I was mooching around on youtube again and saw some suggested video about WWII excavations. I was quite intrigued to see what that was about so watched it. I had, from the title, expected an “excavation” in the archiological sense, but it turned out to be some rather less careful russian guys digging “artifacts” out of some pretty big holes they had dug. Most of these artifacts seemed to be live munitians. When things like that are found in Western Europe, the entire neibourhood is ecacuated. With some of these guys, they just toss the things on the heap with all the live ordnance they pulled out ot the ground!

There is a load of this stuff on youTube if you keep digging (no pun intended), but here are a couple of clips I found interesting.

The first is an abandoned island, left pretty much as the German army left it:

The next is a T34 being pulled out of a bog, it has German markings on it, supposedy captured by th Germans and re-used against the Russians before being dumped in a pond. There are a load of live shells in this thing which they start pulling out. Some of the commentary says they were able to get the engine of this tank runnign within a few hours!

A German tank being hauled out of the ground:

Some guys digging up bunkers by hand:

And the clip of some guy who has been on the sauce strugging to get back out of the pit!

I find it pretty fascinating just how much of this stuff is out there still to be recovered. I guess some of these things have quite a high value with collectors. I think its nice to see the effort being made to recover this stuff, as long as no one gets blown up in the process!