Just wanted to post a couple of WWII era 50cal bullets I found while diving for sharks teeth and other fossils in the Sarasota, FL area.
Did some research and found this:
During WWII, the area was sparsely populated, so the Army set up two air bases near the present-day Sarasota and Venice airports. Pilots were trained on gunnery, firing, and bombing ranges.
Pilots in P-40 Kittyhawks and P-51 Mustangs practiced dive bombing and shooting with their 50-caliber guns. The bullets and casing found are likely left over from those training sessions in the 1940s.
When I lived in DE they did a beach replenishment and used a sandbar offshore. What they didn’t know was that it was used for training during ww2 and they brought a lot of uxo up on to the beach.
I did some surveys on an old military ground attack training site a few years back. We came across a whole bunch of .50cal, 20mm, 30mm, old training rockets and a few craters that had some training bombs and likely a couple with un-exploded bombs in them.
It was a walk through history but you had to be careful where you stepped:)
