More common than capturing enemy weapons off a battlefield, was each side salvaging their own equipment. One of Becker’s creations (above) was a Czechoslovak Škoda A6 anti-tank gun inside a German enclosure set on a French Renault R35 tank hull.Īfter Germany invaded the USSR, use of captured Soviet weapons became widespread so much that photos of German infantry with a PPSh-41 or PPS-43 are barely worth mentioning. Becker designed no fewer than 25 different adaptations of Allied vehicles, including French hulls with Czechoslovak guns, Dutch trucks towing French guns, British hulls with German guns, and so on. After Erwin Rommel met Becker and was impressed, this ad hoc effort gained official sanction as Baukommando Paris (Paris Building Command). This was located at the former Hotchkiss factory near Paris. On his own time, Becker established a central office for cataloging, collecting, and modifying Allied weapons. The Wehrmacht was at the height of it’s hubris, and quality captured gear was being taken as personal or unit trophies, junked, pushed into rivers to clear roads, etc. After the 1940 fall of France, Becker was alarmed at the fate of Allied weapons. Captured gear was assembled at points called Sammelstelle and then shipped back from the front lines for disposition.Ī notable figure during WWII regarding captured weapons was Major Alfred Becker, commander of the 200th Assault Gun Battalion of the 21st Panzer Division. The most formal was Germany’s Beutewaffe (literally, ‘booty’ or ‘loot’ weapon) effort, which encompassed everything from handguns to fighter aircraft with an official code in the Waffenamt system for example FK-288(r) (the Soviet ZiS-3 anti-tank gun), SIGew-251(a) (the American M1 Garand rifle), and Sd.Kfz 735(i) (the Italian Fiat M13/40 tank). One of the reasons WWII battlefields did not remain littered with vehicles for long was that, with the lone exception of the USA, all of the major warring powers made some official level of combat usage of captured enemy arms during WWII. For the latter, I was surprised at how very little is written about it so perhaps this will be of interest. These are wide-ranging but two in particular seem very popular: WWII weapons in the Vietnam War, which has been touched on several times and a general question of how the world “cleaned up” WWII battlefields after the war. Since starting wwiiafterwwii, I receive from time to time suggestions for topics.
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