WW2 - an ecological nightmare?

So I was walking to the shops this morning and a thought struck me. I'm just starting 'Post War' by Tony Judt. It opens with a description of the large scale effects of the Second World War; dwelling on displaced refugees, demographic changes, mortality rates, destruction of cities and the national responses to the psychological shock of occupation and collaboration. This was all familiar stuff, although Judt manages to really illustrate the catastrophic nature of a war that we are indoctrinated from a young age to view with rose-tinted spectacles. However, there was no examination of what effects the war may have had on the ecology of the affected countries and I can't recall ever seeing such an analysis. Obviously environmental damage was not the top priority of post-war rebuilders but it seems likely that it was just as serious as the destruction of human life and infrastructure caused by the conflict.

This thought was backed up by something I remember reading in (of all things) a travel guide. The link between war and environmental damage is often easier to see in Africa due to the presence of large, endangered animals that are closely monitored and to a certain degree reliant on stable governance to protect them from poachers. Anyway this travel guide referred to the South African government's use of Namibia's lush Caprivi strip as a base for their intervention in Angola during the civil war. It noted that due to the break down of law and order, the presence of armed factions and the easy availability of weapons during this period there was a rise in poaching and a fall in the populations of endangered animals that many areas have still not completely recovered from today. War obviously has its environmental effects even if they often go unnoticed amid the general chaos.

So I think I'm going to do some internet research and see if I can find out anything about the effects of total war on European ecology. I'll confine my focus to Europe as it is a huge question already and I don't fancy getting into the environmental effects of dropping nuclear bomb (although that might be a fun project for another time!). Lacking University-level journal access and time it will probably be a bit patchy and unspecific but hopefully I'll discover some interesting things.

Initial thoughts for things to look into -

1) Rare animals in European zoos – I remember a possibly apocryphal story that bombing wiped out all of the elephants kept in captivity in Berlin. Zoo animals were high profile and had a better chance of making it into eyewitness testimony than wild animals.

2) Horses – Despite increased mechanisation the armies of WW2 were almost as reliant on horse drawn transport for logistics and the movement of troops as in WW1. Tank and truck numbers were limited and railways wouldn't get you everywhere. A large number of these horses will inevitably have been killed by bullets or bombing.

3) Feeding of large armies – How far did the various armies in Europe live off the land? Modern films generally portray them as eating army rations and buying/stealing from civilian farmers. However, this is an American-centric view of the war and wouldn't have been as easy for (for example) Russian partisans based in deep forests without logistic support. Quite conceivably there were some soldiers who were forced to hunt for their food or did so to supplement rations.