That stuff from the swamps comes up in remarkable shape sometimes. I remember in mid 80's a couple friends of mine were at digging...Remember when 3 of us were sitting on buddy's balcony on the 5th floor, fiddling with K98 he found near Liepaja. Then one of them loaded the rifle with a round of ammo, which also was dug out off Shkedes dunes and, to my astonishment pulled the trigger. Bullet hit the brick just underneath the roof of building across and I remember how neat the fountain of brick particles looked like then...lol(I still shiver when think of that bullet hitting somebody instead of a brick...) The rifle was in pretty good shape with some pitting on the receiver and dark bore, but after that shot the bore was much cleaner. They were digging a hundreds of rounds of ammo off Shkedes dunes then, mostly German 8mm and lots of Oerlikon type 20 mm cannon rounds. These were very rusty on the outside, thus they could easily separate the projectile and casing. The projectiles were ending up in the fire producing a loud bang, but the treasure was inside of the casing - perfectly intact sack of powder with black German eagle printed on the side and date:1944. The upper part of the sack contained a large amount of smokeless powder and the bottom part had smaller amount of greenish stuff which burned with much higher velocity then smokeless powder... lol. We were teens then and we never thought of consequences from playing such games. I am still amazed that none of us ever got injured or worse - killed. Finding old ammo, casings or projectiles on the beach just a hundred yards from my home was a common occurrence then. Old rusty F1 grenades and mortar projectiles were also a common find in Liepaja at that time...No doubt that there were the heaviest battles fought in Kurland at the end of the war, with Germans furiously fighting back until 9th of May...
