The Armory Life Forum

One of the reasons WWII battlefields did not remain littered with vehicles for long was that, with the lone exception of the USA, all of the major warring powers made some official level of combat usage of captured enemy arms during WWII.

As the Allies advanced upward and east from Normandy in 1944, a basic pattern for cleaning up battlefields was established.




Some battlefields were never fully cleaned up after WWII. A good example is the only WWII battlefield in North America, Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. These remote and inhospitable islands make recovery of heavy items nearly impossible and much equipment was just left there.


A Japanese Type A midget submarine which remains abandoned on Kiska island

Isolated Pacific atolls and islands were similar. Like the Aleutians, it was very cost-ineffective (and in many cases, physically difficult) to move heavy or awkward scrap items off them after WWII.

Per a policy decision by General MacArthur, surrendered Japanese aircraft were to be immediately destroyed by the fastest possible method, usually immolation.

One Japanese warplane the USA was interested in was the Aichi B7A2 “Grace”, a high-performance carrier-based attack plane. The “Grace” outclassed it’s US Navy contemporaries and was actually faster than a “Zero” fighter.