Question: Have U ever discovered a war artifact on a WWII battlefield?

[WineCape]

Has any grog/historian/person on this board visited a WWII European/North African battlefield out of curiosity and picked up something relevant to that battlefield that was lying buried after so many years? Or willfully walking with some metal detector device to scavenge for interesting unspent artillery shells, rifles, shell casings or whatever war materials that was, most probably, buried and long forgotten?

If so, it would be very interesting to hear on this forum what items you have discovered while walking/searching and where. Anybody with interesting info to relate here for the board members?

Sincerely,

Charl Theron

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"The last time that I trusted a dame was in Paris in 1940. She was going out to get a bottle of wine. Two hours later, the Germans marched into France."

-- Sam Diamond in "Murder by Death" (1976)

[ February 21, 2002, 09:22 AM: Message edited by: WineCape ]

[CMplayer]

This doesn't really count but at a flea market in Berlin in 1987 (the one near Gleisdreieck) I found a bunch of old family photos. Many of them showed 'dad' dressed up in an SS-looking uniform.

[Frenchy]

While my family was stationed at Kadena AFB on Okinawa from 1965 - 1970, I had the opportunity to visit the battle sites of that island. I was only 9 when we arrived so it was for me one heck of an adventure.

Many areas outside the base still had areas off limits due to Naval unexploded ordinance.

My friends and I would go up and down that island; the Shuri Ridge defences, the beaches, Sugar Loaf Hill and numerous others and find plenty of M-1, .30, .50, 20mm and 40mm unspent ammo. Our biggest find was a cave with remnants of a Nambu with shells still there, cracked and spilling the powder. It was an incredible find.

We would take this stuff to the Museum on Fort Sukiran, now Camp Sukiran, and sell it. It was a great museum of the battle and had numerous items.

I also visited the location where General Buckner was killed. At the time it was marked with a simple cross. With the urbanization of the island in recent years, I doubt if any of the areas I walked are accessible or even exist today.

I'll see if I can't dig up some old photos.

[JAK]

While we were stationed in Hanau, Germany we would pickup pieces of glass cups, shell casings, and the like out of the training area behind our quarters "campo pond". I Have been to Grafenwohr

and Paderborn, but by far the most awesome sight I have seen in Germany was that of the Hanau Market Platz on the weekend! Eine Herring Brochen Bitte!

Jake

[Guest Panzer Boxb]

When I was but a young one... bussed to school

in Frankfurt, Germany. Around "Platten" somewhere, the name eludes me. The US Army had converted a WWII warehouse to our Junior High.

They were doing upgrades to the water lines and must have stumbled across a buried equipment horde.

As our buses were coming in, scores of kids were jumping in the pit recovering helmets, articles of

dress, gas mask containers and whatnot. Needless to say it was chaos, for me it was "I want". The US Army quickly posted guards and cornered the area off.

Later that day I managed to recover something I might still have to this day. :confused:

I need to say this to protect me.

I know I did not get what I really wanted. But it

was a sight to behold.

To this day I think about the history of that place. Incredible, and frightening.

-Mike Z. :cool:

[Bruno Weiss]

Think that is where I discovered Walter Cronkite.

[Jussi Köhler]

While a was in the Finnish army, I participated on a trip over to the Russian side to see our old defencive lines (about 6 years ago I think). There was still surprisingly much ammo-casings and similar stuff left in and near the old trenches. I found an ammoclip to the famous Suomi-SMG... It was VERY rusty and in bad shape. I have lost it since then somewhere... One of my mates actually dug up an old helmet with a hole in it, which was a bit spooky... I think it schocked him so much that he didnt take it with him...

Jussi

[ParaBellum]

When I was in the Bundeswehr we once had manoeuvres with the german-french brigade in France in Camp Mourmelon in the Verdun region.

Once when I came back from the woods where our camp was, I asked my staff sergeant what the plastic flags meant I saw next to my personal toilet area...

He told me that these flags were markers for WW1 shells and grenades and that I better be carefull where to sh*** here...

Since there were so many duds lying around the french simply couldn't destroy them all.

Needless to say from then on I got VERY careful in choosing where to relieve myself...

Once I was on patrol in some woods when we found some human bones.

We didn't touch them but informed the french authorities so that 80 years after these horrible battles the remains of that soldier could be burried on a cemetery among with his comrades.

After you've seen the countless rows of crosses and the "bone house" near Douaumont you loose your interest in battlefield tourism...

