"Black Diggers" (pics)

T

TheGoldenState

New member
Move over gold, we're looking for steel now.

These so called "black diggers" are making a living out of finding buried WWII weapons and restoring and selling them.

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/pictures/view/82266608/


Interesting & Awesome.

Let's see how many we can name.

PREVIEW
GO to link for more


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only problem is most of those guns machine gun wise are illegal in the us since they were never registered for ownership under the amnesty period.

since the source for this is ebaum i am skeptical of this whole digging for guns thing.

i lived in Europe for years and traveled to all the dday beaches on a vacation. they are actually police patrolled to stop people from digging up the beach and to respect the people that lost their lives there.

I am guessing without even clicking the link most of these are probably from former soviet union countries where the battles were fierce and the retreating german army left supplies. and the russians kept all the arms from wwII. hence the mitchell mausers.
 
since the source for this is ebaum i am skeptical of this whole digging for guns thing.
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It is on a myriad of other gun sites as well.

Nice post though.

How do people legally own guns and other relics brought back from wars past, if these are to be deemed illegal?
 
Well if you noticed most of the guns were from the Eastern Front. Given the scale of fighting on the Eastern Front, patrolling all battle locations would be next to impossible. That said, I do have trouble believing a gun that was buried for 60+ years can be restored to that good a shape.
 
With +130 types and millions of guns used/had during WWII, I don't think it's impossible to find guns is decent shape after some restoration.
 
How do people legally own guns and other relics brought back from wars past, if these are to be deemed illegal?
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i was referring to the MG's since these wouldn't have been registered prior to the amnesty ending.

they would be deemed illegal and be forced to be destroyed or rendered unusable.
 
My ex-wife's family is from the Champagne region in France, they were farmers and literally couldn't plow a field without shells, parts of bodies, weapons, and who knows what else coming up.

They had piles of this of this kind of stuff, it was all recognizable for what it was, but was so rusted as to be useless.

This stuff is coming out of old arsenals or peoples barns, not out of the ground.
 
for good information, look up the Yorkshire Diggers who dig up ww1 trenchlines in europe. thats real interesting as theve found living quarters that have been buried since armistice was signed, that are almost exactly the same condition as the day the dirt was piled on.
 
When I was originally sent to the Philippines (Clark AFB, 1985) it was nothing to buy WWII ordnance from the Negritos, outside the Mabalacky gate.

Years later when I went back to Philippines, I had people show me, in secret, guns that had been saved/recovered and cleaned from WWII. No machine guns, but a few rifles and quite a few handguns.

On Okinawa we were told to stay out of the caves, because they are still booby-trapped. People went in anyways and brought out old firearms and grenades. Some of them looked like they would be ready to fire with a little bit of cleaning.


AN ASIDE: I had another Senior NCO walk in to my dorm room carrying an old Japanese grenade he "Found" in a cave. He was finally convinced to call EOD and they got rid of it. He later told me that it blew up "Pretty cool."
 
Dr Strangelove said:
they were farmers and literally couldn't plow a field without shells, parts of bodies, weapons, and who knows what else coming up.
TheGoldenState said:
That's awesome, in a weird, sad, cool kinda way
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She (the ex-wife) and some cousins were playing when they were little kids in the stream outside her house one Sunday before the family dinner and she found something interesting in the stream, played with it a bit, and brought it in to show the family when the kids where called inside for lunch.

She said she walked in with the object in her hands, one of her uncles just turned white, took the the thing out of her hands, and went out the door. When he came back a bit later, he told her it was an American grenade and that she should never touch anything like that she ever found again.

I later showed her a WWII "Pineapple" grenade, she said that's exactly what it looked like.
 
A female friend of mine here in Korea, who is 42, was playing with two of her best friends when they were 9 years old or so. It was winter out in the Uijeonbu area, which isn't far from the border with North Korea. They were on the edge of town and fresh snow was on the ground. Along the roadside, someone had lit a small garbage fire and added some wood to it. The fire had burned a while. Well, she and her other little friends were cold from throwing snowballs at each other as their parents shopped along the street. They stopped to warm their hands around the fire, and

BOOM!

What was left of unexploded mine, buried for 30 years or so, went off. These things were supposed to have been cleared long ago, but this one had been missed. As bad luck would have it, the fire had been lit right on top of it.

My friend still has scars on her wrist, and suffers from PTSD. If she hears a loud bang near her, she freezes and cannot move for several seconds. I saw her do this after a car backfired, and that is how the story came out. One of her other friends wasn't so lucky. She lost a large chunk of her face. I forget what injuries the other kids had. The story made national news here.
 
I think egor20's link illustrates how unlikely it is that a gun buried for about 70 years would be in any kind of decent condition. Those things would have had to have fallen into a vat of cosmoline that happened to have been left on the battlefield.
 
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