What Happened to All of the M4 Shermans and T-34 Tanks after World War II?

Be they trundling through the mud of Western Europe, kicking up dust on the plains of North Africa or forging a path through the snow of the Eastern Front; the tank defined the war on land between 1939 and 1945. When the war ended and all sides began to disarm they found themselves with literally tens of thousands of now-surplus tanks in their inventories. Many of these war machines inevitably found themselves on the business end of a scrapper’s torch as they were broken up, melted down and remade in to the trinkets of peacetime but equally, huge numbers of these proven, modern and widely available machines were now being eyed by other armies around the world as a way of quickly and relatively cheaply modernising their own tank units. As a result, for many of these tanks, combat was far from over. This is the story of how two of the most iconic tanks of World War II went back into the fray with owners old and new, time and time again, long after they should have been confined to the history books. They were