The fate of World War II surplus aircraft — General Aviation News

By Frederick Johnsen · October 16, 2022 · 7 Comments

World War II was a huge logistical problem that demanded high production output from American industry right up to its surprise ending with the Japanese signaling surrender in August 1945.

But once the war was over, there was a glut of aircraft.

In fact, that glut began before the war was over when some older military aircraft became surplus as newer machines came on line.

Aircraft storage areas, typically in the American west and south, became the new home for these older and sometimes war-weary aircraft. By early August 1945, with war in the Pacific still under way, about 4,000 military planes were already parked at surplus fields.

More than 500 had found new buyers, but the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) expressed disappointment that not more of the airplanes had found new homes.

A photo from the airfield at Wickenburg, Arizona, shows lines of Ryan PT-22s among the types out of service.

If light trainers were not captivating buyers, rows of bombers and fighters at places like Ontario and Blythe, California, offered a different future. The RFC figured on recouping some of the cost of these warplanes by selling their engines and accessories, while scrapping the aluminum airframes.

In August 1945, Ontario hosted 1,600 surplus warplanes, Blythe 877. Hemet, California, logged 27 surplus machines, while Phoenix had 236 aircraft, and Wickenburg 680.

The Los Angeles RFC office reported it cost $8 per month per aircraft for storage and processing, including handling sales.

Kingman, Arizona, became a huge and well-known desert parking lot for a surplus fleet estimated at more than 5,000 aircraft. But there were many smaller pockets of World War II aircraft in storage, most of which were scrapped in the postwar 1940s.

Army Air Forces depots near Spokane, Washington, and Ogden, Utah, yielded scrap in an era long before these machines were prized as historic icons.

Meanwhile, bases in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Pyote, Texas, parked aircraft in the dry sunshine. Pyote is said to have stored more than 2,000 warplanes, including many B-29 Superfortresses.

Walnut Ridge, Arkansas, as well as Clinton and Altus, Oklahoma, also swelled with surplus aircraft, with Walnut Ridge storing nearly 4,000. Augusta, Georgia, was another RFC scrapping center.

The current military aircraft storage and salvage facility at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson also stored Army Air Forces aircraft after the war. Included in this were a number of foreign and domestic artifacts destined for the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio.

The American aviation industry and the postwar Air Force had an interest in seeing the warplanes of the recently won conflict scrapped quickly.

Air Force leadership was painfully aware of the hobbling effect World War I surplus airplanes had on the growth of the Army Air Service in the 1920s. The next war could not be fought with B-24s and B-17s. New aircraft were on the horizon, and existing planes could be a roadblock to their acquisition.

In November 1945, an analysis in Aviation Week by William Kroger said: "Responsible government officials are determined to wipe out what now is considered to be largely an obsolete air force before any Congressional or public clamor arises for its retention for reasons of economy alone."

The aluminum ingots recovered from scrapped aircraft constituted an alloy not necessarily appropriate for returning to aircraft construction, the Aviation Week story noted. A B-24 Liberator contained 13,000 pounds of aluminum. Scrapping and melting was estimated to recover 65% to 70% of that tonnage, but the result was not pure aluminum. The U.S. Navy experimented with a furnace from which it was hoped ingots of 94% pure aluminum could be recovered, with the belief that these would be viable for some commercial uses. It is possible die-cast products made use of such recovered aluminum.

Navy aircraft scrapping in the fall of 1945 involved manual separation of differing metals. At Naval Air Station Jacksonville in Florida, about five warplanes were salvaged daily. The costly metals separation task was borne by prisoners of war in 1945. With their expected repatriation in early 1946, the profitability of the Jacksonville salvage operation was in question.

A number of military aircraft survived the mass purges of 1945-49 intact. Some, typically transports, were eligible for standard civil licenses. Some bombers and attack aircraft qualified for the limited licensing category that enabled their use as working warbirds for tasks like photo mapping and agricultural application. Still others — often fighters — were sold in the restricted category.

To the extent that the military services kept some World War II types in limited numbers for postwar uses resulted in more of these types eventually entering the civilian market. That's why today the warbird movement has more B-17s than B-24s, which were quickly chopped up, more B-25s than A-20s, more P-51s than P-47s.

If it is easy to decry the mass scrapping of iconic World War II aircraft today, it is good to remember the forces at work in the 1940s, long before air museums were commonplace, when the Air Force and industry considered the machines from the last war to be more liability than asset.

(This article includes research made possible by access to the complete Aviation Week and Space Technology online archive, for which we are grateful. The archive is available as an Aviation Week subscriber benefit).