Bottle hunting in Guam

[RCO]

thats a neat place to look for bottles , you wouldn't think there'd be so many bottles on a island like guam . myself if i found anything good i'd just keep it , its not like there going to miss a couple bottles as there looks to be thousands in that dump . but its likely most of the coca cola bottles are the same if the dump was only used during WW2 , be unlikely to find much age in the dump if it was only used during that period .but still a neat place to look .
we have snakes and spiders in canada but nothing like the one posted . there is only 1 venoumous snake native to my area and i've yet to ever come across one only seen small snakes over the years that are mostly friendly .

 

[daven2nl]

I had an opportunity to go back out exploring today, to an area I had been to many times before. Some areas of the jungle are pretty thick with brush, and you always have a feeling that around the next tree is something special, so it is hard to turn around and head back. This time I wanted to relocate a piece of UXO (unexploded ordnance) so I can mark the position for disposal, and I wanted to head a little deeper than I'd gone the last time I'd been in this area, which was several months ago.

It was a rainy day today, but it was actually quite pleasant. I got soaking wet but the rain actually helped keep the mosquitoes away and it wasn't as hot as usual.

Finding the UXO was easy enough; it's not far from a hunting trail I use to access the area.
I'm posting with slightly larger images; hopefully this doesn't cause anyone issues.

This may not look like much, but it's an unexploded 75MM pack howitzer high explosive round. The screw looking thing to the left is part of the fuse mechanism.

In this area previously, I'd found many American and Japanese bottles. Through this area used to run a dirt road, abandoned at the end of WW2. Originally, I rediscovered this road and explored the whole length, finding lots of stuff all along it. Since that time, I've been revisiting areas along it, after looking at Google Earth and finding potential targets to explore (primarily areas with coconut trees in the jungle which indicate former settlements).

Now I'm hiking with GPS capability which allows me to explore specific areas, when other times I'm not sure exactly where I'm heading except for some compass headings which to use to find my way home.

Soon I pass into what is new territory for me, and immediately I start finding stuff.

This is a crushed 75MM pack howitzer shell casing (American), from the war.

Not too much further, I find more howitzer shell casings and some scattered Japanese beer bottles.

You can almost make out part of the embossing around the base "DAINIPPON BREWERY COMPANY LTD" and the "DNB" logo near the next. These bottles have a distinct shape and are by far the most common WW2 Japanese bottles I find.

 

[daven2nl]

The further I went back the more I found. I stumble across several pits in the ground, perhaps 4 or 5 feet deep and 20 feet across. At first I thought bomb crater, and my second thought was they they were American burn pits, but they didn't look like either. They were too perfectly shaped and had no entry point from where a bulldozer would have gotten in to dig them out.

This photo does no justice, and it's hard to get a photo that does, but this is one of the 5 or 6 similarly shaped pits I came across. They were probably separated by 100ft or so.

Also unusual is that I found absolutely no American bottles around either - only Japanese ones like these Dai Nippon bottles, scattered around each of the pits.

Here is the base of a Dai Nippon beer bottle, showing the trademark star logo. The 18 is the year of manufacture - 18th year of the Showa reign, or 1943. I have not found anything definitive stating that this is in fact the date code, but I have looked at dozens if not hundreds, and am confident I'm correct in thinking this. Most common numbers are 14-18, which would make sense (1939 to 1943). I've found none from 1944 which also makes sense because by this time the American submarines had made a big dent in Japanese shipping.

In the background you see a green bottle which is also a Dai Nippon bottle, but smaller and for a soft drink beverage - Citron.

You can see the typical growth in this area. Very difficult to see more than 10 or 15 ft in any direction. As a result, I could be missing the mother load of bottles and not even know it. This is why I often revisit areas, and often stumble across new stuff every time I do.

I had hoped to find a Japanese Sake bottle. These are quite rare to find whole. They are very large, perhaps 20 inches tall and 6 inches in diameter, and are made of a very pretty blue-green glass. They are very distinctive in shape. It was not to be today, however. I did find a piece of one though.

This is the top of a Japanese WW2 era sake bottle - usually you find them broken. I think I've only come across 6 or 7 whole ones during all of my exploring. The story is that in Japan, these bottles, after use, were melted down and blown into fishing floats. This would make sense, because they are the same color.

Back to the mysterious pits. Since I found nothing but Japanese glassware around them, and nothing inside them, I believe this was a former Japanese defensive position, probably an anti-aircraft site. Most likely these were dug (with great effort into the limestone) to house 25MM AA cannons. Whether or not the guns were ever emplaced here, I don't know, but I dug around and found nothing in them. I'll have to come back with a metal detector and look more closely. When the Americans landed on Saipan in 1944, every ship heading to and from that island passed Guam and lobbed some shells at the defenders when it was still help by the Japanese. The Japanese never got a chance to finish all their defenses, which may have been the case here.

I am definitely looking forward to returning to this site and poking around some more!

-Dave

 

[elmoleaf]

Thank you for posting. I look forward to reading/seeing more.
It's so different than what I've encountered.....coal ash/rust/crust/1920s stuff in New England.