British army dump - Huge quantity of Lee-Enfield relics

R

RRPG

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Hi All

Thought I would share with you the result of my latest relic recovery outing to a British army dump site here in the UK.

The area I had been searching, (which produced all those sling buckles, P14 adapters and Bakelite scabbards you may have seen in my last post), had been cleared and leveled by the guys who also dig the site, but they had opened up a new area a few yards away. I obviously took advantage of the pre-dug hole and commenced digging. At a depth of about 6 feet, the dump was STILL going, with no signs of stopping. There were at least 4 different layers, with the very bottom one being the only one to show no signs of a 'burn'. There was a lot of stuff coming out, but much of it beyond repair due to the fire, but persistence pays off, and I soon had a HUGE haul of finds.
Found just a big stack of Lee-Enfield No 1 nose caps, a Browning MG pistol grip, and two handles I originally thought were off a Vickers MG, but now I've identified as coming from a Lewis MG! Lots of other cool stuff as well, most of which is now in citric acid soak to stop it corroding any more.

I've posted a couple of pictures below, but You can see the dig itself and all of the finds in the below video :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5XuewYpYBc
 

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What a huge waste of materiel. At the very least you would think they would recycle the steel parts as scrap iron. :mad:
 
Indeed, but back then, once the war had ended, recycling meant digging a hole and chucking stuff in it.
 
Why would they do that? Because all that material was no longer necessary. A lot was overly used, out dated, broken, or otherwise in disrepair and they simply didn't need it.

It is time consuming and expensive to try to curate everything that you don't currently need. Militaries do this sort of thing with some regularity in various forms.
 
What a huge waste of materiel. At the very least you would think they would recycle the steel parts as scrap iron.
Click to expand...
Our country did worse after WWII. I watched a documentary on finding the Japanese midget sub that was sunk near the harbor of Pearl Harbor before the air attack. The bottom was littered with jeeps, trucks, etc., dumped after the war which begs the question: Why did they not sell them for scrap? The only thing I can think of was that it may have been considered too expensive to ship them to the mainland for melting. When it comes to the small amounts of steel in the posted Brit equipment, I can see that on the basis of economics, it would not pay to mess with the small stuff like separating buckles and such from web gear.
 
My step father was in the Navy WW II. He was in the Pacific when the lights went out, while watching cargo ships dump new, crated jeeps overboard, he was told that the cost of shipping them back over several thousand miles would cost more than the jeeps were worth. Hard to believe.
 
my father was on a freighter in ww2 and told me at the end of the war they dump all kinds of stuff in the ocean
 
Kind of like the new, never used B-17 bomber that Art Lacey bought after WW2. The first one he crashed on takeoff, they gave him a second one, no charge. He flew it to Milwaukie, Oregon and used it in his gas station and later restaurant & motel as an attention getter. I remember it well growing up and in short the government wanted to rid of surplus unwanted war material any way possible. The B-17 was removed a couple of years ago and is under restoration.

http://www.oregonlive.com/milwaukie/index.ssf/2014/08/milwaukie_bomber.html
 
Not British, but US Army throw away. In the late 60's, early 70's I was stationed in Yuma proving grounds testing the AH56A, ( look it up :) ), in my spare time I used to take my jeep and explore the grounds. I found several tent city sites just by looking for patterns of rocks placed in a row. I even found the Headquarters area by checking out where three cactus were growing in an unnatural line. I was able to find loads of M 1 parts ( still good ) and other items from the 1940's, Coke bottles, tools, personal items and I was also able to locate blanket lines in some of the tent areas. These were square areas where a blanket was placed on the ground for poker games. I must have been one of the first to ever do this because I found coins up the Gee-Gee, silver quarters , dimes, half dollars and even a few silver dollars, where the coins had fallen off the blanket and became buried in the dirt and sand. I also found a few things that I believe had been buried on purpose, apparently on the hopes of coming back later to retrieve the items. I sold and traded quite a few items, others I still have. One of the items I had was a large gold ring ( very heavy ) No engravings or markings on it, I was never able to trace it. I would have loved to have retuned it to an individual or family but this was way before computers and the internet ( yes , there was such a time ). Every thing dated prior to 1942/3. Quite an adventure for a young E-6 staff sgt.
 
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The large heavy gold ring with no markings must be taken to Mt Doom and cast into the fire! :D

Untold amounts of military equipment were just dumped in the sea or buried after WWII, entire squadrons of planes dumped overboard from carriers, or bulldozed into a trench on a pacific island (jets were the coming thing just need to get rid of these old time planes...etc)
 
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