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This week, the 4th March it will be 85 years since the Allied commando raid on the german occupied Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway. In the early hours the 4th of March four landings from the sea were made. The goal of the raids were to destroy german infrastructure, fish- and paraffin factories and any shipping connected to the germans.

Other than fresh air, nice memories and good moods the best finds for me was the Lappland Shields and the named helmet. I had hope all summer for Erkennungsmarken, but found only one german and three or four Stalag tags, perhaps this is the season I will find a hoard of interesting gebirgsjäger EKMs.

After the light rinse, I drew the rust buckets a warm bath. Of course armed with gloves and good ventilation. First I poured just enough water to cover the bottom of the tub. Then I threw in a handful of Oxalic acid as a substitute for bath salts and dissolved it by stirring. Now I put in the helmets and filled hot-hot-hot water until the lids were submerged

In a forest where a gebirgsjäger artillery unit once lived I have searched and metal detected for a few seasons, and found several interesting map tools and some shooting tables for their guns.

Today it is Winter Solstice and the Yuletide is upon us again. Here in the house of HobbyHistorica it will be a calm and cozy celebration. I have a couple of weeks more or less off work, and am planning to use some of these days to catch up on some diorama making since the nice and snowy holiday weather seems to have been replaced with a grey sky, warm and rainy days, so I guess I can forget about any skiing.

I like using a war relic as a base when i am making a miniature diorama. I have built dioramas on large grenade fragments, shell casings, rifle casings, boxes, coils of barbed wire, plus lots of other bits, and I am always trying to fit the scene and its landscape to the story of the relic.

These small metal sleeves to place a matchbox in were popular tourist trinkets and often they were decorated with vikingships, iconic landmarks, coat of arms etc. A few times I have been extra lucky and dug up trench-art examples were the soldier had made the cover from scratch and personalized it with his own artwork.

What is very common with these metal cups, made from a low quality aluminum-zink alloy, is that they most of the times are decorated with so called trench-art. In their spare time soldiers personalized these items with names and illustrations, reminding them about home, a dear one and other positive memories.

On the wall a stiff old jacket hanging on a nail caught my attention. At first glance it could be any old hunter jacket, but when I saw the white inside its hood I knew I had found gold. Hanging less than a meter from the missing wall and being exposed to all sorts of insane polar weather

I spent much of my spare time there bunker crawling in some of the countless installations the germans littered the area with during their occupation, and since I have been interested in WW2 since childhood I guess it counts as a semi self biographical diorama.

One day I saw photos taken of some of the camps during the liberation, and knew that I had to make a 1/35 scale miniature of a specific camp at some point. I didn`t have the space or economy to undertake such a project at the time, so instead I decided to construct a watchtower and section of the fence.

At some point I decided I wanted to build a collection of pegs, and today I have a bit more than thirty with different markings. Doublets I have traded, given away or sold. Most of them were found by myself in Norway or Kurland, Latvia, while a couple were gifted to me by friends searching the old battlefields in Karelia, Russia.

I have heard tales about great finds being made inside such canisters. Medals hidden in the spare lense compartment, caps-, guns-, personal items, ammo- and even treasures in the form of gold instead of the gasmask. Naturally with such tales floating around digging up a heavy unopened box is very exciting, and opening one even more so.

A signal from the detector had me opening up the vegetation and soil, and I found a small fire pit. It had mostly rubbish of course, but I picked out a couple of Finnish coins, a 10 pfennig coin, a candle holder, a brass ring, a nail file and a compass, so not a bad start.

I got the box to the surface and it was of the type that had held optical sights for machineguns. And it was heavy. I gently used my blade to open it, hoping the sight would have survived, coz the box was pretty rusted and had probably been cooked in the fire.

When we got to the large square pit, I swept the detector around the edge of a corner of it, and got a good signal. It was coins. A relatively large spill with 19 coins. Mostly German 5- and 10 pfennigs, but with a few Finnish coins mixed in. None in very good condition.

Around lunchtime yesterday I was digging up the top of a Notek lamp from a rockfilled dumping pit. In the small pile of relics I had already dug up were also a 7.5 cm shell casing and the headlight from a bicycle. I had arrived to the site some twenty minutes before Jimmy, and taken the detector around for a warm up.

We went to the far end of the pile and began digging in underneath the metal mountain. Almost instantly Jimmy began pulling out parts from MG34s and 42s. The parts were all in very good condition. I pulled on a rod sticking out from the jumble and it was a perfectly preserved wehrmacht grounding rod.

Between the collapsed rocks that had made up the foundation of the building the Fisher picked up on a aluminum signal. I had to flip a rock over and found a piece of trench-art under it!! It was one part of a cigarett case, and it had a name engraved with cyrillic letters.

As I was searching alongside a pathway going back towards my car the Nokta gave off an iffy signal below a crooked tree. Usually I wouldn`t dig on such a weak and uncertain signal, but I still had time and I hadn`t really found anything interesting, so I decided to try something. My car was only fifty meters away so I ran over and grabbed the Fisher to sweep that across.