Is my Detector a Helmet Magnet?
- Inka
- 1 hour ago
- 4 min read
This last week I have been completing the large trash burning place behind the ruins of a gebirgsjäger barrack which I began sifting through last week.
On Tuesday I spent nearly six hours there trying to avoid getting sliced up by the many broken shards of bottles, while piling up to the side of the ditch relics that had survived the burning.
It was good summery weather the whole day and the beautiful songs of the birds were the only thing to be heard, except the occasional clink from my shovel hitting a rock or my bayonet scraping across a piece of glass or metal. So it was a pretty cozy day spent in the smell of freshly dug soil.
Since the fireplace was quite shallow not much digging was needed. I only had to remove the top layer and the web of roots and then scrape away an inch of soil using the blade or my Fiskars garden rake.
I wasn`t very lucky with the finds though. Only towards the end of the day a few salvageable bits popped out. From the side of the opened patch came a small wallet, which had one of its corners burnt off. Inside was a handfull of coins, but only three early German ones survived, the rest were made of zink and perished as I tried to clean them up later.
A Norwegian Army button was a bit of a surprise. Had a soldier lost it during the post-war clean up, or had it been a small trophy kept by a gebirgsjäger?
Together with the button was a small chain made of silver, and such metals goes straight into the treasure chest of course.
Some other bits were two canteen drinking cups, and a nice bottle with text embossed in the glass and one more can opener belonging to a field kitchen, just missing its swivel.
Some weaker signals just to the side of the big fireplace caught my attention when I stretched my legs after a few hours, and there under the moss were a whole bunch of k98 ammo pouches, mostly intact. Five pairs in all. Plus two pairs of rotted boots.
I had also dug up some bits from wagons or vehicles, which I piled up next to a tree to come and collect later if I manage to ID them to something interesting and useful for restoration projects.
When I was cleaning up the place and getting ready to leave I discovered that my small garden rake was lost. I looked around for a while, but I suspect I might have buried it somewhere..
A couple of days later I went back to continue the work and scored immediately. The first signal the Fisher F5 picked up was a helmet! It was even visible as part of the back rim was sticking out of the ground by several inches. I got it out of the ground and shook out the soil that had accumulated inside it through the decades. In the helmet-shaped mass of soil and roots I could see parts of the leather and aluminum liner, but most of that had rotted away, only the chin strap was still intact.
The lid itself had a small crack in the dome, but it looks like it might clean up well. Third helmet this month! I have really been lucky with the lids so far this season.
I had a meter left to search on the main fireplace so I removed the vegetation on top, and cut away the roots, and brought from the backpack the new garden rake the GirlfriendWife had bought me.
It was hilarious. She had gotten me a set of toy tools for kids! So there I was scraping relics out of the soil with a miniature rake and shovel, and with those I recovered the last couple of relics present there. A cream jar, two field torches, a German and a Norwegian coin and a broken clock. Between the clock parts were two hands, so naturally I though it was two clocks, that took me a few hours to come around, to GirlfriendWifes great amusement :D
A few meters away I found another, smaller patch full of signals, and it was also a scattering of burnt war junk a few inches below the surface. Here I dug up no less than five rifle buttstock holders from a vehicle or carriage, three rubber track link pads, marked W 402, an aluminum hook for an Einheitslanterne, lots of glass and clay bottles, gaming pieces, clasps and hooks from Y-straps and a few cream tubes.
The most interesting find though was a small piece which appeared as I was rolling away a layer of top soil. There I saw a verdigris colored cross! It was a Finnish made cross which was part of a fob often seen together with the Finnish-German Lappland- Eismeer- and Nordfrontkreuzes.
The next hour I was hunting for one of those crosses, but I only found a few bits belonging to a field kitchen, some kind of alu bowl, and a fire poker.
Together with more bottles was a last and interesting find that day, Gebirgsjäger fashion in
the form of a pair of plastic sun goggles.
It had been raining much of the day so I was wet and dirty when I cleaned up the place and found my way home for a warm shower and dry set of clothes.
The rest of the week was spent around the house preparing the garden, cleaning up our large strawberry field and now I am going out to put the potatoes in the ground so that we`ll have food for the winter.
Thanks for reading, and I wish you a great week :)
