Sale of Surplus Vehicles / Returning Vehicles to the UK

Thanks for that work Mike.

Going into a bit of detail here, but does anyone know what happend to the Vickers Light Tanks over in North Africa. Did they return?

 

I remember RAF Burn,near Selby being used for the storage of tanks just after the war before their disposal.

The runways were packed with tanks some having desert camouflage. There was no security and we schoolboys used to ride our bikes through the avenues of the tanks parked and inspecting the interiors of the tanks of our choice.

Nearby on the old A1 was the wartime army vehicle park at Bryram Park a couple of miles north of Ferrybridge....never manged to get into the place but after the war,it was the location of the sale of ex WD vehicles.My uncle who was setting up a business bought two vehicles from there.

One was an ex US Chevolet LH drive tank ammunition carrier comprising of an all.steel fabrication with a shell delivery chute on the LH side at the rear.

The other was another LH drive large brown van with if recollect correctly had bulbous sides..nicknamed by us as the brown bomber.

In 2002 while down in Gascony,passed a village garage and saw an ex US recovery vehicle parked on the garage front and still in use....one of those recovery vehicles with a powered hawser mounted at the front.Must have been left behind in France by US forces but now in an area where, as I see it,US forces did not have a presence.

 

With respect to North-West Europe, most vehicles ended up in designated Vehicle Parks before being redistributed as and when required. One such Park was along many miles of the Hamburg to Lubeck autobahn. Lots, of course, continued in use while many many more were scrapped or simply dumped at sea. I understand that many were scrapped simply to avoid flooding the commercial market!

 

Concerning equipment brought to Dutch East Indies. Much of it was taken over by the Dutch when the British pulled out i '46.

 

There are many stories of the UK taking surplus vehicles and other equipment out to sea in LCTs and pushing them into the sea, from such (post war) locations as Aden, when the local government refused to pay for them. So it's not only the US!

Chris

 

Slightly digressing.I served with two instrument mechanics who served in Palestine before the founding of Israel in 1948.They related that when the RAF left Palestine,Spitfires were abandoned but were intended to be left in a wrecked state.

To prevent further use, an instruction was issued for instrument trades to wreck the cockpit instrumentation panels.But it would appear it did not stop the fledgling Israel Air Force from recovering the aircraft which ultimately were able to take part in the first Israel/Arab war..

I would imagine that other aircraft functions would have been also damaged for abandonment but such was the glut of Spitfires available post war,that it posed no problem to source spares.

 

Looking through some ORBs covering my grandfathers movements in India at the end of the war I came across an entry relating to late payment of companies contracted to carry out work for the RAF, I can't remember the exact details but it was something like 20,000 Rupees owed for over 12 months to a company called Allen Berry and Co. And if accounts didn't pull their finger out then they would lose all the goodwill built up with this company and any future work would not be carried out by them.
They were apparently part of the Dalmia Group and according to Wiki Allen Berry and Co bought 50,000 US surplus vehicles after the war.
They were also quite litigious and there are a lot of hits for Allen Berry versus whoever in the Indian Courts and I seem to remember one case being that they believed that they had bought not only the vehicles at a certain depot but also the ground they stood on.

Pete

 

Speaking of disposals in India - I stumbled across this while looking for something else