Quote:
Originally posted by jacobtowne:
What I meant by my question is what dimension did you measure?
JT
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Hello jacobtowne,
as no projectile was available I determined the calibre by measuring the inner diameter of the cartridge opening. We call it "cartridge mouth" in Germany.
Just had a closer look at the cartridges. The cartridge mouth is bent slightly inwards so the diameter decreased. There are traces of red color in the cartridge mouths. Some cartridges even contained small red disks, apparently made of wood or thick paper and painted red. These disks are some 7.5 mm in diameter and some 0.6 mm thick. Can you confirm blanks were constructed that way? To sum it up, I think the cartridges in the clip were indeed blanks and these small red disks were used to seal the cartridges.
Apart from the cartridges in the clip I found several single cartridges. None contained a bullet. Most were unfired. One cartridge had the firing cap removed and was exploded. A big hole is gaping in its side. Maybe it was exposed to fire.
One single cartridge was fired. This cartidge had a calibre of 7.6 mm and a length of 63 mm so it meets the specs for the Garand given in Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garand . Stamped into the bottom of the fired cartridge there are 4 letters with a 90 degree angle between them. They are "T", "W", "I", "S". This fired cartridge shows no red color and the mouth is hardly bend inwards so I think it belonged to a real bullet.
The bottom marking of the fired cartridge differs from those of the non-fired cartridges. They show "EW 42" or "FW 42". As 42 is probably the production date they belong to WW2.
The occurence of both blanks and fired live catridges is somewhat mysterious. US Soldiers in WW2 had hardly taken blanks into action. US soldiers on a post war manouvre had not fired a real bullet (I hope) at this place outside any military training ground.
Regards,
Thorsten
