Posted on 07/10/2019 8:10:22 AM PDT by BenLurkin
He’s lucky to be missing only one finger.
My Dad, who just passed at 94, served w/Patton’s 3rd Army Corps, as a Combat Engineer Platoon Sgt:
During World War II, from March 27th, 1943 to December 2nd, 1945, Dad served as Platoon Sgt with the 101st Combat Engineers, 26th Infantry Division, 3rd Army (Patton Armored) in the European Theater. He received the Eastern European Ribbon w/ 4 Clusters for Northern France, Rhineland, Ardennes, Central Europe, along with the Purple Heart Medal for wounds he received in The Battle of The Bulge, the Bronze Star Medal w/ 3 Clusters for Valor, American Theater Service Medal and the WW II Victory Service Medal.
He talked with me about the War - once - all thru hundreds of European cities, towns and villages, hedgerows, Ardennes and into Battle of The Bulge, and finally Bastogne, where he was shot by a sniper, dragging his wounded men from a bloody snow field, where they were caught in a nazi machine gun ambush. That was his ticket home, where he met my Mom, his RN caring for him, his childhood sweetheart in York, PA, in a VA Hospital in Virginia, while recovering from his wounds. I was born in 1949 and my sister in 1951.
When I was stationed at Ft. Riley, KS back in the 90’s the 74th EOD commander was a friend of mine. He told me they had been called out to remove some civil war era munitions from an attic at a residence just off post.
Early on during the centennial commemorations for the First World War, several magazine articles were published, addressing the ongoing situation of people finding unexploded ordnance.
If memory serves, in the years before 2014, landowners and field hands in northeastern France were still discovering live bombs & shells at the rate of some 500 tons a year.
Farm operators had by then gotten more proficient at identifying types of dud ordnance. Emergency-response personnel had trained them to tell the difference between poison-gas shells and those filled with “mere” high explosive: they’d call in authorities after finding a gas shell, but they’d simply drag HE shells to the edge of their fields and place them on the side of the road. Once a week, disposal teams would come by and collect the accumulated munitions.
German WWII bombs are still being dug up in England, and Allied bombs are being regularly dug up in Germany. They just evacuated thousands from Frankfort a couple of days ago to defuse a WWII era bomb:
1,100-pound US bomb from WWII defused in Germany after mass evacuation
...his metal detector started going off. Thinking he had struck gold...
History fanatic my ass. Thanks Red Badger.
He’s only 18, so he’s learned a very valuable lesson............
He's lucky he wasn't blinded by the shrapnel.
There is still a fair amount of un-exploded ordinance from WW1 and WW2 in the fields of Europe.
Yep. In my travels by road in Eastern Europe during the summer occasionally I would see a cordoned off area with danger signs. A lot of old ordnance is only found as the area it is in is developed.
Yes, even a detonator can be deadly.............
“There is still a fair amount of un-exploded ordinance from WW1 and WW2 in the fields of Europe.
During the Battle of Berlin in WWII the Soviets fired tens of millions of artillery rounds.
.
Sigh, I wasn’t too bright as a kid, and my curiosity always got the better of common sense. I would have been a kid who, if I found a discarded radiation therapy machine in a Mexican dump, I would have unhesitatingly tried to break it open and been fatally irradiated by the nice blue stuff inside. If I ever came across an explosive device, I think I would have taken a hammer and chisel to it.
When I was in Seventh Grade, one of the kids in my shop class found a bullet, and we were able to remove the primer from the case, and while we huddled around one of the kids put it on the sidewalk, took a hammer and whacked it.
Of course, it made a loud and satisfying bang, but the metal jacket on the cap shot into the kid’s shin and got lodged inside, and they had to call an ambulance. It could have been me, or it could have gone in my eye or neck and nicked my carotid artery...anything. just another dodge of stupidity.
I was a Navy brat, and in my travels came across all kinds of military odds and ends in abandoned buildings, and I was constantly breaking things open just to see what was inside.
My dad had a Rolex he had purchased back in the early Sixties, and it stopped working so he put it in his dresser drawer.
He mumbled about it often, how much he wished he could afford to get it fixed, and...one day when I was about seven, I got the watch out of his dresser drawer, convinced I could fix it, but probably more curious about what was inside a watch. (that was around the age my parents gave all us boys watches, and it was a thing of pride and ownership. (They were just cheap Timex watches, but...a real watch!)
No way I was going to open MY watch up and look inside.
So, I took his Rolex down to the basement, seized it in my dad’s little red vise, and with the help of a hammer and screwdriver, managed to get the back off. No mean feat for a Rolex...
Anyway, I destroyed his watch in the process of trying to figure out how it worked and fix it.
I panicked and threw it in the trash.
For the rest of his life, I would see him rub his crew cut head with a hand, and hear my dad lament under his breath “I wonder what happened to that watch...”
I never got to tell him, never had the guts. He passed on a few years back, and now he knows...:)
Back in the '50s, three of us went "camping" in the New Jersey wilds. We brought our 22s with us and one guy gets the idea to throw a handful of cartridges into the campfire coals. Nothing. The wise guy says they're too far from the fire, reaches in to shove them further and one goes off.
He's grabbing his hand making chicken noises. We take a look and the shell casing is halfway in his finger. We take a camping knife and pry it out, dump iodine on the wound (more chicken noises) it, wrap it in a piece of cloth and continue camping.
Good times, good times.
Hahahahahaha!!!!!
“Good time, good times”...
It was more complicated then in some ways, but...it was also simpler in some ways...:)
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