Picture of the day

Gibbs505 said:
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Three Royal Navy 70 gun third rates and a 110 gun first rate at anchor in Valletta Grand Harbour, Malta, circa 1855.
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Shortly thereafter, they got bored, formed an invasion fleet, & went swanning around the waters adjacent to Europe & Asia Minor looking for a world to conquer. :p

Russian fortification at Sevastopol after their withdrawal.

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Strategic Air Command: Boeing B-47 Stratojet, Boeing B-52 Stratofortress and Convair B-36 Peacemaker strategic bombers, lined up from least to most engines, 6, 8 and 10 respectively.
 
Normandy beach, 1946:

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Anyone know how long it took to clean up materiel like this after the war? I have to think scrap steel was in huge supply, and with Marshall Plan money flowing in, significant demand as building material. Stuff like this would have been cut up, hauled off, and recycled, but this appears to have been in place a while.
 
UXO, bits and pieces in remote locations, sure, but what about Caen? Normandy? St. Lo?

There's still portions of mulberry off Normandy, but how long did it take to cut up and haul off the ships thatw ere beached / abandoned / destroyed?
 
Dark Alley Dan said:
Normandy beach, 1946:

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Anyone know how long it took to clean up materiel like this after the war? I have to think scrap steel was in huge supply, and with Marshall Plan money flowing in, significant demand as building material. Stuff like this would have been cut up, hauled off, and recycled, but this appears to have been in place a while.
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It's still Army property
 
lots of stuff is still in barns etc, normandy is littered with private owned museums of various qualities. they were deciding to stop cutting up tank hulks in the 70s as many german heavy tanks were so insurmountable that no scrap dealers had gotten to them yet and they were now viewed as monuments.

you can still see where sticks of bombs landed on google earth by the rows of different coloured dirt splotches
 
Dark Alley Dan said:
Of course it is. But like a bunch of other stuff left in an area with limited law enforcement and a needful population, you can bet goodly chunks of this stuff disappeared into barns and chicken coops all over western France.
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The rumour is that South Korean industry pretty much created itself whole cloth from what was left behind after the war. Jeeps cut apart and turned into garden shears, tanks melted down and re-founded into engine blocks for Hyundais...

Ari Onasis built his shipping empire buying up Liberty ships for next to nothing, then running them hard until the engines gave out - which allowed him to ship oil and other merchant goods at a fraction of the cost of his competitors. Rumour has it that he also never insured a cargo. He ran the math and figured it would be cheaper in the long run just to pay out of pocket on the off chance one of the ships sank.

There was just such a huge amount of scrap kicking around France after WWII, that I have no problem imagining it taking years to get around to consuming it all. The Higgins Boats and a lot of the other material left on the beaches at Normandy would have been in rough shape and low grade compared to some of the other scrap lying around the countryside.
 
grelmar said:
View attachment 54390

"German defensive position in Berlin. consisting of a Panther a turret on a small bunker."
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I believe that is a Panther, probably with a broken final drive (they were notoriously weak), buried up to its neck. There was no time for casting concrete bunkers in the streets of Berlin, even if you could have got permission.
 
RRCo. said:
I believe that is a Panther, probably with a broken final drive (they were notoriously weak), buried up to its neck. There was no time for casting concrete bunkers in the streets of Berlin, even if you could have got permission.
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Quite probably, all I had to go on was the caption.

I was having trouble figuring how they could make the turret swivel without it being attached to the chassis.
 
Speaking of Korea making use of U.S. surplus...

Last flight of the OH-58 over Fort Bragg a few weeks ago before being turned over to Korea. They're being replaced by the AH-64 Apache and UH-72 Lakota in U.S. service.

Some of the pilots seem pretty choked up about losing their babies. Can't blame them, especially seeing as some of those pilots were perpetually deployed throughout the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.

 
RRCo. said:
I believe that is a Panther, probably with a broken final drive (they were notoriously weak), buried up to its neck. There was no time for casting concrete bunkers in the streets of Berlin, even if you could have got permission.
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That one looks like a Panther that had field use (judging by the paint work), brought back for factory repair then pressed into service as a dug in hard point in the battle for Berlin. The Germans did set Panther turrets called Pantherturm I or III in either concrete or steel substructures (268 in total), some where regular tank turrets and purpose built ones would have a extra thick turret roof for protections. In the battle for the Gothic Line they had 48 Pantherturm in place and they where very difficult to destroy actually a fair number are still in place in Western Europe and not been chopped up or removed.
 
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