Attachment 92767
I'm trying to figure out what this is, I haven't had much luck with google. It has a military green paint
Printable View
Attachment 92767
I'm trying to figure out what this is, I haven't had much luck with google. It has a military green paint
That appears to be the casing, or hopefully is just the casing, for a US M83 "Butterfly" bomb:
U.S. M83 Butterfly Bomb, Post WWII- Inert-Ord.Net
Hopefully, T-11 is the designation for a training bomb, or this one has been properly inerted.
Hello Mamyers,
First.. Welcome to the Forum.
I see your in Lansing, I'm out in Williamston.
Curious how you came upon this Butterfly Bomb ?
After doing a bit of reading about the use of these in WWII, thru the link posted by Hcompton79... Another Michigander.
From the link above:
"The bomb has a lethal radius of up to 70 yards."
Further searching led me to the use of these by the US in the Vietnam War.
So maybe even Korea.... I don't know. But YES to Vietnam.
From the link I'll post below it shows many different size and styles of these 'Sub-Munitions'. Today they estimate that 80 million still exist in Laos:
Schuster Institute Investigative Journalism
Bombing Laos: The American public knew next to nothing about the air raids on Laos for seven years until President Richard Nixon was forced to acknowledge that campaign publicly in 1970.
Over a period of almost a decade beginning in 1963, “the U.S. military and its allies dumped more than 6 billion pounds of bombs across the land—more than one ton for every man, woman, and child in Laos at the time,” writes Coates. “American forces flew more than 580,000 bombing missions, the equivalent of one raid every eight minutes for nine years.”
Among the ordnance dropped were 270 million cluster-bomb submunitions, tiny “bombies” that were packed by the dozens or hundreds into canisters and casings designed to open in midair, scattering baseball-sized explosives across areas as large as a football field. Millions of submunitions fell into forests, where many lodged into treetops and scrub brush, waiting for decades until something jostles them loose. Bombies are the most common form of unexploded ordnance in Laos today.
Some were painted bright yellow and looked like miniature pineapples; others looked like oranges, lemons, or soda cans. For various reasons—human error, defective equipment, failure to arm—up to 30 percent of all bombies failed to explode on impact. As a result, more than 80 million live submunitions remained in the soil after war, volatile and deadly. Little kids mistake them for toys. Farmers mistake them for rocks. One little bombie is powerful enough to destroy anyone or anything within thirty yards.
Charlie-Painter777
They were nicknamed the "Devil's Eggs"
I don't remember seeing them during my three years in Vietnam. But that doesn't mean there were not there. I was mostly along the rivers or villages by the rivers.