Japanese INERT Mine Collection

[JCB99]

OK

Tony, Hello. I need a few days to take pictures and double check my reference manuals. I'll post those pictures on the Projectiles page. Finding Japanese Artillery projectiles larger than 75mm/76.2mm is extremely difficult. This one (I am told) came from a West Coast museum that closed twenty years ago. Amazingly it has original paint. The brass case for this projo is about 48 inches long. I've never seen the case for sale. I've got the correct fuze for this but the adapter ring has been lost. Give me a few days. Jim

 

[tigbrand]

Thanks

Cheers Jim, any info would be much appreciated. My case cost my brother in law 8 uk pounds about 15 years ago! The seller i remember had other jap cases but i never new how scarce they were. thanks for the reply,Tony.:tinysmile_fatgrin_t

 

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Japanese Mines;

Another bit of trivia;
Around 1965 I was on a clearance operation south of Vero Beach, Florida. During the war, engineers laid a minefield about 100 yards deep from the beach for the practice invasion of Anzio. The object was to test minefield clearance using 7.2 barrage rockets launched from shipboard.
Mines employed in the test was primarily U.s. anti-vehicle land mines, German Teller Mines, Japanese pottery, yardstick mines, JE and JG beach mines. Most had spotting charges rather than a H.E. load with live fuzes.
It was interesting to see such a variety of mines from several countries. This area was overgrown with 7 foot tall palmetto. In the end we gave up the use mine detectors and brought in a D-9 cat and dozed up the site into hedgerows and burned them.
When this field was laid the engineers made no maps and just walked off and left it after their trials. At this time this area was not populated and as usual they did not think about future condos being built along the east coast beaches. The same stuff was also located at Fort PIerce where the Naval Combat Demolition Units trained. These units later became the UDT.
Regards,
John aka Bart

 

[US-Subs]

John,
great photos. I'd heard of this operation many years ago, but had never seen the photos. Very interesting. I also enjoyed the Tiny Tim warhead. I worked a commercial job out in Fontana about 13-14 years ago, it was a scrap yard that had about 5000 tons of ordnance scrap recovered from California renges. In this we found about 25 Tiny Tim motors, I suspect that they came out of China Lake. I considered dragging one of them home, but the liklihood that I could ever find a warhead vs the size of the item made me reconsider. As it was I still purchased about a ton of "scrap" from the dealer and picked up some interesting bits of history.

 

[John D. Bartleson Jr.]

Tiny Tim Rocket

At the Vero Beach op we found two Tiny Tim rockets (12.75 inch motor with a S.A.P. bomb for a warhead and using three DDR fuzes.
we found these babies off shore about 150 yards in about 12 feet of water. We located them with the navy Mk. 10 locator and used a salvage balloon to raise them and tow them ashore. We were not sure if they were practice heads but sent the fuze head data to the Tech Center who said " you have a tiger by the tail" so we got a police escort and took them about five miles further south on the beach and shot all three fuzes with C-4 fashioned in a small cup. They were plaster loaded. The motors were so rusted that in order to see the warhead base we snaked the the assembly between two trees and attached the 4x4 wench to the tail to break it off the W/H, needless to say we were all behind plenty of cover.
I remember in school, in rockets the instructor said "this is a Timy Tim, don't worry about it, you will never see one". These rockets were made to penetrate the sub pens at Brest and Keil.
Regards,
John aka Bart

 

[US-Subs]

Tiny Tim motor near center, identified by the multiple nozzles. This was one of the bomb piles in the Fontana scrapyard.