WW 2 equipment saved

In WWII for some time the USA was using left over WWI ammunition, especially small arms. Of course WWI Springfields,machine guns, and other small arms that had been sitting in cosmoline for over thirty years went in to action.
 

CalBear

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There were almost literal mountains of stuff over every variety stacked on little sand spits across the Pacific. Most of those crates were simply left to rot, simply because it was too costly to send a ship to collect it, load it, sail back to the States, unload it, and store it.

It is actually pretty cheap to build up those mountains and shift them around during the war when the personnel doing the moving are getting paid $1.75 a day regardless of number of hours worked (in 1945 a PFC made $54 a Month), but once the war is over and every voter expects their son/brother/husband/cousin to be discharged right GD NOW! and you now have to pay civilians around $1.52 an hour (with 1.5x for anything over 8 hours), which was the salary for West Coast longshoremen in early 1946, that same movement gets bloody expensive. Literally cheaper to let most of the stuff rot, or to give it to local governments/groups.
 
@CalBear : Exactly the point. In Europe, you could turn over surplus to locals with minimal effort, and a lot had immediate use in reconstruction. A lot of the island bases in the Pacific were little dots, many of which were uninhabited before the war or had been depopulated by the Japanese. This meant the choice was leave it or spend a lot of money to move it, with explosives and petroleum products they were mostly moved, bigger stuff/not "dangerous" it was left. On inhabited islands, a lot of the locals simply were not adequately trained or educated to make use of equipment, although bits and pieces were salvaged and repurposed. Reading about the rise of "cargo cults" is interesting...
 
When I was in the ATC in the early 80's we did a lot of shooting with Lee-Enfields. One of the reasons being they were easy to maintain and use, the other was that there was a load of .303 left over from WWII and Korea.
When in a war, a country will do it's best to overproduce rather than run the risk of running out at an inconvenient time. Just in time procurement does not work in wartime.
 
Grew up as an Army Brat just after the War, and Dad would bring home C-Rations that were older than I was by a decade. Some of them were pretty good, even. Some of the Guys I knew got WWII dated cans when they were in Vietnam.
Only thing that didn't keep, were the cigarette packet, totally dried out. Med kits were surplus too, and some of those had longer shelf life than you would think. Some Medicines are very stable, others, not so much..
but the Sulfa packets seemed to be pretty effective on all the cuts and scrapes a kid could get back then

I recmmend you check out a channel on YouTube called Steve1989MREinfo. He buys and tests ancient combat rations, many of which are still edible.
 
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