Illustrated with more than 150 unique photographs, Abandoned
World War II Weapons allows the history buff and general reader to
explore the detritus of this great, destructive conflict in every part
of the world.
The scattered remains of a German bomber on Spitsbergen Island; Sherman
tanks waterlogged off Omaha Beach; Japanese merchant ships sunk off the
coast of New Guinea. 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, armored
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 partisan weapons caches in the
Belorussian forest; sand-covered trucks in the Sahara desert; crashed
American bombers and Japanese anti-aircraft guns in the jungles of New
Guinea; tank wrecks on old military training grounds; 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 and today a popular dive site.