[ February 21, 2002, 01:31 PM: Message edited by: ParaBellum ]

[Leta]

I live in Madrid, Spain, and a few Km. from my home, in the Ciudad Universitaria (University City) was one of the bloodiest fronts of all the Spanish Civil War. I remember, when I'm only 5 years old (in 1967, 28 years past the end of the war) I was in that zone with my parents, walking at the countryside. Then I saw something white ... I ran to it and when I was over it, I saw with horror it was part of a human backbone. With 5 years, I was afraid of skeletons so, recognizing that as a part of one of them, I ran crying to my father's arms. We immediatly went back to the car, but at the side of the path I saw part of a skull ... imagine that.

Well, I remember that day perfectly because those images impact me during years. And years after, studying history I could understand how in the heck those things were there. The rain probably washed the terrain and the bones appeared ... I don't know, but I don't want to find again nothing like that in a battlefield.

Recently, a few months ago, I was in a small village of the north of Spain in an ancient house of a friend. He was repairing the roof, and before this, he needs to clean up the attic, plenty of old things. "Watch that thing I encountered" said my friend. Then he gave me a little bag of strong material. Inside was a perfectly preserved gas mask his grandparents has during the war, to prevent a gas attack.

Sometimes it's not neccesary to go to the battlefield to find war souvenirs

[ February 21, 2002, 01:53 PM: Message edited by: Leta ]

[Pvt. Ryan]

When I was a kid we used to drive from NY to FL. One day while driving through North Carolina we stopped at a Stuckey's and I bought a Civil War minnie ball. It was an awesome find and I still have it.

[Hensworth]

The discovery of unexploded airplane bombs and artillery shells is still a very regular occurrence here. Sometimes somebody even manages to get blown up by one.

Recently a whole village in the north of France had to be evacuated because a store of WWI gas shells had started to leak. After nearly 90 years they still haven't been destroyed !

My top find was an airplane bomb on the mudflats in front of the Dutch coast. They were often dropped by damaged bombers limping back to England.

[Bruno Weiss]

I found a paintball cartridge in the woods out front of my house.

[vimes]

When I was 6 or maybe 7 I spend a summer with my uncle who lived on the Crimean

peninsula at the time. One weekend we were at the beach and I and my cusin were running

around on the beach when we saw something dark in the sand. We ran towards it and saw

an rusted cylinder. It was very rusted couple bends in it and one of the fins survived, we

just discovered a bomb.

So we tried to turn this thing around, it was heavy but we managed to turn it around and

saw that there was a gash running trough nearly the whole length of the bomb and it was

filed with sand. This didn’t deminsh our joy that we have found a bomb, we quickly

decided to share our discovery with my uncle but to our suprise he didn’t share our

enthusiasm, after he examined it alone he gave us a lecture about not touching stuff like

that and show them to adults. That was the last time I saw our little bomb

[ianc]

My dad was an art professor and he took two sabbaticals when I was 5 and 12 (in '67 and '74), both for over a year. We travelled for about half the time and stayed in one spot for half of it. The first time was in Denmark, and the second in Holland in a little town called Heusden (which I visited last year for the first time in about 25 years).

My young Dutch friends and I would ride our bikes over and walk along the tops of the dikes there, and in those dikes were many artifacts, including many little shards of stems and the bowls of those long curved ceramic pipes the Dutch smoked long ago.

We also found many Enlish and German bullet shell casings, and I collected them, even then being a grognard in the making. I still have the best ones and the best two are sitting on my shelf right now, with 43 and 44 stamped on the bottom of them.

The story went that as the allies were closing in on the town, the Germans locked many of the townspeople in the town hall and burned it. Hence, the 'Duitsers' were not well looked upon in that part of the world, and the town hall looks rather newer than the rest of the buildings in the town square.

My best friend's father was a river policeman on the Maas, and he found an MP38 and a tommy gun over the years, but he sold them both. He let me steer the boat, but relieved me (quite rapidly) of the responsibility when I couldn't keep it straight.

ianc

[Blenheim]

Wow, Leto... sometimes is hard to remember that bloody battles were fought so near where I live (I am in Madrid, as well).

I remember as a child (I was 13 or so) finding a helmet in a trench near the Ebro. It was very rusty, and had a hole... When I realized what that meant, I had to throw it away. It was a Republican helmet, probably (little hammer and sickle on a side)....

[Scheer]

Interesting thread,

When I was a boy in the late sixties, we searched the fields around our home town Kiel ( northern germany ). Kiel was a major Kriegsmarine base in WW2. Around my home there were various Flakbunkers

and we found several 20 mm casings and once I´ve found a 88 grenade filled with white powder. There was a crack running from the back to the front.

My mom went postal on my a.. when she found this thing in my stash ... 8)

Scheer out

[offtaskagain]

I was born at Kadena AFB. Our house was about a block away from Sugar Loaf Hill. We used to pick bullet casings and other unidentifiable debris out of our lawn. My dad volunteered for duty to search the caves scattered all over for ordnance and remains. He found a complete skeleton in one. I've also visited Verdun. The battlefields are almost unchanged except for overgrowth. The Ossuaire at Dauoumont is a truly haunting place, especially for a 7 year old like I was at the time.

