Air America, the now-famous “front company” airline of the CIA, flew WWII aircraft alongside modern types during the Vietnam War. By now Air America has already been thoroughly written on elsewhere. Less well-known is a similar setup in the same timeframe, also using WWII aircraft: Continental Air Services Incorporated.
(C-46 Commando during WWII.)
(C-46 Commando of CASI at Long Tieng, Laos during 1975.)
The USSR’s most-produced tank of WWII, and most successful during that war, was the T-34. After WWII many nations received this tank, one of the more obscure ones being Laos.
(Soviet soldiers with a T-34 during WWII.)
(Lao T-34 during the 2010s.)
(Ex-Lao T-34s in the Russian Federation during 2020.)
The path by which these T-34s came to Laos and then “returned” to Russia is quite winding and interesting.
For starters, they didn’t really “return home”, at least not in the strictest sense of the words. They are all Czechoslovak post-WWII production, having first gone through Vietnam.
I debated on this topic as perhaps it is too bland for general reading, but perhaps readers will be interested not only in WWII military technology but how decisions about it was made in later decades.
(The launching of USS Dyess (DD-880) during WWII. A third of a century later, USS Dyess would be one of the Gearing class candidate ships for the study below.)
There were many proposals to upgrade WWII warships. For every success like the GUPPY submarines, many more proposals never saw daylight. They were too expensive, or mechanically impossible, or just dumb ideas to begin with. Today they survive only as poorly-documented sketches.
(The July 1980 report which spelled the end for WWII destroyers in the US Navy.)
However this proposal: to upgrade WWII Gearing class destroyers for service deep into the 1980s, was a reasonable idea to explore, mechanically feasible, and thoroughly documented in the unclassified realm. As it was never done, it is forgotten today. So hopefully it will be of some interest.
(The decommissioned USS William C. Lawe (DD-763) on the right, which in 1983 had been the very last WWII destroyer in the US Navy.)
Normally a barracks ship would probably be thought of as one of the most boring things in any fleet, but four Benewah class barracks ships of WWII were successfully retasked as riverine combatants during the Vietnam War.
(Launching of the barracks ship USS Benewah (APB-35) during WWII.)
(USS Benewah with a UH-1 Iroquois and riverine warfare craft off the Vietnamese coast in 1969.)
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)
With 4,000,000+ being made, the Enfield No.4 Mk.I is often considered the classical WWII British rifle. In the nation of Burma (today called Myanmar) it continues in use in the 2020s.
(British soldier in Bahe, Burma with Enfield No.4 rifle during WWII.)
(Myanmar National Police member with an Enfield No.4 rifle during 2016.)
Asroc and Katie were two methods of introducing nuclear weapons to WWII-era warships. One was fairly well thought-out and had a long run in service during the Cold War. The other did not and is remarkable for how unusual it was.
(A nuclear RUR-5 Asroc detonates near the WWII aircraft carrier USS Yorktown (CV-10) during 1962.) (photo via Federation of American Scientists)
(Blueprints for the 1950s modification to the WWII Iowa class battleships to enable them to fire 16″ nuclear shells.) (photo via Battleship New Jersey Museum)
After WWII the US Navy modernized war-built vessels to various degrees for many reasons. Many options were available: new weapons, new radars and sonars, enlarged superstructures, new radios, adding or removing aircraft capability, replacement engines, layout changes, and so on.
Normally one thing that couldn’t be changed was the physical size of the hull. Things could be added, moved, replaced, altered, or rebuilt inside or atop the hull; but at the end of the day the WWII hull was what it was.
In the examples below, extremely dramatic “surgery” actually changed the length and size of the entire ship.
(Not a case of seeing double: the bow and stern sections of USS Navasota (AO-106) pointed in opposite directions during the WWII warship’s 1960s “jumboization”.)
(The WWII submarine tender USS Proteus (AS-19) cut completely in half during 1959. This “jumboization” was one of the most complex engineering jobs ever done prior to the computer age.)
The American M24 Chaffee light tank of WWII saw postwar combat in southeast Asia for a quarter-century starting in 1950, first with the French army, then the South Vietnamese army, and finally the South Vietnamese air force.Â
(A French army M24 Chaffee in combat during the Indochina War.)
(A M24 Chaffee of the ARVN (South Vietnamese army) attacking Gia Long Palace during the 1963 coup.)
(With a PanAm Boeing 707 in the background, a M24 Chaffee of the VNAF (South Vietnamese air force) guards Tan Son Nhut in Saigon. Even as the Vietnam War was being fought, the airport’s civilian side continued to handle commercial aviation. These air force tanks would be the last WWII Chaffees in Vietnam.)
Two Liberty Ships which survived WWII were later used as heavily-modified test hulls by the US Navy, the stranger of the two being YAG-37 which was powered by aircraft propellers.
(A WWII Liberty Ship.)
(YAG-37, the former WWII Liberty Ship S.S. John L. Sullivan, during the turboprop experiments.) (US National Archives photo)
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