WW2 gunnery range - Mortar bonanza !

Hi all

Well, a few weeks ago a good friend of mine put me onto a possible site where he had seen quite a few mortar rounds. Armed with this info, I went on a trawl of the net for 3 or 4 hours but could find no reference to the location he’d given me being a range at anytime, let alone in WW2. Undeterred, I have spent the last 4 weeks tracking down the landowner and finally found him, spoke to him, AND got permission to search the site.

My search area was a little limited as I couldn’t search in the growing crops, so had to limit myself to the edge of fields and two small wooded areas. I wasn’t doing too bad, finding a fair few spent bullets and 3 or 4 2 inch mortar fins and hunks of nose fuze, when I got to a little stream.

You have to watch the video to find out what happened in the stream !!!

WW2 relic hunt - Mortar fins and fuzes !! - YouTube

After only 3 hours detecting I had this little lot.

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I am fairly sure this place was a WW2 range !!! lol

The 2 inch nose fuzes and bullets…..

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…and the fins. 37 of them. :) :) :)

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I have already cleaned some of the nose fuzes. There are markings on some of them but they are very feint and I can’t capture them in a photo I’m afraid.

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And here are some of the best fins cleaned up.

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Nearly all the fins have visible date stamps on the base.

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And some have the makers mark and dates visible on the fins. About half have visible dates, the rest are too corroded.

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Those that are visible are all WW2 dated.

A truly great site. They must have used other stuff there as well as 2 inch mortars. This first visit was more of a recce so I can get a feel for the site. All I’ve got to do now is find out where they were firing them from !!!

Hope you like the finds and the video :)

Laters

Steve T


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