WW2 Stuff in the garbage or scrap pile?

**Roudeleiw** · 10-22-2014, 07:01 AM

Originally Posted by DakotaRog

Roundeleiw- Have you ever been to Verdun?? I've heard in one of the museums there a person goes down below ground some distance. The countryside around there was so chewed up for so long during the extended battle by artillery explosions that thousands of soldiers on both sides were never buried. This basement is all windows in every direction. Standing there looking intot he earth, a personc an see many bones of the lost guys. A pretty solemn place from what I've heard.

You mean this cemetery here?

I live near Verdun, and the story is really sad, you find singel bones very often there, but like you said, the artillery plowed the whole area and so the soldiers were blown to pieces...
There are some 10 or 20 villages who were so destroyed and full of live ammunition, that they couldn't rebuild 'em. If you look on google maps - Verdun, there is a huge wood, and that's where the villages were.

**DakotaRog** · 10-22-2014, 08:25 AM

For those who have had little exposure to WWI especially younger Americans where almost no specific war battle & campaigns except maybe the Civil (War between the States) War are taught here's the result of the months long slug fest at Verdun: best estimates of total casualties about 3/4th of a million soldiers on both sides, dead or missing over a quarter million. And that's one major battle. Very little about WWI is remembered now unless you're like Roundeleiw and live not far away. Then it tends to be real...

The Battle of Verdun and the number of casualties

**Roudeleiw** · 10-22-2014, 01:41 PM

Originally Posted by ilyaz

Picked this up at the curb a couple of years ago. American? British? It looks authentic but it has also been painted over (rather sloppily)

Hey ilyaz

the helmet itself is canada WWII but the interior is after WWII, I think you can google the price or see on Ebay.

**DakotaRog** · 10-23-2014, 12:35 AM

RCNJ- I don't know if I could ever visit Treblinka or Auschwitz or some other death camp. Reading about battles and visiting them and thinking about them brings about the folly and horror of war but at least the antagonists are engaged in a fight where the outcome may be unknown. The WWII (and other) death camps are just brutality unleashed in a very skewed manner. I've read a lot about the WWII Holocaust and much of its is so clinical and mind numbing. If you want to do some fictional and semi-fictional reading about it that makes you want to get up and fight along side the underdogs I recommend two books.

The first is Mila 18 by Leon Uris. This guy wrote a good number of historical fictions in the 1960s and 70s, some turned into movies. Mila 18 is the story of group of people living in the Warsaw "ghetto" where the Jews were forced to live before the Nazis started the death camps. As Treblinka (the death camp created to exterminate the Warsaw Jews) gets cranked up big time in 1943, a certain number of the residents rise up and fight the Germans to the bitter end instead of going quietly to the cattle cars at the RR station. Mila 18 is their headquarters.

The second book is just called Treblinka by a French guy named Jean-Francois Steiner. After a slow start of the first quarter or so of the book, the story quickens as the group of Jewish prisoners who do the heavy dirty work at the extermination sub-camp plan and finally execute a revolt. Steiner first claimed that the story was based on interviews with some of the few survivors of the revolt but later he admitted there was a lot of fictional embellishment. To me, this is not that important because story is riveting. In the end, the reader ends up hating this guy, who was real:

Kurt Franz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This basic nobody in overall German society ends up having the power to be found guilty of collectively killing 300,000 people and personally murdering dozens. Why he only got life imprisonment and then got let out when he was old and feeble is beyond me. Personally, I wouldn't have cared if he was 84 and feeble, I would have still had him swing on the end of a rope. But then again, vengeance is not mine to administer...

**Pnutfarmer** · 10-23-2014, 12:59 PM

I saw these recently in a local scrap yard's shred pile. I'm not sure what era they are from and they were stuck together pretty bad, but some of them came apart ok.