Absolutely. There was an enormous scrapyard at Cowley near Oxford, Metal and Produce Recovery Depot (MPRD) No. 1 (a second was established near Durham in 1943). Wrecks of both friendly and enemy aircraft were transported there, stripped of any potentially useful components, and ultimately smelted back into aluminium ingots - over 25,000 tons was recovered over the course of the war.

For enemy aircraft the first priority was to secure the crash site; ideally the police, Home Guard or regular army would be despatched to the site as soon as possible - souvenir hunting was strictly forbidden, but smaller parts of aircraft could be rapidly spirited away. The BBC People's War archive, for example, has accounts such as schoolboys picking up incendiary bombs or dodging around guards hunting for souvenirs.

Aircraft or wreckage would be searched and catalogued, most carefully if it was a new or unusual type. Every aspect would be examined - airframe, weapons, engines, equipment etc - first in situ, then if of particular interest the wreck would be transported to the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough for more detailed inspection (the Rolls-Royce works in Derby also analysed engines). Construction techniques, metallurgical properties of components, ballistic performance of weapons were all examined, and in those early days of electronic warfare radio equipment was of particular interest to determine enemy capabilities and formulate countermeasures. The very first German bomber brought down intact over Britain contained a blind landing set (used to guide an aircraft to its runway in poor visibility or at night) that was found to be particularly sensitive, eventually determined to be used with Knickebein, a beam guidance system that assisted the Luftwaffe in finding targets. A British ground-scanning radar was known as Rotterdam-Gerät (Rotterdam device) to the Germans after it was first recovered from a crashed bomber there in 1943.

Wrecks could be used for publicity and fund raising, such as the fuselage of a Heinkel He 111 acting as focus of interest for a Spitfire fund collection or a Bf 109 in front of Windsor Castle. Finally, when there was no more use for them, they were taken to an MPRD. The artist Paul Nash was taken by the visual spectacle of Cowley, seeing the aircraft wrecks as a sort of frozen sea and painted Totes Meer; the Tate also have many photographs Nash took for the piece.

See also the "MPRD" Projects page for the Horspath Archaeology & History Group and a BBC People's War story of a laboratory worker at Cowley MPRD