Allied Cartridge Head stamps.
Cartridges cases are probably by far the most frequently found of items on the battlefield. We show above just a few with their identifying headstamps. Besides the maker marks and year of manufacture you will also notice that they come from rifles, BARs and 50 cal MGs.
Below is listed the manufacturers as they appear from left to right above:
Denver Ordnance Plant (DEN)
Des Moines Ordnance Plant (DM)
Delaware Ordnance Plant (DW)
Eau Claire Ordnance Plant (EW)
Lake City Ordnance Plant (LC)
Remington Arms Co (RA)
St Louis Ordnance Plant (SL)
Twin Cities Ordnance Plant (TW)
*Utah Ordnance Plant (U) shown and/or (UT) not shown
Frankford Arsenal (FA)
Royal Ordnance Factory Hirwaun in South Wales (H-N 9mm 43)
Federal Cartridge Co (FC)
Royal Laboratory, Woolwich, London (RL vii) - a 303 clearly from 1939.
Radway Green (RG vii) - British 303. This cartridge was made in Cheshire. The Mk VII cartridge design commenced in 1910 and Radway used a single arrow as their identifier when this example was made in 1940, switching to "RG" in 1942. All Ministry of Defence manufacturers of ammunition stopped using the Roman mark numerals of the example seen above in late '44, so we can now say that the cartridge dates from either 1943, '44, possibly 1942 but certainly not 1945.
However this still doesn't answer the question as to how it ended up where it was unearthed!!
Winchester Repeating Arms Co (WRA)
*The Utah Ordnance Plant was termed a "second wave" plant. It was run by Remington on behalf of the US Government and was located in Salt Lake City, Utah.
The items above and below, after restoration might at first appear to belong to the WW1 era. However, these two Lewis Gun magazines, discovered near Limburg were used by the Dutch Army. Despite being buried for many years the M.20 Dutch ammunition is in excellent condition.
The drums show signs of green paint still on them, denoting their use by ground troops as opposed to an aircraft mounted weapon. At right the headstamp on a cleaned round clearly shows a year date stamp for 1923! These rare relics were found at a depth of around 4ft by digger CSL.