LarryT wrote: > Perhaps you know - weren't a large number of WW2 aircraft destroyed or sold > for scrap in Europe following the war because is would have been too > expensive to ship them back? Seems like I heard/read that somewhere.
Makes sense. A lot of them were sold as scrap here too. Up to 1960 or so you could buy a P-51 for not much more than the intrinsic value of the metals. There was a guy here in the midwest who had many dozens of Merlin V-12s he'd bought for scrap in the 1950's. IIRC, when I saw him at a tractor pull when I was a teen, he was running three Merlins in a "tractor". The Brits borrowed a lot of rifles from American civilians back then, with promises that serial numbers were recorded and they'd be returned as soon as the guns were no longer needed. Once Hitler was in the ground, the borrowed guns were smelted to help drive the recovery of British industry. About ten of them belonged to the father of a friend of mine. He's still bitter about it. I mean really bitter, like you'd loaned your 300SDL to a friend so he could drive to work and he sold it to a crusher for $100 and kept the money for himself. Mitch.