Have you ever just found something?

[holyorangejuice]

Have you ever just found some old piece of history (clothes,coins,papers,weapons,anything!!) in your backyard, on a vacation, in the woods, with a metal detector and anything else?

I use to take a metal detector and go through my backyard. I found some super old coins and a couple of bullet casings that were quite old. Not sure how old but they werent new either.

karl steiner

[Gunny57]

Used to look in places that were battlefields of WWII back in Europe...always found some spent casings...metal detector was ok, but once, we dug out a live 60mm mortar round...and somehow spoiled our day, as we had to wait the Carabinieri bomb disposal unit...but they rewarded us allowing us to watch when they blasted it!

MP

[HQ327]

As I kid I used to walk throught traiing areas on the AF base an collected spent brass, When living on Fort Campbell my sons found old buttons, dogtags, and other items form old barracks near Turner Loop that had been burned down, and bull dozed.

I have found minie balls on a friends farm here in NC, part of the Wyse Fork battlefield.

JG

[alleramilitaria]

found a B-17 in the mozel river vally, also found about 6 or so flack sites near the area (cement pads with lots of blast damaged scrap). around yepers.... bring a big bag, you will have it filled in about a hr. or less.

i found buttons, brass, mess tin, G98, and lots of arty fuses and fragments just walking around a farmers field (after getting the ok first)

dave

[hardtack88]

On a trip to the Hurtgen Forest I found a US shovel and the top of a machine gun ammo box.
I think I found some batteries and other debris of war, but I left it since it looked rather junky.
Oh yeah, this was just on the ground! I didn't even dig the stuff!

Sean Marcum

[twhigham]

When we were kids, my brother and I spent our summers collecting brass .50 cal bullets that washed up on the beach at our parent's beach house near Clearwater, Florida. Then we got brave and did some snorkeling for barnacle-encrusted bombs and artillery shells. We used to float them in on canvas rafts. Turned out the area was a gunnery site at one point. We hammered the crust off of one shell and took it to school wrapped in a paper bag for show and tell. They cleared the building for the bomb squad to deal with it and that was the end of our offshore explorations.

A bit later some military divers did some exercises and cleared the bigger ordinance out, but bullets still wash up from time to time.

Sometimes I think of my brother and I banging on that old artillery shell with claw hammers and thinking about how close we may have come to blowing us both to pieces.

[williegford]

I was walking past an old house in my neighborhood that was getting ready to be demolished when something told me to go inside and look around. In the garage, I found a pair of A6 shearling flight boots, which I of course liberated. Not as cool as finding a B-17 in the Mozel River Valley but it's all I've got.

Bill

[chiefyeomanbb55]

Some years ago while hiking the Dolly Sods Wilderness (located on the Cheat-Potomac Ranger District of the Monongahela National Forest in Tucker and Randolph Counties, West Virginia) our party came across a 60mm mortar shell. This is not unusual for the area because Dolly Sods was used as an Army training area in WWII and it is not uncommon to find ordnance lying around. We followed instructions in our guidebook (i.e. don't touch or move the object, note the location with something -- we used a stick with a handkerchiff tied to it and stuck in the grouond near the object -- and inform a park ranger as soon as possible). Much of this stuff is still "hot" after all these years.

Chief Mike

[france1917]

Mike they have also found small arms up there, and plenty of old pitons on Seneca Rocks from where the 10th Mountain trained there.

[dvt]

We bought a house and barn from a WWII vet. Part of the deal was they weren't cleaning out the 60+ years of clutter. In one out building we found a helmet and liner. In the barn we found a box marked as the flags for a formal dinner setting of a General. They are the 5 foot or so poles with stands etc.

[S/Sgt.Noble30thID]

Rode my bike past a house here in town about 6 or 7 years ago and found 3 footlockers full of stuff stacked beside the road. Went home and had Mom drive me back down there and there were now 2 more, plus a cot, plus uniforms!....I still have all of it and couldn't be happier.


CHarlie

[chiefyeomanbb55]

Not something I found, but a shipmate in my Naval Reserve unit approached me one drill weekend because he knew I collected militaria. He said he had something for me. After drill we went to his car, he opened his trunk and handed me a (1) WWI U.S. Army campaign hat in very good condition, and (2) U.S. Army wool WWI service tunic (size 40 with the cutter tag still attached). He said he was at his town dump the previous weekend and he saw somebody throw these things away, picked them up and gave them to me.

It's great having friends like that.

Chief Mike

[tentha86]

While wandering around outside the old Camp Hale site, we found a T28 (M29) Weasel - wrecked but 75% there. Then we found a '34 Ford wreck with a Camp Hale gate pass (1944) at the bottom of a gulley. There are still pitons in the climbing wall, and the dump is still intact - it's illegal to dig there, but there is broken crockery from the hospital laying on the surface, and glass Coke bottles and all manner of fun stuff if you know where to look.

