Saturday, April 16, 2011

Living in the centre of the allied invasion grounds on D-Day 1944 the area is still rich in finds – for the intrepid and the lucky. I tend not to be the latter – as whenever I go with my French colleague Gerard I find enough old horseshoes to kit out a regiment of Napoleonic cavalry – whereas Gerard finds everything the WWII buff could ever want - including on his day out last time a German MG42 machine gun!
OK it’s not in ‘as new’ condition - more like a ‘well loved’ teddy bear that’s been buried for 65 years – but it’s still recognisable as one of the most feared weapons of that war. Pictures will follow as it gets cleaned up a bit.
The previous week (again without me jinxing his day) he stopped at an abandoned barn and found this - a German K98 Mauser rifle wrapped in rags and stuffed behind a roof beam.
    
With the new company about to ‘kick off’ for 2011 we have put together in the armoury the figure of ‘Frank’.
Frank is (or should I say was) a Paratrooper of the 82nd Airborne who died in Normandy in 1944 (again more on this in a later blog). Recently on one of his forays Gerard got hit on his detector dug down and found a ‘dog tag’ – wrapped in a complete parachute. Our guess is that when he died his comrades buried him in his chute and marked the grave. Later the war graves commission would have exhumed him and moved him to his final resting place at Omaha cemetery.  Very shortly the canopy will once again hover over him (or his representation) as we hoist it – shroud lines and all into our tower roof. 

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