Military men - what happens to destroyed/abandoned tanks etc. on battlefield

The aussies say hold my beer, run out into no mans land, and pull that sum bitch out of the mud and bring it back home to Australia.

Ain’t she purdy

It's probably more expensive to try to salvage parts of a destroyed tank than just leave it

When I was in the Second Cavalry Regiment, we had one of the Iraqi tanks from Desert Storm parked out front of the Squadron HQ.

To the victor...

If it’s one of theirs, it’s usually just left. If it’s one of ours, we call a wrecker...

quote:

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Theirs were irradiated with DU rounds, ours were not

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I know. I irradiated my share of them. Course before I sent those DU rounds down range, they’d been loaded in the ammo compartment about 4’ from my seat in the gunner’s station. But we were assured they were perfectly safe. And would the Army lie to us?

The ideal notion is that the Logistics branch of your military is able to collect/receive your salvageable tank wrecks and make use of them.

During WW2 the German Wehrmacht and Waffen SS were quite proficient in this practice, and, it kept their armored formations much more up to strength then they otherwise would have been.

Examples:

Rommel's Afrika Korps - expert and very proficient in collecting up battle damaged German tanks and getting them back in the fight ASAP. It was a real loss when Rommel's wreck collectors could NOT do this because the British held the battlefield after the fight.

Waffen SS armored formations on the Eastern Front in 1943 - Battle of Kursk - examination in the US National Archives of the actual unit records of losses and restored to the battlefield show that tank losses were remarkably small due to battlefield repair of "destroyed" tanks.

-1943 Battles near the Mius River -- same remarkable example of repairing and restoring "destroyed" tanks to the battlefield.

Of course, the battlefield ability to do this breaks down when the pace of your retreat accelerates and the enemy air interdiction operations interrupt your capabilities to do this. I'm talking about the July, 1944 to May, 1945 phase of the war on West and East Fronts.

quote:

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I know. I irradiated my share of them. Course before I sent those DU rounds down range, they’d been loaded in the ammo compartment about 4’ from my seat in the gunner’s station. But we were assured they were perfectly safe. And would the Army lie to us?

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You are perfectly fine and completely normal, so, what more do you want?

Back in the day they did this too.

M88

I bet we left a ton of shite in Iraq. There was a huge boneyard in Al Asad last time I was there. Tanks, tracks, HMMVEEs, trucks, etc. Anything useful had been stripped off, but the skeletons were there. I doubt they took all that crap out when we left, and prob left our good stuff too for the hajiis to joyride in. I hit an IED, my vehicle was towed to Al Asad, and three years later I was back there and it was still sitting in the same spot. Prob still sitting there. What a stupid fricking place.