The Allied soldiers moved through the Italian countryside, their weapons ready, my grandfather among them. He carried his standard-issue Thompson submachine gun, the weapon he was trained to use. But on his hip, in a holster he rarely spoke about, was a trophy he had taken from an Italian officer—a Beretta semi-automatic pistol. He never fired it in anger, as far as I know.
It was just something he kept. That was the typical way of things. Most captured weapons ended up as personal souvenirs, picked up off battlefields and carried as keepsakes. The MP 40, the German submachine gun, was a favorite among Allied soldiers who used it when they could.
But officially, troops were discouraged from using captured weapons in combat. The problem was sound. German weapons had a distinctive crack compared to Allied guns, and in the chaos of battle, that difference could get a man killed by his own side. The British, though, took a more organized approach.
They armed some of their special forces with captured MP 40s. The SAS used them on operations dropped behind enemy lines. The folding stock made them lighter and easier to carry on parachute jumps than the heavier Thompson, and ammunition could be sourced from resistance networks. The SOE, Britain’s covert operations organization, and its American counterpart, the OSS, issued German Walther PP and PPK pistols to their agents going undercover in occupied Europe.
Those compact weapons were easy to hide, and again, ammunition was simple to obtain through local resistance groups. There were even stranger adaptations. SOE armorers modified Luger pistols for silent killing, preparing them for assassination missions inside Germany, including a planned attempt on Hitler himself. I examined one of those modified Lugers at the Combined Military Services Museum in Essex.
Later, the famous Welrod assassination pistol was deliberately chambered with German 9mm Parabellum ammunition so agents could fire it behind enemy lines and still find bullets for it. The Pacific theater was different. Not much Japanese equipment was used by the Allies. Some US scouts and snipers were issued captured Japanese Type 97 and Type 99 sniper rifles, which were respectable weapons with an incredibly low muzzle flash that made a shooter hard to spot.
Quite a few were used officially by US snipers in the Pacific War. But Japanese machine guns were just battlefield pickups, discarded once the ammunition ran out. Japanese weapons were seen as greatly inferior, except for those sniper rifles, so there was never any widespread issuance of captured Japanese gear. In September 1944, the 82nd Airborne Division dropped into the Netherlands as part of Operation Market Garden.
The plan was to seize a series of bridges and hold them until British armor could relieve the paratroopers. But the planners had made a serious miscalculation. They had not expected the paratroopers to face much German armor, so they did not send enough bazookas. The initial drop brought little anti-tank ammunition, and follow-up supply drops were scattered, prioritizing small arms ammo, food, and medical supplies over heavy weapons.
The paratroopers faced seasoned German troops and tanks. But luck intervened when the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment overran a German supply depot near Nijmegen. It was stacked with crates of panzerfausts, the single-shot German anti-tank weapons that packed a much bigger punch than the American bazooka. The crates were distributed among the units.
Many of the men already knew how to use them from earlier service in Sicily and Normandy. General James Gavin, commander of the 82nd Airborne, later wrote that the panzerfaust was “the best anti-tank weapon we had for the remainder of the war. ” Crates of them stayed in divisional stores for the rest of the conflict. By late 1944 and into early 1945, the advancing Allied armies in Western Europe had outrun their own supply lines.
Everything was still coming over the Normandy beaches, trucked forward by the complicated Red Ball Express. Captured ports had mostly been badly damaged by the Germans to prevent their use. Antwerp had been captured intact, but the Germans still held the Scheldt estuary, and it took costly operations by British and Canadian forces to clear the area before supply ships could enter. Fuel and ammunition shortages soon appeared, forcing the Allied armies to stop and dig in on the German frontier.
That pause gave the Germans a valuable breathing space to reorganize—and to launch their counteroffensive in the Ardennes in mid-December. The Allies had overrun many German artillery batteries and supply depots, often capturing weapons in perfect working order. With a critical shortage of shells for American and British guns, a decision was made to re-equip some artillery units with captured German weapons, which had plentiful ammunition. The US Army re-equipped two field artillery battalions with German 10.
