I don’t think aircraft were dumped over the side because of treaties. I could be wrong, but I think that the reasons aircraft were jettisoned were that they were damaged beyond reasonable repair, decks had to be cleared to accept aircraft that had no other place to land (this appened during the evacuations in South Vietnam), space was needed to accommodate personnel, and similar reasons. Remember that these aircraft were still front line fighters at the time.
Some equipment was abandoned to local personnel. PT boats were burned, since they were made of wood and could not reasonably have been mothballed. A few mothballed ships were put back into service (most famously, a couple of battleships) or sold to foreign countries, others were used for target practice, and most were scrapped for their metal. Aircraft were generally stripped of their usable components (much of which found its way to the surplus market) and the airframes were chopped up and melted down. Tanks? You got me there. Some went to foreign countries, and a few are actually in civilian hands. I’d suspect that most were scrapped.
One reason you see destroyed tanks and aircraft scattered around Pacific islands is that they were often inaccessable. Who’d want to go to the trouble to collect a POS fire-gutted Japanese tank? The metal wouldn’t be worth it. Nobody cared about crashed aircraft. For one thing, most would be scrapped. May as well leave it in the jungle and save the trouble and expense of hauling it out. And over time nobody remembered they were even there. Now that flying examples can be worth a million dollars or more, and with improved means of locating them and retrieving them, people will look for them.
One story that I was told, I’m not sure if it’s true, is that one reason so much equipment was destroyed at the end of the war was to avoid depressing the post-war economy with large quantities of surplus equipment that had peaceful uses.
That certainly wasn’t the case in Australia and NZ- surplus tanks were sold off to farmers to be used as tractors (minus the main gun!), jeeps were sold to anyone who could pay for them, planes were sold to people with pilot’s licences, and the soldiers kept their rifles.
Certainly, for may of the Commonwealth countries, all this military equipment was expensive, and the Government either kept it in service, or sold it to people with the ready cash to buy it. There’s quite a lot of it still floating around, if you know where to look.
You can find the skeletons of WWII aircraft all over Southern Alberta. There was a large bomber training base near Vulcan, and after the war they cut through the spars to make them unflyable and sold them to farmers for parts for $50. My uncle’s farm has an Avro Anson sitting on it that did a lot of playing around on as a kid.
Back in the 70s I spent some time in North Africa and my buddies and I found all kinds of abandoned equipment lying around. Semi-working tanks; hand grenades; artillery shells; guns; etc. I still have a .380 caliber revolver from those days.
Don’t have a cite, but I remember an article in Smithsonian magazine several years ago about crashed WWII planes in the Netherlands. Apparently some of the thousands of planes (and it was thousands) that crashed there during the war weren’t recovered during or after the war, usually because they crashed in flooded areas and sank in the mud. The article included a startling aerial photo using ground-penetrating radar (I think) to reveal a large number of buried planes scattered beneath a peaceful Dutch landscape.
Well I work in the marine field. I know that marine surveyors, who are experts in rust, use a rule of thumb of about 0.1mm/yr for normal steel loss in a marine (ie extremely salty and corrosive) environment, and regard 0.2mm/yr as fast. In a jungle away from salt spray, 5mm loss in 50 years would be heaps.
So while you may be correct about sheet metal, anything armoured (tanks etc) is still going to be there.
Pretty much what others have already pointed out. I’ve never heard of any treaties that required the United States to disarm at the end of World War II. We were on the side that won.
Back in the 70s when I was on Kwajalein, our sponsors had a Japanese machine gun they dug up, among other stuff, bayonets, beer bottles, etc. I still have spent aircraft stuff, AA shells, small arms rounds, etc. out in the garage. Back then I was able to walk out on the reef during low tide and pick them up. 30 years later. No digging. Heck, I once found a detonator of some sort sitting on the lagoon-side beach about the size of two coconuts. The bomb disposal unit gave me a good talking to about that one. Bunkers were all over the place in the islands and you could crawl through them and explore freely. Good times for a kid. Every year or so a section of road would collapse into a bunker the US bulldozed during the battles with everything it contained. People, live ordinance, etc. Oh yeah, wrecked landing craft and other small boats were still around for diving on.
You might try glaciers, as well…I even remember seeing an expedition that nearly salvaged working B-29 from a spot in the arctic. (It came agonizingly close to coming off before disaster struck…I can’t even bring myself to watch the documentary. “Old Yeller” had nothing on this one. )
And I’ve heard the other day that at this rate, the job should be completed within two hundred years or so…
I’ve read in this thread that WWII tank wrecks in Egyptia have dissapeared (not surprising, of only for the value of the metal). But I’ve read too that on the other hand WWII minefields are still mostly intacts, and as a result Egyptia is one of the countries with the most unexploded mines on the planet.
Not a treaty, exactly, but I saw a documentary one time that said the British pushed a lot of their American planes overboard at the end of the war because of Lend-Lease. They were supposed to go back to the Americans, who didn’t actually want them because jets were on the way – so, splash.
As it turned out, a lot of them would have come in handy in Korea.
I’ve seen newspaper articles about studies (haven’t seen the studies myself) that siad that the meticulously-recorded minefields in the North African deserts left behind by Rommel and Montgomery have been useful in tracking the migration of the Saharan sand dunes into areas previously not desert.
Not sure if that included actual mines or just maps, but I think it did. There are probably a lot of mines left out there.
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