On an other trip i took a friend with me to dig up the rest of the dump pit, but the last visit of me there was the best, not much more came out of the pit.
But i kept returning there many times.
We decided to take a long hike trough the forest to see if we could find more foxholes and trenches witch we had from a old sitemap from the area.
In some dense piece of forest we found several foxholes but it looked like we where not the first to dig there!
In one of the holes de detector reacted and we started digging.
With this as result....



An leather bag with items for the MG42:




































This was afterall our lucky day!!!

Nice finds! Im a bit troubled about the item in the 8th photo. What is it? To me (though I am no munitions expert by any means) it looks like a shoe-mine, or is an anti-personnel mine or in the least, a wierd-looking oil can or water bottle?.

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Lost are only those, who abandon themselves) Hans-Ulrich Rudel.

That's alot of fun checking out old Battle sites. Speaking of coins I was lucky at Walmart the other day , the clerk gave me a funny looking penny for change. I took it home and dropped it in some coke and voila 1943 steel penny. Great pics, thanks for sharing

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Coir a glaive

Nemo me impune lacessit

The 8th picture (on page 2) is an oil-can, used for the MG42, it was included in de leather pouch/bag.
Together with the AA-sight and laufwechsel.
It is not an typical oilcan spec. for the MG42 tough!

Thanks, i will put more pics of finds in this topic in the upcoming days!

Thanks, i will be updating this thread in the upcoming days!

good work Ed

funny the Luftw plate by J. H. ~ Our fine China set is from Johann Havilland ....

I have recently seen a similar plate that was at Bricy Airfield . The plate looks similar but the initials are F.B + (Luftwaffe eagle) +U. V.
I believe the F = Fliegerhorst and B the place (Bricy )
so F G would be Fliegerhorst Gilze F l Fliegerhorst Leeuwarden etc.. I don't know all the codes.
The lats initials are the maker ( J . H = Johann Haviland etc..)

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Here are some other finds from the Hurtgen Forest.

An US can of rifle bore cleaner with battledamage before cleaning:









And after some treatment:





And a US pickaxe from a foxhole.
Before cleaning:









After cleaning:

Hmmm, i thought Fl. ( ) U.V. stood for Flieger Unterkunft Verwaltung.
The marking on my plate has no dot between the F and the l.
But you could be right on the marking you saw at Bricy Airfield, if that had a dot between de F and the B.
Thanks again for the info!

some more interesting items and they are greatly cleaned and restored too!

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I am not postive about all the Markings, I just noted that some are different according to the locations and marked with the initials of the Fliegerhorsten.
I only have two examples i saw "life" (Bricy and Leeuwarden) but considering these productions were confidential I think probably thousands of different markings should exist.

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really cool finds;

Keep up the good work!!

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"Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts." - Cicero

A picture of the church in Grosshau in December 2007:





And a picture of the same church in 1944/1945:





Some pictures of the Hurtgen Forest i took during one of my trips:

















And some life ammo i found and after the picture burried deeper in the ground (US rifle-grenades):









German Pfeifpatrone for the flare-gun:

This is a jacket i found when i was climbing a steep hill in the middle of nowhere in the Hurtgen Forest.
It lookes US but i can't imagine that its WWII-related, maybe one of you can tell me!

Interesting.

The jacket is mostlikely American, because there are two pockets on the lower sides of it and those are not found on the German jackets. My best guess.

Cool comparison pictures of Grosshau too!

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"Live as brave men; and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts." - Cicero

Thanks for your reaction, it just lay there halfway the hill but i can't imagine that it stood the time of 63 years and in all weatherconditions!
I could not find any buttons or other stuff to identify the jacket, so i left it there.

I found two similar Vichy coins with the Francisque (Axe) . The small one is a 1f coin and the bigger one a 2f coin. Then there is a 10f + a 20f bill

All these were issued between 1940 and 1944.

I believe the one you found is a 1f coin

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Nice ones, indeed i found a one Franc coin.
I think it belonged to a german because with this coin i found the 2 german coins, so probebly he was stationed in France before they pulled back into Germany after the allied invasion.

It would be interesting to check which units were stationed in the forest and find out who came from France. This could narrow your search and you would have an idea of which unit could have owned these items.

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The German units that where stationed at the spot where i found the coins where elemants of 984th regiment of the 275th Infantery Division, this Division was in Brittany months before D-Day.
They fought the Americans for six weeks on the Contentin Peninsula and draw back to St.-Lo and in the Falaise pocket.
Another unit at the coin-spot where the remnants of 1/1031 Security Battalion and 20th Luftwaffe Fortress Battalion.
Knowing this the coin must have seen a lot of action from the fighting in France till the fighting in the Hurtgen Forest.