Battlefield finds in the ground...

My mother-in-law is leaving in May and I am coming with my father-in-law at the end of June or after July 4th (have to see the NYC fireworks and celebrate Independence Day). Meeting with one of his colleagues at the University of Iasi (Math and History Departments) to go over maps, history books, books and other sources of information). For those of you in Iasi, PM me your contact info and my mother-in-law can get a hold of you before we arrive that summer. Plan on going to the River Prut for a day and trying to convince them in letting me go to Stalingrad (but they are very adiment on not allowing this one) or even Odessa (they are debating this one since they know people there). Hopefully I can get some veterans to remember things. Plan to spend 2 days at Tirgu-Frumos as well.

Hey thats great.!
hopefuly il finish my exams by July .. case id sure like to come along..for the trip.
the prob is that right now im in Sibiu and to travel to Iasi is a 14 h or so trip with the train. But if ur comming for sure then i might just be willing to make that trip.
so r u planning to go digging? or just visit the battlefields? becase if u wanna dig to then maybe i can get my metal detector with me and help out.. who knows maybe we might find.. some realy neet stuff.. lol... oh yea... if we get to discover a poor lost soal ( bones of a dead soldier ) dont worry im a Pre Med student ive seen much worst and i know the human anatomy like the back of my hand so prob we will be able to put him back together. Hopefuly we could honer him and give him a proper bariel.

Dragos

Yep I am coming, just purchased ticket. Leaving June 28 and returning back to the states near the end of July. Coming with my wifes grandfather who is a veteran on the Romanian cavalry in Russia (wounded in 1942 at Rostov). Plan to go to Tirgu Frumos and then over to the west near Arad. Will stop at Peatre Neamt to visit godparents (from the wedding) as well. Any good places around Iasi anyone can mention?

There are many relics to be found on the old battlefields of Romania.

My first experience of "relic hunting" came in the 4th grade, when I went on a 5-day school trip to Bran. One day we all headed out into the woods, and stopped at a clearing, where we were left to play freely under the condition not to to wander off on our own. I and some 5 other schoolmates starded digging around, and ended up finding a small cache containing grenade fragments and three rusted cartriges. Since there weren't enough relics for all of us, we started fighting, but that only alarmed the teacher, who promtly confiscated the loot... Or so she thought, since I had managed to drop one of the bullets into my shoe, from where I retrieved it later. I still have it, and, as far as I can tell, it's a 9mm Luger, markings unreadable.

A few years later, I was on another school trip, this time in the north of Moldova, on the Giumalau Mountain. At one time, I and another 3 of my classmates wandered off the road into the sorounding woodland, and were amazed to see traces of trenches, complete with rusted barbed wire. We didn't dare get too close, because we were afraid of landmines, but we did stumble upon what looked like an ammo dump, with stacks of artilerry shells. The ones near the top were obviously defused, and were spray-painted red, but the ones near the bottom of the stack, where the rust had fused them together into one single mass, looked live, so we didn't disturb them. A few days later I ran into a local kid about the same age as me (I was 13 at the time) and he proudly showed me his "trophy" collection: belt buckles, pieces of shrapnel, german helmets, even a complete machinegun belt. While still at his house , I noticed his father used the flat bottom of a defused 88mm shell as an anvil for yardwork! At about the same time I learned of a german tank (Pz IV?) that lay upside-down in a nearby ravine, but, although the kid proved willing to show me the exact location, we were sheduled for departure that evening, so I never actually got to see it.

Probably the most curious find I made while hitch-hiking on the outskirts of Ploiesti during a rainy day. I was shivering on the side of the road, waiting for a lift, when I suddenly noticed an oblong object at my feet. I picked it up and it proved to be a live cartrige of a type I had never seen before.
The casing is made of brass, in a brownish-colour with green spots of corosion, and measures 54mm in lenght. It has a tapered bottom of around 13 mm in diameter, (you can see the markings in the picture posted below) and the caliber is 6mm. The bullet, that I unfortuatelly lost, was all lead, unjacketed, and in very poor state. It was very long in comparison to modern bullets at almost 40mm, and almost cylindrical in shape, except for the very tip, that was rounded.



