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I went out in the field looking for arrowheads and look what I found...


kfields
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I went in the field across the road from my house looking for arrowheads. I've never found much but this time I did find a damaged bird point. I was walking back towards my house and was about smack dab in the middle of the field when I started seeing bits and pieces of aluminum. Then I recalled one of the locals telling me that a bomber crash landed in the field during WWII. I asked him where and all he could say was it was in the field somewhere. Any way, I think I found the spot.

Here's a picture of the field from my upstairs window:

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Here's what I found in the field all within 20 feet of each other. A couple of the pieces are thin, one contains rivets. Two of the pieces appear to have some splotches of OD colored paint on them. The largest piece is slightly thicker and appears to be cast aluminum. So what do you think?

 

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http//i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa43/322nds/Airplane%20crash%20at%20Vandalia/aircraftpieces5_zpsec112d93.jpg

 

Here is a picture of the field while I was standing in it:

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The Dayton, Ohio airport is within half a mile from where I live. Back during the war, I think they called it Dayton Army Air Field so the whole story about a plane ending up in the field appears plausible. Finding real concrete information about the incident may be difficult.

Thanks for looking!

Kim

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Too cool! Those look like pieces of aircraft that I have handled. Perhaps local newspaper archives can tell more about the crash?

-Johannes

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439th Signal Battalion

What a great find and story. Thanks for sharing.

 

I have never found pieces of a plane (that I am aware of), but I have dug up a few spent musket and minie balls around my house, in addition to some antique coins and other pieces.

 

I too enjoy looking for arrowheads (when time permits).

 

As a boy, every spring when we would disc the fields in preparation for planting, we would take off our shoes and go through the newly turned dirt and find all sorts arrowheads and pottery pieces on the family farm here in western North Carolina. It never ceases to amaze me how many relics the earth continues gives up over time and what kinds of pieces we would find. I still have many of them in a box downstairs.

 

Where I live now, I have found only one arrowhead, but the neighbor across the road continues to find several...

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Good idea Johannes. I think I'll head to the local library one of these weekends and see if they have the old local newspaper on file.

 

Here's a picture of another item I found. Looks like it is two lead connectors screwed into each other to make sure they didn't separate:

http//i200.photobucket.com/albums/aa43/322nds/Airplane%20crash%20at%20Vandalia/aircraftpieces5_zpsec112d93.jpg

post-60-0-24794900-1364691311.jpg

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Great find. The best time to look is right after the spring plowing is done or some major constuction project..

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Garandomatic

Pretty darned neat. I'm about 3 hours east of you, and we still have the family farm that dates back to 1813 or so. Our family collection is pretty big, as we have Grandpa's stuff, Dad's stuff, and mine. My dad pulled an almost foot long point out of the ground once on some property we rented a long time ago, and found a mortar and pestle in the same spot. They later built the school where I work on the spot. Found a triangular bird point below the football field a couple of years ago at cross country practice. Craziest thing I ever found was a tiny pre-1670 French coin in the bottom field, badly worn, thin as can be, silver, and definitely French. To bring my post back to militaria, I have a piece of a fighter jet that went down very nearby in the early 50s, and a student gave me a couple of very small swatches of cloth from the USS Shenandoah, as his family had a pretty large sheet of its fabric. Also have a WWI 37mm casing that somehow turned up in my grandpa's garden. NO IDEA how, but there you go.

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Thanks ram957. My location is slightly NORTH of Dayton not that the paper could have gotten it wrong.

 

I looked at one of those military crash site databases on the internet and came up with 3 possibles:

1. Aug 8,1945, Charles F Rice pilot, P-51D, serial #44-14573, location Dayton Airport (close to my location);

2. June 9, 1942, Render Densen pilot, A-31, serial #34-771, location Taylorsville Dam (close to my location);

3. July 17, 1945, Don W. Cunningham pilot, AT-6F, serial #44-81993, location Vandalia (I live in Vandalia so maybe my best bet?).

 

Thanks everyone!

Kim

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Garandomatic

All I found when I took a detector to where that French coin turned up was broken farm machinery parts. Given the fact that we've been there since the Indians left, it was kind of neat to hear the swears of my ancestors echo through the valley when whatever it was broke, but it sure wasn't what I hoped for!

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Nice find! Even with a metal detector, all I find is pull tabs and nails.

 

hardheaded

...and balled up metal foil, old pipes, a hammer head, broken screw driver, bobby pins and an occasional coin. For this reason I gave up metal detector treasure hunting years ago. :( At least the metal found in this field is actually interesting.

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Kim

 

 

I have some artifacts as well

 

 

One is a flare pistol I was told came out of a field near Sioux Sity when a B17 went down

 

Also have a large amount of materal from a site in Germany.A local B24 pilot was there in the mid 1970s.He spoke to a guide they had and turned out he had been a military doctor or admisitration officer in the Luftwaffe at a near by hospital during the war.They hit it off and he took the vet to a spot later in the day where the man had seen a B24 go in and explode.The Vet told me he could still see a path in the trees where the plane had cut its path going in and the tour guide stated not much had grown back since the crash.The vet dug around and picked up several hand fulls of scrap metal and also chaffe from the site.While having dinner with his German host later in the evening they spoke more of the day and the war.The vet determined he had actually been on a mission that day over the area and in all likely hood it was one of his groups planes that had went down in the tree line.His host stated he saw the plane go down that day and he and personel from the hospital went to the site and there were no survivors there.Later some soldiers had brought in several wounded or injured aircrew but the man never determined if they were from the same downed plane.The vet brought this material back with him and kept it until he moved from here about 10 years ago.

