robbery stateside.
Collectors will tell you that with regard to the standard Japanese bolt action service rifle (the Arisaka), the ones with the Chrysanthemum design on the rear of the bolt are more valueable as it means they were taken in combat, because the post-surrender ones have that design (the Emperor’s symbol) ground off. So somehow, some quantity of these long arms were relocated to the US.
Nowadays it is strictly forbidden to take weapons home from the war. The military is very image concious and doesn’t want to be seen as a source of unregulated and unregistered weapons that could nd up in the wrong hands. They do search personal baggage for stuff. Even parts of weapons: I read of someone who had confiscated a sidearm from an Iraqi officer; it was all fancied up, and knowing he could not take the weapon home, the US servicemember removed the engraved grip panels. But he was told that “the book says no weapons or parts of weapons”, and so the grips went into a trash can somewhere in theater.
If you lose your weapons and/or gear due to operational considerations such as being wounded in combat, it isn’t counted against you. Losing any of it due to carelessness or stupidity is another matter, as is deliberately discarding it.