More recent finds have included another very coroded 9mm Luger found one day while strolling near Vraja Marii, (A restaurant located near the main entrance in the port of Constanta, that was built over a ww2 era german casemate) It was just just after a rain, and some earth had slid down, revealing the curved roof of the bunker, as well as the cartrige. On the same esplanade, another day, I noticed a metal object bobbing in the water, so I went down the stairs to investigate. It turned out to be a german fuel canister, marked 1943, severely dented, rusted and half full of seawater, a fact that promted me to leave in place... (I still hate myself for doing that)

Another "relic hunter" experience came in the summer of 2003, when, after enrolling at the "Ion Mincu University of Architecture and Urbanism", I was participating in a workshop in Sibiu relating to building conservation and restauration. As part of our work, we were supposed to measure up the old buildings lining the historic center of Sibiu. We were split into 4 man teams, and as part of the training, we were told to leave any ammunition and weapons we might find, and call the police bomb disposal unit to deal with them. At the time, we figured this to be only a joke, but a few days later, one of our teams ran into a cache consisting of a pair of Nagant revolvers and several dozen cartriges in the attic of "Piata Mica" nr 16 ...

Back in the present day, I'm currently running a small, Bucharest based, group of so-called "Urban Explorers", and we are planning several trips for the summer, including one dedicated to finding the lost forts of Bucharest, built around 1900 and abandoned just before WW1.
You are free to contact me via PM if you want to join our hunt, and we would be delighted to help with any relic hunting in and around Bucharest, as well as in the rest of the country.

Cheers, Alex

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 05, 2006 09:12 pm

The bullet is could be a 6,5mm from a Mannlicher m93, but the year is way off. A picture from the side would help, to see if it is rimmed.

A Mannlicher M1893 was also my guess.
Unfortunately, not only is the year wrong, but also the size, since the Mannlicher cartriges were 6.5x284mm, and the one I have is only 54mm in lenght.
The casing is indeed rimmed, and here it is, in comparison with a Warshaw Pact 5.45, a Nato 5.56 and a Springfield 30-06.



Later edit: Bingo, nailed him!

I was browsing some sites dedicated to ammunition, and ran into this guy:

6.5 x 54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer released in 1903.



The cartrige in question is second from the left, and the fourth is our old friend the 30-06... size seems to match as well as general apearance. The only detail that is a little off is the fact the cartrige in the second picture is not rimmed, unlike the one I've got, but that might be just because it's a later model, since this type of ammunition was manufactured until the late 1960s...

The second picture is courtesy of a site located here:
The 6.5 x 54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 06, 2006 12:00 am

6,5x284 is to huge 28,4cm

The case is from a 6,5x54 Romanian Mannlicher m93.
The cartridge that you say is 5,56 is in fact 7,62x52mm NATO and the 5,56mm looks to me more like the 7,62x39 (AK-47), look at the size of that bullet it is as big as the 30-06.

Can anybody tell me what kind of bullet this is?




This post has been edited by cipiamon on February 06, 2006 11:41 am

mihnea:
You are right, while rifling trough the box of ammmunition, I misakenly took out the wrong round! the "5.56" is indeed a NATO 7.62X51... (as opposed to a Nato 5.56X45)

However, the 5.45 is a standard WP 5.45x39 tracer, NOT a WP 7.62X53

The 30-06 is from a Winchester hunting rifle, and it's labeled "Winchester 30-06 Sprg"

Here they are again, seen in comparison with a further four 7.62X51s (from an american M60 LMG) a WP 7.62X53 (from the Ak 47) and a 14.5X114mm MG tracer shell.



