Car graveyard - U.S. Soldiers

Car grave yard in Belgium story.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...ldiers-hid-beautiful-vintage-motors-WWII.html

Intersting !

 

Damn ! Shattered dreams for those guys.

 

It's really something that these cars still exist after all these years, there has to be alot of story's out there when these cars first arrived.

 

i went there 2 years ago and everthing was gon ... to the crusher

 

Nothing to cry about. I only spotted two or three pics of anything remotely "WWII" era.

 

Cars sitting under evergreens are doomed,,appears most, if not all were not good candidates for anything but the crusher. HRP

 

Wow, those things are wasted!

 

I didn't see many cars there that were pre war. Mostly 50's stuff. When my Dad was stationed in Germany in the early to mid 50's most of the servicemen returning home sold their cars to the new guys coming in.

 

Those WWll soldiers must have been time travelers !

 

Mother nature can be a bitch!

 

I agree !!!!!

 

X3- the real shame was the European stash that was written about in Automobile Quarterly some years ago- just a private owner who didn't want to sell his cars- Bugattis, Alfas, Delages, etc.

 

I wouldnt pay any attention to that old rag, i wouldn't wipe my ass with the Daily Mail let alone what i wouldn't do with the website. Those cars arent all pre 1947 as alleged to when the US left.

 

If US Army policy was anything like Canadian army policy, soldiers could bring personal belongings home at government expense including cars. My uncle bought a new Rover TC2000 in 1968 when he was stationed in Germany. As long as you owned the car for 6 months before being sent home, they would pay to ship it.

On the other hand if you had an old banger why bother? This is what a lot of guys did including my other uncle. Buy an old heap, run it into the ground and abandon it when you got reassigned.

In his case it was a split window 1947 VW that he dumped beside the road when it ran out of gas the day before he left. This was in 1956.

I suspect the junkyard in the woods was just a convenient dumping ground, possibly it was a remote part of an army base back then. Once they were abandoned no one could use them or register them without the log book or registration documents.

 

I was stationed outside of Nurenburg in the mid-late 60s and we had an impromptu "wrecking yard" on post. At the far end of the property, we'd find old cars dumped by fellow soldiers when they we no longer viable to repair. The higher-ups would let them sit and be picked-over by us poor enlisted guys for our low-buck opels, VWs and GoGo Mobiles for a few weeks and have them hauled off base.
I had a 57 Opel Kadette and scored a cylinder head off a 53 or 54 Opel sitting all alone at the end of the base...it was gone in a week.
It was cheaper than grinding the valves on my 57 engine and may have had smaller combustion chambers for a little higher compresion...sure ran better.
And in '69 the only guys who got their cars shipped back to "the world" for free were guys who just reinlisted or officers. By then I had a 7 year old Buick special with the 215 V/8 and I sold it before came home.

 

First thing I thought of.

 

Typical sloppy Daily Mail reporting - lots of cheap 1960's English Fords in those pictures.

 

Things sure rust away quickly there. It must be near the coast. Those are so far gone that they aren't worth even scrap.

 

Nothing errie and enchanting there. Bunch of 4 door junk. No US soldier would wanna bring that crap back. Looks like any other junkyard of the time. OOO lets spice up our crapy news story and say a bunch of soldiers hid these cars. BS. Are they suggesting some of them were stolen too?

 

Looks like old cars that were of little value being parked parted and allowed to decay. No diffrent than any junk yard. The good ones get saved and the rest turn into soil.

 

What a crock BS story. I left Germany in 70 as a mere E-5 and the Army shipped my Roadrunner back to the states, no problem, along with anyone that was E-5 or above. No GI in WW2 would be thinking about a damn car being shipped home. THEY wanted to come home.
Everyone had a POS Euro car when I was there to run the streets with and none of those were ever brought home. No one wanted them. One guy bought a bought a new 914 and we had to put I think 1000 miles on it before shipping it home or he was going to have to pay a large import tax or something because it was new. That dang Porsche was driven 24-7 for a week to get the miles on it by three or four of us, but we got the mileage and he shipped it home. I dragraced the Roadrunner there for over a year at Ramstein Air Base. The RR wasn't worth a damn on the Autobahn with a 4:86 gear so we all had Opels for daileys.

BOutlaw

 

Looks like a young reporter found some great pictures and decided to make up a story to go along with it.

My family was stationed in Germany in the mid-1950's. I wasn't born yet but my mom told me the Army shipped their '53 Chevy over for them and when they left they sold it for a tidy sum; the equivalent of driving the car for free for three years. They bought a brand new '57 Chevy when they got home so I could come home from the hospital in style!

 

Seems like a work of fiction by someone with no idea of what they were looking at.
Much ado about rotting garbage.
Yawn - life's too short to worry about crap like this.

 

Bullshit story.

There are pics of a '62/'66 Ford Taunus, and a '59/'68 Ford Anglia.

Those cars were not left right after WWII.