Alongside the B-17 Flying Fortress, the B-24 Liberator was one of the main American bomber types of WWII pending arrival of the B-29 to the Pacific theatre. Despite the huge number built, they disappeared with amazing quickness from the postwar American military, serving on only in China and India.
(The EZB-24 test plane which was the very last Liberator in the US Air Force.)
(Indian B-24 Liberator bomber.)
(Taiwanese B-24 Liberator bomber.)
France restarted domestic production of the Junkers Ju-52 transport after WWII. Although intended as a quick, cheap stop-gap solution, the AAC.1 Toucan fought in three post-WWII conflicts and quietly served as long after WWII as the famous original Junkers did before and during WWII.
(Junkers Ju-52s of the Luftwaffe training Fallschirmjäger during WWII.)
(A French air force AAC.1 Toucan – the post-WWII French copy of the Ju-52 – flies over a burning Vietnamese jungle during the Indochina War.)
(A French air force AAC.1 Toucan in Africa during the 1950s Algerian War.)
Argentina used a variety of WWII items during the 1982 Falklands War, ranging in complexity from a Brooklyn class cruiser to M1 helmets. The most surprising, and least known, was an effort to resurrect the Mk13 anti-ship torpedo that nearly made it to use.
(US Navy Mk13 air-dropped unguided torpedo of WWII.)
(Argentine IA-58 Pucara attack plane with a Mk13 in 1982.)
The post-WWII career of USS Killen (DD-593) is an interesting example of how the USA’s Cold War atomic tests, along with sloppy record-keeping and the unavoidable passage of time, resulted in a public relations mess at the turn of the millennium.
(USS Killen at sea in the Pacific during WWII)
(Wreckage of USS Killen on the Caribbean seafloor in the 21st century)
Originally designed as a carrier-based gun dogfighter, the F4U Corsair, and it’s later attack variant, the AU-1, was used heavily as a ground attack plane during WWII, and almost exclusively in that role during the Korean War.
(The first prototype Vought Corsair during WWII.)
A wide variety of weapons not originally envisioned were successfully used by the Corsair: air-to-ground rockets, napalm tanks, radar, depth charges, cluster munitions, and so on.
Easily the most unusual was something that could have never been envisioned by Vought’s engineers when they designed the plane; a guided missile.
(French navy Corsair with SS.11 guided missiles aboard.)
Since starting wwiiafterwwii, I receive from time to time suggestions for topics. These are wide-ranging but two in particular seem very popular: WWII weapons in the Vietnam War, which has been touched on several times; and a general question of how the world “cleaned up” WWII battlefields after the war. For the latter, I was surprised at how very little is written about it so perhaps this will be of interest.
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. The most formal was Germany’s Beutewaffe (literally, ‘booty’ or ‘loot’ weapon) effort, which encompassed everything from handguns to fighter aircraft with an official code in the Waffenamt system; for example FK-288(r) (the Soviet ZiS-3 anti-tank gun), SIGew-251(a) (the American M1 Garand rifle), and Sd.Kfz 735(i) (the Italian Fiat M13/40 tank). Captured gear was assembled at points called Sammelstelle and then shipped back from the front lines for disposition.
France’s chaotic return to it’s Indochina colony after the end of WWII in 1945 saw the surprising use of some former Japanese warplanes, as the Indochina conflict against the communist Viet Minh began.
(French air force Ki-43 “Oscar” fighter.)
(French navy E13A1 “Jake” seaplane.)
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