As for the mannlicher M93- I don't know where that came from , I must have been high or something... The M93-95 standard cartrige is 6.5X52.
But, since my round is not 52mm but 54mm in lenght, it might not be from a Romanian M93, but a Mannlicher-Schoenauer 6.5x54mm round, that would have been the standard military Austrian round intorduced in 1903 (although very popular on the civilian market, only two armies ever adopted it, those of Austria and those of Greece) As far as I know, at the start of WW1 the Austiran Army confiscated about 5 000 "M93" rifles in this calibre that were being readied for contract with Mexico and issued them to their troops, (after WW1 most ended up in the former Yugoslavia and saw action in WW2), hence the apparent confusion.
The Romanian M93s remained in 6.5 calibre until 1915, when they were converted to the 8X50R cartrige.

cipiamon:

Your cartrige is a standard WP (Warshaw Pact) 5.45X39mm ball (solid jacketed slug, as opposed to the one in my pictures, that is a tracer and thus has a red band around it) and would have been used in the AK-74.

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 06, 2006 01:44 pm

@cipiamon
That bullet is a 7,62x39mm Warsaw Pact used for the AK-47, it is not a 5,45x39mm in the picture below you see the difference on the left 7,62x39 on the right 5,45x39mm (http://www.waffeninfo.net/mun_545x39.php).



@Wings_of_wrath
Please do more research before posting again in a field you don't know, most of what you have written in your last post is very wrong.

The Mannlicher m95 used the 8x50mm.
The Romanian and Greek Mannlicher m93 used the 6,5x54mm. The Romanian m93 were used until after WWII as training weapons in 6,5x54.
The Yugoslavian Mannlicher m95 was converted in 1938-39 to use 7,92x57mm cartridge.

Edited it is Holland not Greece. Sorry

This post has been edited by mihnea on February 06, 2006 03:18 pm

Please don't be angry with me, Mihnea, my fields are airplanes, buildings and bayonets, not ammunition, so my post was in accodance to the info I had (not much and most of it googled, I must confess).

Right. Since you seem to posess a load more information on the matter, can you please tell me what the actual differences between an Austrian 6.5X54 Mannlicher-Schoenauer and a Romanian m93 6.5X54 would be? (I did see it listed as 6.5X52 in at least 3 sources and as 6.5X53 here , but I'm not taking anything I read on the net for granted anymore - wasn't the Carcano 6.5X52?) How can I tell them apart?

But I must be adamant about the Mexican Mannlichers the Austrian Army comandeered- They are not the same thing as the Yugoslavian Mannlicher m95's you are reffering to.
I couldn't find the original page where I read that, but there is some alternate info here- the number of rifles confiscated varies by a whole lot though- here

Anyway, apparently I should leave ammunition collecting altogether, because I managed to confuse a 7,62x39mm and a 5.45X39.... I was convinced the standard Wp 7.62 was 51mm long (I have a cartrige case in that dimension [can it be from a SKS or some other gun along those lines?]) so when I measured the other one I did have and saw it was 39mm long, I assumed it to be a 5.45X39... Stupid mistake, I know.... (and that makes two mistakes in a row on this forum with that other one where I mistook a road for a ridge while searching for the lost mamaia airfield... :what, no "blush" emoticon available on this forum?: )

This post has been edited by Wings_of_wrath on February 06, 2006 06:13 pm

The Romanian Mannlicher m93 was using rimmed 6,5x54mm cartridges while the cartridge used by the Greek Mannlicher-Schoenauer was not.

No they aren't. The Mannlicher m95 used by the Yugoslav army were standard until they modified them in '38. As for the Mexican Mannlichers I don't now.

Both the sites you posted contain some incorrect information and other that I doubt so I wouldn’t recommend either as sources of information.

Yeap, that is a cartridge case from a 6,5x54mm romanian Mannlicher.
It is very obvious the year of production, the type of the rifle, and the makers mark. I have also encountered some PAM's, and, correct me if I am wrong, but these were made at Brasov (PAB's and PAM's).
I will try to post the the name of the factory.
Andi

Pirotehnia Armatei
Try to designate the Romanian Model 93 rifle cartridge as 6,5x54R (rimmed), to avoid confusion with 6,5x 54 Mannlicher Schonauer wich is rimless.

This post has been edited by Cristian on August 18, 2009 06:29 am

Yes, you are right about the manufacturer, thank you.