I was wondering what happened to those early and mid war tanks when they became obsolete. Some I know must have gone to training units, other converted into various support vehicles but I presume that can't have been all of them. Were old tanks dumped, chopped up or simply wasted out of service one 88 round at a time?
post subject Our town WW1 tank was chopped up for scrap in 1941. I am in the process of tracing a churchill that has recently gone from the old Newton Chambers factory industrial estate at Chapeltown, Sheffield. Newton Chambers produced Churchills and this tank was left to the city of Sheffield. a friend went to take a photo on Sunday to find it had gone!
It depends on which country. The USSR just tended to send them into battle anyway. After all, they needed all the tanks they could get. Britain and America tended to use them for training, or upgrade them for other uses (AA, engineering, etc) - unless they were desperate for tanks, like after Dunkirk, or in the earlier days of North Africa. Japan and Italy (as far as I know) just tended to send them into battle anyway. They lacked the industrial capacity to fully replace old with new. Germany was an odd mix - some old tanks soldiered on because nothing was available, and some were re-worked as support vehicles (including SPGs and Tank destroyers)
there have been a lot of metal thefts recently in the UK due to the increase in the value of scrap. Mainly lead and copper but a tank has to be worth a few quid due to it's weight FNG
Or maybe someone on the council found out how much it's worth...... .........ahem cough, cough I mean the council have decided that it is not correct to glorify/promote warfare (we don't want to upset anyone now, do we).
Germany kept one of each vehicle, both domestic and foreign, they came across, but they were eventually used as part of the final combat. A lot were also used as trainers, if they had lost their combat capability due to damages, and some again were converted into other self-propelled guns.
Do you mean one or at least one? I'm aware that they repaired and flew quite a few captured aircraft too sometimes in covert operations against the Allies. Your post implies that they only kept a single example of each type, whilst I'm sure as circumstances demanded they might have kept multiples of useful or common types.
. You forget the time honored practice of using the broken old war-horses as shooting targets , in an article recently it was stated that some tanks of the British 2nd division were left in France in 1940 in some haste , the tanks were found in 45 in a shooting range around Lubeck , as they were mark VI the writer tartly commented that being so bad , loosing them was probably a blessing .
lol - what were they testing on them? "Herr Oberst, our Walther P38s are successfully penetrating the armour of the British tanks"
Apart from using captured tanks and testing them (in Kummersdorf) at least one example of everything was kept for a future musuem or study collection in Stettin. Aglooka
