{"id":104773,"date":"2020-09-06T12:10:23","date_gmt":"2020-09-06T16:10:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=104773"},"modified":"2020-09-06T12:10:23","modified_gmt":"2020-09-06T16:10:23","slug":"cleaning-up-after-wwii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=104773","title":{"rendered":"Cleaning up after WWII"},"content":{"rendered":"
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FRANCE. Normandy. 1947. Omaha Beach. Abandoned landing craft.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I recently stumbled upon an article that explores the massive undertaking of cleaning up<\/a> after the world’s largest war and thought you’d all be interested. Head’s up, it’s a long read, but I found it fascinating.<\/p>\n

The scale of the war is hard to fathom. Tens of millions of men and women were pressed into military service (by 1945, more than 12 million in the US alone, the USSR had conscripted almost 30 million for a total of around 34 million in service). Even countries that weren’t belligerents built up their military forces in men and equipment for any possible future involvement.<\/p>\n

The photo above is from more than two years\u00a0after <\/em>the D-Day invasion at the Battle of Normandy. The remains of the massive Mulberry Harbors and wrecks of the invaders and defensive structures were still abundant. Not surprising since the invasion involved 1,200 aircraft, 5,000 ships, and 160,000 ground combat troops in the first day alone.<\/p>\n

The bombing raids over Europe involved enormous formations of aircraft. More than 1,000 British bombers conducted a single bombing mission over Cologne, Germany on May 30, 1942. Even that mission was unsuccessful strategically and required more huge bombing missions.<\/p>\n

Little is talked about the “what happens after” of war materiel. Much is made of the human toll and the toll on infrastructure (bombings of Dresden, Berlin, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki for instance), but little thought is given now to the more mundane. From 1945 to 1946 the US military shrank from more than 12 million to just over 3 million men. The trucks, tanks, planes, and ships those 9 million men operated were largely left in place or marshaled for future destruction.<\/p>\n

Give it a read when you’ve got some time. The article is filled with great pictures for context and visualization. There are a lot of stories here worth unpacking more. Like MacArthur’s order that everything related to the Japanese war machine was to be immediately destroyed whereas in Europe there was much studying done on our enemy’s equipment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently stumbled upon an article that explores the massive undertaking of cleaning up after the … Cleaning up after WWII<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":664,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,121,217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104773","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-historical","category-war-stories","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104773","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/664"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=104773"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104773\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104777,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104773\/revisions\/104777"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=104773"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=104773"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=104773"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}