Hello everybody!
I just registered on the forum hoping to get some help IDing what you can see in the attached pics. The "splinters" were found in and near the small crater (about 1-1.5 m across, see the tyre marks near it, now filled with sand) in a battlesite deep in the Libyan desert. The place is quite undisturbed and there should have been nothing there either before or after a clash at the beginning of 1941, so there are not really many possibilities; actually it should be something that a Long Range Desert Group Patrol carried or something thrown from an Italian recce/light bombing plane. The problem is, the size of the "object" is quite small and doesn't fit with any of the small arms employed by either side; the only thing I could think of is either some component of a 2-in British mortar round (the biggest calibre weapon available in that occasion to that LRDG Patrol) or a component of a small size Italian aircraft bomb. There actually was also an Italian ground unit, but no weapons in its inventory has anything in common with the "object" (rifles and MGs in 7.7 mm, 12.7 mm and 20 mm which I know well).
In both cases I opted for "internals" since the splinters are too thin for either the casing of a mortar round or the casing of a bomb, apart maybe from .5 kg incendiary Italian bombs (which should have a smooth surface, though, as far as I know). The Italian plane should not have had any drop weapons bigger than .5 - 2 kg, of whatever type (fragmentation or incendiary or else). What really looks weird to me is the threading on both sides of what looks like some sort of "ribbed" cylinder a few inches long and who-knows-how-many inches in diameter. If it had been found elsewhere I could have thought of something else, but being in context with the crater it should be part of something that exploded there. I also have no idea of the behaviour of explosive ordnance in hard, flat sand like that, which might help in understanding the explosive content of the object and thus its origin.
Here's the "object", with a hand to help in size comparison
and here's the place they were found
Unfortunately my knowledge of British mortars and Italian aircraft bomb details is not deep, also because (although I live in Italy) there's almost no documentation available - I'm currently using a reprint of OP 1668 "Italian and French Explosive ordnance" edited by the US Navy Ordnance Bureau in 1946.
Rob
I just registered on the forum hoping to get some help IDing what you can see in the attached pics. The "splinters" were found in and near the small crater (about 1-1.5 m across, see the tyre marks near it, now filled with sand) in a battlesite deep in the Libyan desert. The place is quite undisturbed and there should have been nothing there either before or after a clash at the beginning of 1941, so there are not really many possibilities; actually it should be something that a Long Range Desert Group Patrol carried or something thrown from an Italian recce/light bombing plane. The problem is, the size of the "object" is quite small and doesn't fit with any of the small arms employed by either side; the only thing I could think of is either some component of a 2-in British mortar round (the biggest calibre weapon available in that occasion to that LRDG Patrol) or a component of a small size Italian aircraft bomb. There actually was also an Italian ground unit, but no weapons in its inventory has anything in common with the "object" (rifles and MGs in 7.7 mm, 12.7 mm and 20 mm which I know well).
In both cases I opted for "internals" since the splinters are too thin for either the casing of a mortar round or the casing of a bomb, apart maybe from .5 kg incendiary Italian bombs (which should have a smooth surface, though, as far as I know). The Italian plane should not have had any drop weapons bigger than .5 - 2 kg, of whatever type (fragmentation or incendiary or else). What really looks weird to me is the threading on both sides of what looks like some sort of "ribbed" cylinder a few inches long and who-knows-how-many inches in diameter. If it had been found elsewhere I could have thought of something else, but being in context with the crater it should be part of something that exploded there. I also have no idea of the behaviour of explosive ordnance in hard, flat sand like that, which might help in understanding the explosive content of the object and thus its origin.
Here's the "object", with a hand to help in size comparison
and here's the place they were found
Unfortunately my knowledge of British mortars and Italian aircraft bomb details is not deep, also because (although I live in Italy) there's almost no documentation available - I'm currently using a reprint of OP 1668 "Italian and French Explosive ordnance" edited by the US Navy Ordnance Bureau in 1946.
Rob
