I wish a Merry Christmas to all wwiiafterwwii readers, a few days early. Below is a Christmas card of the British XII Army of 1945, the first peacetime Christmas which Great Britain had since 1938.
Tag: 2020s
salute to USS Hemminger / HTMS Pin Klao: WWII to 2025
On 1 October 2025 the Royal Thai Navy decommissioned HTMS Pin Klao, the former USS Hemminger (DE-746). It was the last Cannon class in service, the final WWII DE (destroyer-escort) of any type still in service, and one of a small number of WWII warships of any type or nation still in use during the 2020s.
(USS Hemminger (DE-746) during WWII.)
(The final crew of HTMS Pin Klao, the ex-USS Hemminger, during 2025.)
Sherman’s last ride
The USA’s M4 Sherman tank of WWII had a long career after that war, seeing service with numerous armies in several conflicts around the world after WWII. The last active user was the South American nation of Paraguay.
(Sherman Repotenciado of Paraguay’s Regimiento Escolta Presidencial; by 2018 the final active-duty unit anywhere on Earth still using WWII Shermans.)
the MAS-36 in Burkina Faso
France’s WWII MAS-36 rifle served in a number of francophone African nations after WWII. This is a look at one of the more obscure, Burkina Faso.
(French soldier with MAS-36 rifle during WWII.)
(Upper Volta army soldiers with MAS-36 rifles during 1976.)
transplanting South Vietnam’s WWII warships to the Philippines 1975
Fifty years ago this May, ships of the South Vietnamese navy fled to the Philippines as Saigon was overrun.
Recently media outlets have covered this story, often as “…how America stole a whole navy in 1975!” which is not correct. Meanwhile many naval observers worldwide are aware that the Philippines later received these WWII-era warships, but not really aware of the steps to make that happen.
This will be less technical data and more a look at the behind-the-scenes hoops that the USA jumped through to transplant a fallen ally’s WWII-era warships into another ally’s fleet.
(The escape: Overloaded with refugees, HQVN Lam Giang arrives at Côn Son as Saigon falls in 1975. It had been LSM-226 during WWII.)
(The payoff: BRP Miguel Malvar, formerly South Vietnam’s HQVN Ngoc Hoi and the WWII US Navy’s USS Brattleboro, serving the Philippines in the 21st century.)
PM M1910 in the Russo-Ukrainian War
Perhaps the most “out of place” thing in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is a machine gun not only of the second world war but also the first.
(Soviet PM M1910 in action during the WWII battle of Kursk.)
(Ukrainian army soldiers training with paired PM M1910s during 2024.)
the M8 Greyhound in Mexico after WWII
The WWII American M8 Greyhound armored car has had an incredibly long run in Mexico, still being upgraded in the 21st century. Beyond these vehicles themselves, it is a chance to look at Mexico during and after WWII. At least in English-language sources, Mexico – considering its size and population – is often given scant attention.
(US Army M8 Greyhound during WWII.)
(The Mexican army’s M8 Modificado II, still in service almost 80 years after WWII ended.)
the T-34 in Laos
The USSR’s most-produced tank of WWII, and most successful during that war, was the T-34. After WWII many nations received this tank, one of the more obscure ones being Laos.
(Soviet soldiers with a T-34 during WWII.)
(Lao T-34 during the 2010s.)
(Ex-Lao T-34s in the Russian Federation during 2020.)
The path by which these T-34s came to Laos and then “returned” to Russia is quite winding and interesting.
For starters, they didn’t really “return home”, at least not in the strictest sense of the words. They are all Czechoslovak post-WWII production, having first gone through Vietnam.
the Enfield No.4 in Myanmar after WWII
With 4,000,000+ being made, the Enfield No.4 Mk.I is often considered the classical WWII British rifle. In the nation of Burma (today called Myanmar) it continues in use in the 2020s.
(British soldier in Bahe, Burma with Enfield No.4 rifle during WWII.)
(Myanmar National Police member with an Enfield No.4 rifle during 2016.)
what happened to Japan’s WWII aircraft companies after 1945
When WWII began in 1939 Japan was an aeronautical giant; one of the top five aerospace powers on Earth. Six years later the industry lay in ruins and a year after that, no longer even existed on paper.
With the possible exception of Mitsubishi, very little was ever written about Japanese aerospace companies before WWII and most were unknown outside of their homeland; in contrast to companies like Messerschmitt or Boeing which were famous worldwide. Nearly no attention at all was given to what happened to them after WWII.
A study of their final fates also has a second story. This is how defense contractors – which dominated Japan’s GDP during the early 1940s – were dismantled in a controlled way to limit the “contagion” of their loss to the wider postwar economy.
(Mitsubishi’s bombed-out factory at Nagoya at the end of WWII.)
(The Nakajima Aircraft corporate offices in Ota during the post-WWII American occupation. Today a Subaru factory; one of Nakajima’s descendants, is on these grounds.)
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