WW2 relic recovery - British army base

R

RRPG

New member
Hi all

It has been a while since I posted here, but thought you guys may be a little interested in some of the relics I've recovered from an old British army base here in the UK. The base dumped a lot of weapon parts and armoury gear in a pit next to the site, and I had the good fortune of tracking that pit down. Most of the stuff is relic, with many items being recoverable to a decent state. I suppose the most interesting thing about this base is, for me anyway, the volume of WW2 equipment that was buried here. Having been a collector and recoverer of WW2 relics for more than 20 years, this place throws up some truly remarkable gear.

I realise that this may well be a little more 'relic' than some of you like, but they are all important to collectors like myself, who are trying to save the stuff still buried in the ground after WW2.

Links to a couple of videos about the site....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuipvJNAziA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_mF3uohgx0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huN95bl-YCE

First picture shows the volume of finds from one dig at this site.



In this image are the remains of Bren carry handles; MG belt starter tabs, both Vickers and Browning; Lee-Enfield butt plates; Lee-Enfield oil bottles; Vickers belt brass strips; No 76 grenade crate safety sign; webbing and 'NoBuckl' buckles.......

Some of the best finds from the site just recently have included.

Hundreds of MG belt starter tabs.



Bren 100 round magazine Mk 2 winding arms



Bren gas regulators



Lee-Enfield oil bottles



And this remarkable Besa MG trigger mechanism.



I have also been finding PIAT parts and lots more stuff, shown in the videos.

Hope you like the relics.
 
WOW! I've been a collector primarily of British items for years. I love the stuff. This is impressive!
 
Thanks for the link.

Isn't that just typical of governments, though? Your taxes paid for all that and it is just disposed of like so much garbage. Same with the U.S. govt.
 
Yep. The dump at this site is the size of a football pitch, just to give you an idea of the money that went into the earth! Still, their trash is my treasure :) :) :D
 
Likely these were worn-out parts, not new parts just thrown away.
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They don't look worn out to me. The Bren gas regulator looks new and unused, and only the carbon steel parts show any signs of deterioration from being buried for the last 70 years.

To use a graphic example of government waste, think back to the newrseel footage that showed Huey helicopters being pushed overboard into the Pacific from the deck of an aircraft carrier after we left Vietnam.

One late friend of mine who was a rangemaster at an Arizona AFB told me that they once had an unauthorized surplus of ammunition that had to be taken out into the desert, shoved into a deep hole and buried. I asked him why he just didn't say it was gone and keep it; He told me that the penalties were swift and sure if he had gotten caught.

Governemnts waste money because they have an inexhaustable source of revenue: You, the taxpayer.
 
csmsss - given the sheer volume of parts, they were not worn out. We have found hundreds of Sten spring covers and end caps, along with bolts and barrels, all together in one huge 'seam'. We have evidence of weapons being dismembered and then burnt along with bayonets with the blades clearly chopped off and thrown in separate piles. None of the ammo boxes could be classed as worn out either. All in all, it is stuff from a base armoury dumped when the base closed.
 
We have evidence of weapons being dismembered and then burnt along with bayonets with the blades clearly chopped off and thrown in separate piles. None of the ammo boxes could be classed as worn out either. All in all, it is stuff from a base armoury dumped when the base closed.
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On US bases, WW2 and after, the Army dug pits and filled them with chemical weapons, artillery rounds, etc, and covered them over with dirt. That was how they disposed of stuff. Then the Army lost the maps, then the bases were BRAC'd, and it cost one heck of a lot of money to find the pits, clean them out properly, and sell the property cheap to real estate tycoons.

I can recall seeing "burn pits". Instead to taking stuff to the dump, it was burnt in pits. I heard the motor pool dumped their oil into the ground, barrels of old oil, and that required dirt tests, water tests, dirt reclamation.

They just took the path of least resistance in getting rid of this unwanted stuff.

That was when we were a rich manufacturing nation, now we are not, but China is. The US ships China tons and tons of scrap metal, so old stuff is no longer tossed in a pit and buried.
 
At one time in the there was no procedure for turn of excess items, stupid as it sounds that was the regs. You had to justify any turn in's with reams of paper. So at Command inspection time you were between a rock and a hard place. We used to make sure several trucks were on dispatch on official business but that only works for a couple of truck loads. I too have seen new tools and parts buried. Then in the mid to late 60's someone with a few brains rewrote the regs. Your could turn in just about anything with the notation " Found on Post " .Worked like a charm, no more throw away of still useable items. However I did hear about a UH-1C huey being buried during the change over to the ARVN army, that happed during the pull out in the 70's.
 
That was when we were a rich manufacturing nation, now we are not, but China is. The US ships China tons and tons of scrap metal, so old stuff is no longer tossed in a pit and buried.
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Didn't we ship lots of scrap metal to Japan once?
 
Jim, the Doolittle Raiders were also nice enough to send the Peace Medals the Japanese had given us prior to Dec 7 back to them :)
 
WWhen I was active duty Navy....

It was customary to shoot up as much of the small arms ammunition as possible on the way back from the Med.

It was not (or so we were told) permissible to bring small arms ammunition back into the states after deployment. So we did non-stop small arms qualification. Any left over ammunition was dumped over the side. Box after box after box of .45, M14 and .50 cal. Couldn't even keep the empty boxes.

Don't know if this is still done, or if it was done universally at that time.

Larger ammunition was retained for the Ammo Off-load at Yorktown.
 
Sounds familar. We did not dump ammo overboard but we sure shot a lot at CPen so we could get more than we needed for the next year. I fired around 2500 50 cal rnds one afternoon. Guys were so sick of shooting I could not get any more volunteers and had to order guys to keep shooting and changing barrels. Then was the grenade day where we threw 13 frags to get rid of them. To be honest tossing them things always made me nervous after hearing about some meat head dropping one.:eek:
 
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