For Stalingrad, covered in part 1, Josef Stalin had an idea (however wrong) but no ship. Meanwhile in the United States after WWII, the US Navy had an incomplete ship, USS Hawaii, but was looking for ideas on how to finish it.
(USS Guam during WWII.) (photo via All Hands, the US Navy’s magazine)
(End of the road for USS Hawaii on 20 June 1959 as it is towed to the scrapyard.)
I have not done a 2-part series for a while and these are two ships I have been wanting to write about for some time.
USS Hawaii and Stalingrad were two warships of roughly the same type and of similar firepower, both born (directly or indirectly) out of WWII. Both were made at different times for totally different reasons, each had a unique life and in the end, neither was finished.
(How it started: artist’s rendition of the Soviet battlecruiser Stalingrad.)
(How it ended: the never-finished Stalingrad for use in weapons tests.)
The Spanish CETME is a well-known Cold War assault rifle, and the West German G3 even more so. It is less known that both trace their lineage to a WWII German assault rifle which did not see combat.
(The WWII German StG-45(M) assault rifle.) (photo via Forgotten Weapons website)
(Spanish soldier during the 1950s with a CETME Modelo A, the StG-45(M)’s postwar “child” firing aluminum ammunition.)
(The Heckler & Koch G3, a 7.62 NATO descendant of the two above firearms. This particular one was used in a shootout with Kenyan police in February 2022.) (photo via Nation newspaper)
Heinkel’s He-274 high-altitude reconnaissance-bomber did not serve one single day in Luftwaffe colors during WWII, however after the war it was a useful addition to the rebuilding French air force.
I would like to wish a Merry Christmas to all wwiiafterwwii readers.
Below is the Rocket, the newspaper of Redstone Arsenal, AL from 23 December 1952 – 7 years after WWII and 71 years ago today. Santa Claus is on a JB-2 Loon. If the Loon looks like a WWII German V-1 buzz bomb, there is a good reason, because that is what a Loon was.
WWII was obviously a war of monoplanes. The conflict was fought by types like the Corsair, the Spitfire, the Hellcat, the Mustang, and so on; and ended with Me-262 jets already in combat. None the less all the major nations had biplanes in differing roles and some served in the USA’s military past the war.
(A pre-WWII photo feature of the N3N-3 Canary trainer.)
(N3N-3 Canary after WWII. The markings, 48-star flag flying, and the automobile styles in the parking lot would seem to date this between the end of the Korean War in 1953 and Alaskan statehood in 1959.)
Many Americans of a certain age consider Panama only as the bisected nation on either side of the now-defunct Panama Canal Zone, while a younger generation only recalls it as one of the USA’s “regime change” operations.
Panama, the independent nation, once had its own small army which used WWII arms long after WWII.
(Panamanian soldier with WWII M1 pot helmet and M1 Garand rifle, in tear gas mask during a 1968 coup.) (photo via Bettmann images)
(Within this mountain of Panamanian weapons captured during 1989, is a WWII M1 carbine and M1928 Thompson submachine gun.)
(WWII American M1 pot helmet of the Panama Defense Force’s (PDF) military police captured in 1989. During the 1980s the PDF had reconditioned some of these old helmets with new suspensions, even as kevlar helmets entered the army.)
Bei’an in northern China was for many years “Gun City, PRC”; churning out huge numbers of cloned WWII-era firearms before switching to China’s clone of the AK-47.
(American soldiers examine a captured Type 50, the Chinese clone of the WWII Soviet PPSh-41, during the Korean War.) (US National Archives photo)
(This monument in modern Bei’an honors the 9,006,116 guns made at Factory #626.) (photo via Xinhua news agency)
During the 1982 Falklands War, Argentina’s ARA Alférez Sobral, formerly the WWII US Navy’s USS Salish (ATA-187), made a remarkable voyage of determined sailors surviving at sea.
(USS Salish (ATA-187) in US Navy service.)
(The heavily-damaged ARA Alférez Sobral, the former USS Salish, returning to Argentina in May 1982 after taking multiple British missile hits.)
For readers in the USA, I wish all a happy Independence Day, our nation’s 247th year.
In the US Navy, a warship launched or commissioned on the 4th of July is a special honor. Below is the WWII Gato class submarine USS Angler (SS-240) being launched by Electric Boat Company at Groton, CT on 4 July 1943.
USS Angler survived WWII and during 1952, was selected for conversion into SSK configuration to become USS Angler (SSK-240).
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