Sunday afternoon Sport WW2 fashion.

While driving his Ford van near Colchester, Essex my grandfather was attacked by a German fighter firing machine guns and 20mm cannon. This one hit his van but failed to explode and so he kept it as a souvenir. It has since been made completely safe including the cap by having all explosive material removed. My family referred to being shot at on the ground by German fighters as Sunday afternoon sport although it could happen any day of the week. It started happening after the fall of France and it was normally a lone German fighter flying from a French air field which would fly low over the channel to avoid radar and would have enough fuel for about 10 minutes of flying over Essex before having to return home.


In a separate but similar incident my father who was a child at the time was playing in the garden when a German fighter came in at no more than tree top level and opened fire with machine guns. I don't believe that my father was the target but it was in fact the British solders, camped near by, who were; they returned fire with their rifles. They pilot couldn't care less that there was a child, my father, between his guns and his target. My father well remembers seeing the outline of the German pilot through the persplex canopy. Fortunately, my father wasn't hit but I don't know about the soldiers.

Nice piece...I'm surprised it didn't go clean through the car front to back or side to side...and carry on.

Practically undamaged nose fuse.

As story from WWII about some 20mm that entered a B-17's fuel tank and failed to explode; during a raid a B-17 copped a hiding from a ME-109 with 4 x 20mm explosive rounds entering one of its wing fuel tanks and failing to detonate which if they had would have shorn that wing clean off.
When they returned to base and the engineers had taken care of the unexploded rounds the pilot saw one of the engineers coming towards him afterwards with a bit of wry smile, he handed him one of the projectiles and said look what we found inside one of the rounds handing him a piece of paper.

"This is all we can do for now" so it became apparent that a slave labourer or a disgruntled German had deliberately not filled the rounds with explosive otherwise if they had that B-17 would have marked its demise by that all to familiar smoke trail going down.

I have another good story about a long overdue P-38 Lightning that I will relate to the forum later in all honesty if it had not been witnessed by so many people at its home airfield one would consider it unbelievable.

The 20mm shell left a large dent in my Grandfather's van which remained until he sold it. When this attack started, on my Grandfather, he stopped the vehicle and got himself into the ditch at the side of the road; he noticed dirt flying up around him as machine gun rounds hit the ground.

Please don't take this the wrong way and I'm far from an ammunition expert but your round looks like a British Hispano HEI round and not a German MG151 round. If I can locate my AP round it may confirm it.

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Originally Posted by Brit plumber

your round looks like a British Hispano HEI

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Well...they all look pretty much the same. I have a German round for Hispano that looks like this.

It came to me via my father not directly from my Grandfather. I do also have a D.P./Dummy version which is dimensionally the same but the body is coloured yellow and the brass cap is made of solid aluminium and it also has some German writing on.

Sometimes German aircraft shot-down over the U.K. were found to have British made parts and equipment on-board. My Grandfather who was a member of the Home Guard and the Civil Defence was also an Electrical Engineer and would often attend the scene of German aircraft shot down and while doing so would take a personal/professional interest in the electrical equipment on board. On one such occasion he was examining some light fittings which I believe were in a wing of a shot down German aircraft (navigation lights?) and was surprised to find that the bulbs were made by Osram a British manufacturer. Perhaps these were supplied to Germany pre-war or perhaps some were captured in France 1940, who knows???

I was stationed at RAF Bentwaters/Woodbridge in East Anglia in '71 (the base that had the UFO's around '78 so they can't blame that one on me) and during my eight months there our EOD team defused at least one bomb a month some of them just on the other side of the fence where we were loading nukes. We also got tagged to dig up and remove the 50's from a P51 that crashed in 44. The pilot was still in it.. They knew where it was when it went down and never went after him because it buried in the med next to the river.