Abandoned World War II Aircraft, Tanks and Warships

The scattered remnants of a Wellington bomber in South Wales; the rusting carcass of a Churchill tank used for target practice on the English South Downs; spiked coastal guns at Hamningberg Fort in northern Norway; an abandoned T-34 tank in the Dukla Pass, Slovakia. More than 75 years after the end of World War II, the conflict’s legacy can still be seen from the Arctic wastes to the Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. The six years of World War II produced a greater number and variety of weapons than any other conflict before or since. This included more than 5 million tanks, armoured fighting vehicles and other self-propelled weapons; 8 million artillery guns; almost a million military aircraft; more than 50,000 ships and submarines; as well as many millions of rifles, machine guns and handguns. Today, in every corner of the world, the remnants of this epic conflict can still be seen. Long-buried ammunition in the Belorussian forest; sand-covered trucks in the Sahara desert; the abandoned concrete caverns of the Lorient U-boat base in southwest France; crashed American bombers and Japanese anti-aircraft guns in the jungles of New Guinea; thousands of unexploded bombs in the depths of the world’s seas and oceans; or the hundreds of aircraft and 30 Japanese ships destroyed in Truk Lagoon, the biggest graveyard of ships in the world. Illustrated with more than 200 unique photographs, Abandoned World War II Aircraft, Tanks and Warships allows the history buff and general reader to explore the detritus of this unimaginably destructive conflict in every part of the world.

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