[flamingknives]

A friend of mine managed to retrieve a 2lb AT shell (projectile, no cartridge) from a dockyard crane! that was being dismantled. Apparently it and a couple of hundred more were being used as the counterweight (this was a british port, possibly Dover, I forget)

The best I got was a couple of bits of rusty barbed wire off the north end of the Somme battlefield.

You'd have to positively insane to go looking for live ordanance unless you're with bomb disposal, because old HE is almost the most unstable stuff in the world.

Every so often there is a bomb scare in a British school when some kid brings back something they found on a trip to some WWI battlefields.

It's more likely to find WWI stuff, since the combat was much more concentrated, at least in France/ Belgium

[Michael Dorosh]

The closest I've come was being on loan to the British Army in 1990, and upon billeting at the Guards Depot in Pirbright, being issued a wool blanket with the "1942" manufacturer's tag still sewn to it.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Michael Dorosh:

The closest I've come was being on loan to the British Army in 1990, and upon billeting at the Guards Depot in Pirbright, being issued a wool blanket with the "1942" manufacturer's tag still sewn to it.

When I was in the TA I saw L4 Brens with date-stamps going back to 1943, and they still worked fine...and though it's not quite so old, there's something special about eating a Mars Bar from a ration pack that's dated four years before you were born...

As you were so close at Pirbright, did you nip up the road (just past Deepcut, only a klick or two) to the Brookwood cemetery? It contains the Brookwood Memorial, bearing the names of all those killed on home service in WW2 with no known graves, which includes Violette Szabo, GC, as SOE service apparently counts as "home service" for this purpose. There is also the biggest plot of US war graves in the UK outside Madingley, mostly from WW1.

All the best,

John.

[Michael Dorosh]

Brookwood was also "D.R. Heaven" for all the motorcyclists of the Canadian Army who killed themselves through combinations of speed, alcohol, no road signs, driving on the opposite side, rain, fog, blackout conditions, and youthful exuberance.

Sadly, I never made it to the cemetery, nor to Aldershot where so many of my countrymen bashed square (and who knows, maybe even formed square early on...)

I did however get to parade on Horse Guards for three evenings, which was a thrill and an honour.

Not so much of an honour was being admitted, along with the rest of the "Commonwealth contingent" into the forecourt at Buckingham Palace to watch the changing of the guard. Despite the assurances of the TA Major (a double-named twit from the London Scottish) in charge of us that only very "special" people got to watch from the forecourt, we were singularly unimpressed once we were in the proper viewing place, and had a busload of mentally handicapped (ie "special") children join us alongside...

My FN (you may remember it as the SLR) on basic training was dated 1957 or so; 12 years before my birth. Never had Mars bars...guess I should consider myself lucky?

[Juju]

When my two uncles Walter and Gerard were in their pre-teens (say, end of the forties/beginning of fifties) they found a live handgrenade near my grandmother's home (Eindhoven, the Netherlands).

They were tossing it to and from in the livingroom, when my aunt (their sister) walked in. She told her teacher, who promptly called the police. They paid my grandmother a visit and confiscated the grenade.

Needless to say my uncles got a good hiding for pulling that stunt.

[Simon Elwen]

When I was 9 or 10 we stayed at my great uncles house in Brighton one summer, and we decided to play at war. My aunt told us to take some atuff from my uncles trunk to play with. It was heaven!!! There were two full battle dress uniforms, webbing etc And a Webley revolver and two Grenades, we were stunned. It turned out that he had been a bomb disposal officer during ww2 and had loads of stuff around. There were also 2 50kg Luftwaffe bombs in gararge along with a dozen or so incendiary bombs too!!!!. It was all defuzed or inactivated so they said they were ok to play with.When my Uncle passed away all the bombs were got rid of but my Aunt who is 89 still has all the rest of it. The only item I have is my Grandfathers ID tag from ww1 which is framed up with a photograph of him in his dress uniform (18th Hussars).Its something that I'm very proud to have .

[Fate]

Not WWII, but found an unexploded mortar in Hue on a trip to Vietnam. Have pic and will post it if I can find it.

Fate

[Louie the Toad]

I was born in '47 and ever since I can remember we had 50 cal. mg slugs and casings (w/o the powder) around the house. Maybe 3 or 4 of them. We used to play with them. Also a GI issue canteen with belt and case. My dad served in WWII as an MP in DC. So he was not in the fighting.

The story goes that he was directing traffic one day and was chewing gum on duty. A general's car pulled up next to him and a voice from inside barked out "get rid of that gum, soldier!". It was Omar Bradley.

Wrigley Toad