[Milsurplus] the postwar armored series

[Wammes]

Hi Hubert,

I have never heard of that fact before, but is does sound quite logical. 
Post-war Germany had no functioning industry left and did indeed need a 
functioning police force, so using stocks of armoured comms is logical. 
I'll try to find the site you mention and make the appropriate changes. 
Thanks!

The GRC-3030 is not too rare, I see them offered regularly. Not a clue 
how many where produced, but it must have been hundreds or even 
thousands. They were designed and produced by Van der Heem, a company 
long since disappeared through takeovers, but in those days very much an 
active producers of both consumer and professional electronics and 
electrical appliances. Including vacuum cleaners and electrical 
blankets. Definitely not a company that had to be kept alive by 
artificial means. However, the successor  of the GRC-3030, the GRC-3025, 
was basically an English system, but adapted to using the then modern 
Old Family audio accessories. The special junction box to accomplish 
this was again made by Van der Heem. All this just before the Dutch 
started using the Old Family itself, both GRC-3030 and GRC-3035 were in 
use only a rather short period of time.
BTW, I never really understood why the GRC-3030 would be dubbed "the 
Dutch GRC-9". True, it uses the same antenna's, but apart from that, the 
GRC-3030 is vehicular only.

As to your abandoned war machines, I can only say that I never ever 
found anything like destroyed tanks lying about in the Netherlands. Now, 
I was born 1952, so they might have cleaned up before...
What we still do have is aeroplanes. Every few years one is being 
excavated, either from a lake - or the former Zuiderzee, which was 
partly made dry after WWII - or from our rather peaty meadows, where a 
plane might bury itself if it came down at the right angle. Airmen are 
still being found. As well as bombs, there were a lot of duds and they 
are being found during building projects, mostly in the cities. Nearly 
all Allied, btw.
The other thing we still have, in numbers, is blockhouses. Quite hard to 
remove them, though the ones that were build in the cities were gone by 
the time I started to notice that sort of thing. But the Atlantic Wall 
was - and partly is - quite formidable. Also, when studying biology I 
did a lot of fieldwork in France, right where the English Channel is at 
it's most narrow point and on a good day you can indeed see the White 
Cliffs of Dover. There stood another class of blockhouses again! Google 
"Batterie Todt" for some pictures. They contained the artillery normally 
found on big battleship and guarded the Channel, forbidding passage to 
all ships. And now and again they would shell Dover, it seems. Those 
remnants will not go away too soon...

Grtz, Wammes Witkop