Pre decimal butchering

[Mineblowingmetal]

I usually hunt a few WW2 bases
These are pretty hard to find .....
Target ID is all over the place

US marines trench art rings (or failures)

 

[Dutchy]

Cool find. A question, how do you know Marines did this?

 

[geof_junk]

That was to main way to make a silver ring. For sterling silver the shilling has to be pre 1946. I have even found one made this way while detecting parks.

 

[Nugget]

I'd never heard of that until now, nice find.

 

[Mineblowingmetal]

Cool find. A question, how do you know Marines did this?

Thanks Dutchy

the base was a US site based in Australia during WW2 ...right before the pacific invasion when the Japanese invaded the Philippines there were at any one time up to 60,000 US Marines on Australian soil

they use to make sweetheart items to post home and because they were all paid in Australian pre decimals most of them could only grasp the silver content (925) and couldn't understand the Empires pre decimal system.
many a pub brawl began over misinterpretation of correct change given

the heads of divisions would give out Aussie pre dec coins to the US soldiers just for making items like these purely to kill the boredom while they waited for General McArthur to give the order that they were going back to war ( some of these divisions had already fought in Europe, Normandy and other beachfront assaults ) one of which was the famous RED ARROWS infantry division

 

[Dutchy]

Sorry mate but your facts are a bit out. There were never 60,000 Marines here at any one time and certainly never before 1941/early 42 before the Japs went into the Philippines. The 1st Marine Div came here right after Guadalcanal in Dec 42 and they were only around 18,000.

The Red Arrows or the 32nd Div was mainly at Camp Cable in Brisbane (then to New Guinea) and they were never in the European theatre of ops. (WW1 yes but not WW 2). In fact none of the pacific divisions fought in Europe and were sent over here. There were plans to bring them over for the invasion of Japan right after Germany fell in May 1945. My grandfather was sitting in Marseilles France waiting to come over this way. Lucky for the atom bombs. Sorry just a military history buff.

Should be a bit more stuff there for you, good luck.

Jarhead.

 

[Mineblowingmetal]

Thanks jarhead,

Most of my info on the place comes second hand

Ozatwar can be a little ..... Generalised when it comes to numbers of troops

That site claims camp cable had 20,000 at one time

When reading through a lot of the camps and bases Australia wide there were a lot of US soldiers and navy personnel here and most around Brisbane

Reading back 60,000 was a rather high number I think meant to write 30,000 Australia wide

But even then I don't have the facts from the US documents to state exactly how many were here

Either way it is a wealth of history to unearth....

Apologies and thanks for the detailed info on the red arrows

 

[Teemore]

Nice find, looks close to what pennies that we, as kids, used to shoot at with a .22 were like when we hit then, from the front at least can't remember what the back used to look like.
Not sure where you're detecting but there were a lot of runways and temp air bases just out of Darwin, many are still visible (just).
Cheers Tom

oh almost forgot there were also the flying boat bases at/near Rathmines, don't know whether there were many Americans there