5cm leFH 18 field guns. The 244th Field Artillery Battalion received the feared German 88mm anti-tank gun and used it in an indirect fire role. The 733rd Field Artillery Battalion also used captured 88s. The British did the same, turning German guns against their former owners.
One of the most extensive examples of captured vehicle reuse came from the US 83rd Infantry Division, nicknamed the Ragtag Circus—and sometimes the 83rd Panzer Division, because of its use of captured German armored vehicles. Many Allied units used the odd German tank here and there. The Fourth Coldstream Guards captured a German Panther tank in the Netherlands in late 1944, named it Cuckoo, and used it until it had to be abandoned for lack of spares. But the 83rd decided to use German vehicles en masse, building up a large supply of spare parts to keep them running.
It was impressive. StuG III assault guns were resprayed olive drab and given the Allied white star. So were German SdKfz 251 armored half-tracks and various soft-skin trucks. The headquarters staff used not only US Jeeps but also German Kubelwagen field cars and BMW and Zündapp motorcycles.
They even commandeered civilian buses and repainted them. Most incredible of all, they added an air unit: a captured German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter, repainted olive drab, given Allied stars, and on the underside of its wings, painted with the words “83rd Infantry Division. ”
In North Africa, the desert placed a premium on captured equipment because resupply was so difficult. The initial British campaign against the Italians who had invaded Egypt resulted in the capture of an astounding 365 Italian tanks, about 60 of them medium types.
These were overhauled, fitted with British radios, and used to equip the 6th Royal Tank Regiment while they waited for more modern British tanks. The Italian tanks were unpopular—their mechanical reliability was poor and their armor was thin—but they were all they had. The Australian cavalry unit of the 6th Australian Infantry Division also pressed captured Italian tanks into service. They painted white kangaroos on the hulls and turrets for identification in battle.
They used two types: the M11/39 medium, armed with a 37mm gun, and the slightly heavier M13/40 with a 47mm main gun. Eleven of these Italian tanks were used effectively by the Australian cavalry for reconnaissance and direct fire support until Allied tanks finally arrived. The Free French Army, equipped and supplied by the British and Americans, fought across France and into Germany in 1944-45. While well supplied with armor, they occasionally used captured German vehicles as well.
One French unit was fully equipped with abandoned German tanks and used to support the siege of the German-occupied port of Saint-Nazaire, which was well behind the Allied front line. That important U-boat base held out until the end of the war. The French unit fielded a Tiger I, a Panther, 11 Panzer IVs, and two StuG III assault guns. After the war, the French Army kept using 49 Panther tanks until a new French design entered service in the 1950s.
There is a distinction between aircraft captured and reused for practical purposes and those taken back to home countries for scientific testing. We are talking about the former. During the desert campaign, the Royal Australian Air Force captured an intact Junkers Ju 52 transport at El Gazala in Libya. Adopted by Number 450 Squadron as their runabout, it was repainted in Allied colors and given the name Libyan Clipper.
Every week, it made two or three round trips between Cairo and the front line, moving supplies, ferrying pilots going on leave, and carrying food. And being Australians, one of its most important jobs was bringing up beer. There was nothing better than a cold one when you were stuck in a trench in the desert. The aircraft was a tremendous morale booster.
Another extremely popular German plane pressed into Allied service was the Fieseler Fi 156 Storch, a short takeoff and landing aircraft. The British captured up to 145 of them. Sixty-four were handed to the French as war reparations, but the remainder became personal planes for Allied leaders. Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery had his own Storch in North Africa and then Northwest Europe.
Air Vice-Marshal Sir Harry Broadhurst got Rommel’s personal Storch, which had been captured in North Africa, and used it to take Prime Minister Winston Churchill for a flight over Allied lines in Normandy in 1944. The South African Air Force also operated captured Junkers 52s. Several SAAF fighter squadrons adopted captured Messerschmitt Bf 109Fs as squadron hacks—utility and liaison planes—painted in South African Air Force colors. These are just a few examples of how Allied forces reused captured Axis equipment during the war.
The Soviet use of German equipment is another story entirely.
