When I was in the Army late in the Korean War, the training cadre were all WW II vets and they told stories about trucks and all sorts of military equipment being pushed overboard from ships. Navy people told of planes being pushed off carriers and an uncle in the Seabees told me about PT boats being gathered together and burned and tons of supplies being pushed off docks in the Pacific. Another veteran told me about a general's modified B-26 in Europe being blown up with primacord by accident. But I think the metal was salvaged. A certain number of Luftwaffe planes survived and played a part in the 1947 Arab-Israeli war, and ME-109s were actually built by  Spain after the war. A lot of P-51s went to allied air forces. When Canada eventually upgraded to jets they sold a whole freight train load of disassembled P-51 s to Cavalier Aircraft in Sarasota and, as we know, Cavalier put them back together and sold them to Latin American air forces (and a few to private pilots in the U.S.) I know about that from my late wife who was the widow of the manager of Cavalier.

 - Gordon White
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [ARC5] [Milsurplus] Disposition of surplus aircraft,
Europe WWII
From: Hubert Miller <[email protected]>
Date: Mon, September 18, 2023 11:01 pm
To: ARC-5 List <[email protected]>, Military Surplus net List
<[email protected]>

Sorry, answer doesn't make sense to my question, altho its basic fact is correct.
Flying headgear was not personal property, and the numbers of Japanese planes stashed as last-ditch reserves has been
variously given as 5000 to 8000. There is one particular microphone which strapped on front of the pilot's mouth, no doubt
for non-oxygen altitudes, that is particularly rare. I have one beat-up example. Or how about Japanese flying helmets with
built-in voice tubes for "Gosport" audio? Where did all those go to? I suppose in most theaters of the Pacific War, there wasn't
a huge established urban population to grab and hoard this stuff, plus in the home islands the population was very obedient
about destroying all war equipment. I gather the WWII Japanese communications electronics that survived, in Japan, was
kept for maintaining civilian communications, with a much smaller part by private party hoarding.
-Hue Miller
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