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Diverting the course of this thread a little, but what to extent did recycling occur during the war? We have heard stories of scrap metal drives to feed war production, but how much scrap returned from the Front to be re-used in the factories? Presumably all those convoy ships crossing the Atlantic returned with nearly empty cargo holds, just as Road Transport supplying dumps near the front would have been "light" going back to the beachhead. I think of the amount of small arms and artillery brass cartridge case that would be measured in the tons, that today would be highly sought and valuable scrap. Perhaps rifle brass would have been uneconomic to retrieve in all circumstances, but artillery is generally at a fixed point at one end of an established line of supply. How much spent brass would have been stacked by the guns following the massive barrage of El Alamein? In both senses of the word, I would say thousands of Pounds worth!
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Hi Tony:
I would like to expand on my answer but have a bit of stuff to do right now but in the meantime, the following link will answer a little bit of your question about returning convoy ships. Bill http://uk.answers.yahoo.com/question...6062830AAsmlgq
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Dog Robber Sends |
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Tony.
I am not sure about other countries, but I ran across a book here in Canada a number of years ago that had been published by some federal gov't department in the late 1940's, which alluded to Canada not at all being interested in returning scrap of any kind for processing. They had very rapidly downsized the RCN and Merchant fleets within two or three years of the war's end and probably could not have brought much back even if they had wanted to. One only has to take a tour of western coastal communities in British Columbia today to see how many harbours were built from the sunken hulks of our wartime naval fleet. I suspect the focus for the government of the day was to maximize jobs on the home front for all the demobbed vets and you can hire far more at the raw material level than at some midpoint in the manufacturing process for recycling. There was probably also the added benefit of leaving the junk in situ to help the recovering economies in Europe and elsewhere. A far more progressive concept than what the Allies came up with at the end of the First War, thank God. David |
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Recycling during wartime? Naturally. Use prisoner labour too. A few carrier bits spotted there!
Images credit of IWM collection. Last edited by Michael R.; 09-02-14 at 21:26. |
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One of the original Australian CMP hunters. |
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A sad thing seeing all these photos - with the eyes of today. But at least as it comes to the aircraft - there was simply neither need nor money to maintain tens of thousands of propeller driven fighters and bombers anymore after the war... and in addition, they were technically obsolete...
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Note: donating the war-surplus material was done after the decision to re-equip the Canadian Army with American-type equipment.
See http://www.nato.int/archives/1st5years/chapters/12.htm: Quote:
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Regards, Hanno -------------------------- |
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There were industries founded not only on scrapping or modifying military equipment and selling either vehicles or parts, but on manufacturing new equipment from left over bits.
One example was Ferrucio Lamborghini who got his start by manufacturing tractors out of US surplus parts. The sports cars came later. A less "sexy" example in Canada were the "army wagons" built from leftover CMP parts. They used to be common here in Ontario and one still occasionally turns up at a farm auction. It probably wouldn't take much digging to turn up hundreds of companies set up to re-use surplus parts. As the supply of parts dried up, some of them called it a day, while others moved on to other manufacturing. |
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