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You never know what is in the ground. My parents house was next door to an aunt and uncle's house, they bought the lot from them. An older cousin was working in their garden, our lot before before my parents bought it. He found an Indian peace pipe bowl in the shape of a fist, with the tobacco going in the hand and the stem would attach at the wrist. I spent part of the 1950's and 1960's treasure hunting my backyard and found nothing. Several years ago a nephew was mowing the back yard for grandma and grandpa and found a metal stake in the ground. He pulled it out of the ground and it was marked U.S., about the size of a picket pin. I've never figured out what it is and one of these days I'll find where I put it for safe keeping and post photos of it on here.

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I agree you never know what you're going to find. I really enjoy the stories you have all told about your finds.

 

Slightly off topic, but I was digging up my garden last year (or maybe it was the year before ?) and found this coin in the ground. The interesting thing about the find besides the fact I found it where I did, the house I live in was built in 1826!

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I will be heading back to the field this weekend if the weather cooperates and bring along my old cheap metal detector and see what I find.

I'll post more here when I find more.

Kim

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Garandomatic

Dig those early coins! I'd like to have a half dollar or silver dollar in the same basic design, but man they are pricy. Never found any coins that old myself, Dad always said the family was so poor there wasn't a chance they'd drop anything!

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  • 2 weeks later...

I went out into the field again this afternoon with a medal detector I have and found these 7 pieces.

All are aluminum (non-magnetic) except for the broken piece of plexiglass which I suppose to be part of a canopy as it is thicker than what I see in the hardware. Also the small skinny piece about 2 inches long that appears to be brass and probably used for a fuel line or used to carry some other liquid.

The largest piece was a molten piece of aluminum so definitely a fire of some sort.

There is a number on the small bracket piece with rivets but I don't know what that would mean.

Still no idea on what aircraft fell from the sky. I checked the library but they don't keep back copies of the paper.

I'll head back out to the field on another nice sunny day and see what I find.

Kim

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  • 2 weeks later...

Those are some neat things! When I was stationed in Germany I hooked up with a group called the "Vermisstesuchdienst"..not sure about the spelling after all these yearts...anyway, they go out, research aircraft wreck sites, dig them up, clean up the UXO, and return any crew remains to the appropriate government. I took part in digs for several P-51s, an ME-110, ME109, and a couple of B17s. We also went out with a P47 pilot who had tried to attack a train one town over from where I lived, but it turned out to be a flak train...he bailed out at such a low level that his chute just fully deployed before he hit the ground. We went to the crash site and gave him some of the pieces of his plane..then into Kaiserslautern to the German hospital where he had been held. He was a neat guy...took photos of every meal - which is how he remembered each place he'd been. I've got pieces of a B17 in my museum that were recovered in East Germany. The plane had been hit by another b17 which sheared off the tail. The tail gunner was 19 and managed to bail out. The pilot, instead of dumping his bombs, kept the plane in the air until they cleared a small town, and then crashed into the mountain side. The German saw them as heros and built a memorial to teh crew, which we dedicated in 1992. George (the gunner) was there, and we went to the places he had been held, and during the ceremony a man came up and returned the pilots wedding ring, which he found as a young boy right after the crash.

 

Anyway, some of the stuff we pulled out of the ground looked as new as the day it was made...I still have boxes of bits and pieces of the otehr planes as well. As for local stuff...there was an ME262 being flight tested that crashed near Troy OH, which is just up the road from us.

 

 

Mark send

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  • 2 weeks later...

Have you considered going to your local county recorders office, or whichever county office handles property records in your area, and asking for the recorded history of who owned that particular piece of property?

 

If you do that and get that list, you may be able to start trying to track down old property owners or their relatives, to who what folks remember about crashes on the property.

 

Assuming it is typical farm land, I would guess it will be a short list, given that often times farm land tends to stay in families and with usually fairly locally connected people.

 

Keep us posted!

 

MW

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MW, Normally I would have attempted that but this particular tract is owned by the railroad and has been for many years. They have locals who farm it for them and I'm sure that has been many different people over the years.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Kim

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  • 1 month later...

I went back out into the field Friday and found this piece:

 

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It is also all aluminum except for the inside nut on the bolt.

 

The most exciting news is that a fellow from the 'Warbird Exchange' site was able to ID the number on the part I posted and said it was a good one. He said that series of numbers starting with '23' belong to Lockheed's P-38 aircraft. The kind people over there (and the WW2 aircraft.net site) then piled on with information. They even provided a photo of the pilot and a blurb from a local Ohio newspaper about the crash. Apparently there was a P-38J that crashed in Vandalia, Ohio on December 2, 1943. Unfortunately, the pilot Harry P. Posey was killed in the crash. I have requested an accident report and look forward to see what details it provides.

Thanks for your interest!

Kim

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Love this topic-really great stories. kfields-keep us updated on new developments. Thanks everyone for sharing

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  • 5 months later...

The farmer across the road finally harvested his field this past week which allowed me to go into the field and get a panoramic shot today vs 70 years ago when the plane crashed.

 

Here is a snapshot taken when the local firemen were at the crash site on December 3, 1943, and the next shot(s) I took today (December 1,2013) as a comparison. The large white dairy barn center-left) is still there; the white corn crib center right is still there but I have it painted red and changed it into a huge garage. My house is back on the right behind the trees and is hard to see.

 

 

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