Battle Damaged Mess Kits & Canteens

I thought I should continue a bit with the "battle damage" theme and show you my collection of canteens and mess kits picked up from different battlefields. The main portion comes from friends who dug them up in Kurland, Latvia, and a few from Karelia and Northern Russia.

There is of course the slight chance some hunter took a shot at one or two of them, but most of them really shows the brutality of war, having been ripped apart by bullets and shrapnel.

1:

This messkit seems to have been too close to a detonation. It looks like it had two owners since it has two names inscribed, "Belz" and another name written with cyrillic letters. Found in Kurland.

2:

The Karelian forests had kept this for 80 years when a digger found it. I am not sure from which army it belonged, but it has interesting numbers punched in.

3:

The Finnish canteen is riddled with holes from shrapnel. An interesting detail is the grooves the four buttons on its cloth cover had made when they were punched into the metal by the detonation.

4:

Another mess kit with grenade fragment hits. Lots of Russian engravings. Found in Northern Russia.

5:

A german canteen cup with a single bullet strike. From the Kurland Kessel.

6:

The item in my collection with most bullet holes. I wish this one could talk and tell its tale. Karelia.

7:

A german canteen with both a bullet hole and two-three small holes from fragments of a grenade. Kurland.

8:

The flattest canteen I have ever seen. I wonder if a tank rolled over it. Found in Northern Russia.

9:

This SS marked canteen comes from famous battle grounds, the Kaprolat height deep in Karelia were 200 Norwegian SS soldiers tried to halt a flood of Red Army soldiers. A small shrapnel went through it.

10:

A swarm of shrapnel ended this canteen during one of the many Kurland battles. It is very dramatic looking as it exploded.

11:

The canteen looks more like a garden snail after four bullets deformed it somewhere North in Russia.

12:

The less than a centimeter small grenade fragment almost turned the canteen inside out. From Karelia.

13:

One of the diggers in Kurland found this mess kit. It looks like it was hit by a mix of bullets and shrapnel.

14:

The last item I had to show this round is this canteen, still with the cloth cover, made unusable by a bullet. Found in Kurland.