In the training field close to to the bayonet course, there are hundreds of practice antitank mines buried about 12" down - but is's Federally protected property, and they get very grumpy if you dig. On the mortar range you used to be able to pick up expended 2.36 and 3.5 bazooka rounds, but Corps of Engineers cleaned that up a few years ago. If you know where the bivvy sites were on the ski slopes, you can find a bit of everything - lighters, dog tags, money, ammo, knives - even a cool set of brass knucks! At a recent reunion, I was able to reunite a vet with his "lost" lighter - AWOL for 60 years.

Cleaning out an old barracks for a remodel back east we found a Garand in the hollow wall - and a M2HB in an ammo burial dump with damaged side plates - I guess someone didn't want to turn it in "damaged". Both of those were turned over to the Provost after we drooled on them... The M1 is in their museum - the M2HB was more than a little rough - probably on some NCO's office now!

[chucklynch]

A kid I have a US history class with just told me about clearing out this old shack of a WWII veteran and they found a live bazooka round. One kid asked if he could keep it, but my buddy decided it best not to be fooled around with.Just told me this story this afternoon, "You get a kick out of this" is what he told me.
Personally I've never found jack, but my 91 y.o. grandfather has found several arrowheads on his farm while plowing fields.

[wiggins]

Feb 13, 2009 10:56:43 GMT -5 @france1917 said:

Mike they have also found small arms up there, and plenty of old pitons on Seneca Rocks from where the 10th Mountain trained there.

I've been right next to the Face of a 1,000 Pitons but haven't managed to get on the face yet. Need to pull one of those babies out. We should get a crew to climb Seneca in wools and 41's sometime

[parsonsjacket]

After my wife's grandfather (an ETO QMC truck driver vet) died, we went over to visit her grandmother. She gave me his discharge papers and a few medals and his ID card, and said i could go look around in their garage attic. i climbed up and in a corner was a GI gas can.
the papers are in a nice frame in our living room now, and the gas can is awaiting the day i have time/money to restore it.

[aicusv]

As a kid we use to go arrowhead hunting and found a few. Over the years I have found a lot of stuff in old barns and garages along the way as well. “Back in the day” when I was much younger, everybody had WWII stuff in the garage or down the basement. My brother and I had a full collection of WWII patches from every active division and command and even some that had limited membership. All at no cost. We never paid for a single patch. Our Dad would just ask the guys he worked with for their patches, while my brother and I would hit up the men in the neighborhood. One of the helmets I have came from a neighbor who was with the 28th ID at the Bulge, it was just sitting in his garage and I asked him for it.
One of the more interesting finds was about 10 years ago, I was helping a buddy repair a stonewall on an old farm. While pulling down a section of wall we found a 58 Cal. bayonet from the CW. This led to a long search as to why and how it could have gotten there. Turns out then when the local Federal Regiment left for the war they had to march to the nearest train. This was about 20 miles away. So at the half way point the regiment stopped for the night and local population came out and had a farewell picnic. The location was this farm in the field right along side the wall. Some poor dog face must have gone off to war leaving it behind.

[137e R.I.]

Feb 21, 2009 18:16:01 GMT -5 aicusv said:

As a kid we use to go arrowhead hunting and found a few.

Interesting! 2 years after my family moved to the US, I also found an arrowhead, right in our back yard where my father was tilling soil to plant a garden. I still have it.

When we still lived in France, my friends and I would find things all over the place. Mostly bits of rusty metal and such, we were discouraged from touching any of it and instead told to report it to the police. I can remember rusty US and German helmets laying around in wooded areas, seeing them in people's backyard sheds, US, French and German e-tools still being used by farmers, and in the Canal de la Martiniere (between Nantes and St. Nazaire), there were landing craft from the Normandy and southern France landings that were stashed away there. That was all in the early to mid 1970's. It's all gone now.

In the 1980's, when flying above the Liore river, one could still spot the sunken remains of 2 German e-boots on the banks of the river, apparently sunk during a Mosquito strafing raid. There's still stuff laying around everywhere.

I won't even get into the things my friends and I found during our class trips to Verdun.....all of which we we told not to touch, for obvious reasons.

[Gefreiter Hauwärtz]

I've found a bunch of random stuff....
Handfulls of change: 1943 silver half dollar, 1942 silver Mercury dime, and a steel penny.

Having to help empty a haouse (The guy moved out and didn't bother packing): Unissued 1943 US field jacket, well used cold weather field jacket, M1 helmet, B-15 flight jacket, captured Heer belt, stack of postcards, Wehrmacht calender book, and top of an NSDAP flag pole.

In a repro jacket from a Gardena surplus store: Original 1938 5 reichsmark and 1942 Soviet 2 Rubl'

[hiltz]

While my wife was in Stockholm she came across on old militaria shop on the last day of here visit. She asked the owner if he had any WWII items. He told here he had one. Out from behind a flag he pulled an SS Tunic with a WESTLAND Regiment cuff title. Needless to say..I own it.