Link – French Resistance cache unearthed including STENs named ‘Pepette’ and ‘Alice’

Hmm..first it was an StG44 ad now this.

A couple remodeling an old home in north-central France found a cache of ammo, grenades and submachine guns hidden under a granite floor, The Lyonne Republicaine reported.

The find was made in July by the couple in the Quarré-les-Tombes area, about 150 miles away from Paris. Cached under the floor were three STEN guns, over a dozen Britsh Mills bomb type fragmentation grenades, three handguns, more than 1,000 rounds of ammo, and several Bren light machine gun magazines.

I wonder if, a hundred years from now, people in Idaho, Arizona, and Montana will be finding PVC burial tubes full of guns and ammo every time someone digs up an old driveway or tears down an old garage.

Mathematically, there has got to be a lot more of these sorts of things out there. WW2 left millions of guns and related materials spread across Europe. It’s no stretch to think that there were quite a few people who squirreled a bunch of it away.

Here in Montana, the thing found mostly is what we term ‘relics’. Someone plows up an old Sharps that is nothing but a barely recognizable collection of rust, or someone finds an old Colt in the rocks under a bridge somewhere. We all read about that Winchester that got found propped up against a tree after a hundred years, right? I’ve met more than a few folks who have found guns out in the sticks…usually a gun someone lost or forgot, rather than a purposefully left cache. But…..there are those out there too. Once in a a very rare while, one turns up when someone leaves it where they shouldn’t have.

I’m always fascinated by these types of stories because they usually have interesting stories of their own behind them.

9 thoughts on “Link – French Resistance cache unearthed including STENs named ‘Pepette’ and ‘Alice’

  1. Unless a contractor found them I would still have them. They might need them in the future. No one would have known they exist if they had just SHUT UP! The people who hid them did so out of need and for these smarmy losers to tell the world about them is beyond belief! Most likely the people who hid the weapons died before they could be used (killed by NAZIS) !!
    As for future caches of USA weapons and the like, here is a short related story. I worked for a company that dealt with gold, silver, diamonds ETC. We got a job going over a large estate of mostly silver and some gold. Mostly in coin form. The person who contacted us said he had more but the MAP he had was wrong at best about where the rest were so he was getting a metal detector to find them. Many 5 gallon buckets full of coins missing!

    • How many people still have the knowledge to do a house remodel on their own anymore? The owner probably heard about it after the cops.

    • Truer words…..
      For me, stories like this reinforce my conviction that, over enough time, the human animal has tremendous difficulty learning from the past. Disastrous social tendencies are cyclical, and endemic to ethnic groups everywhere. We can ‘prep’ for our kids & loved ones, but by the time you get to grandkids, they think your ‘ancient history’ is just the folly of a stupid generation instead of a preview of their own future.

  2. Australia had a huge run on 6″ PVC pipe back when their gun ban went into effect. Probably a lot of SMLE’s forgotten underground when Grandpa kicked the bucket.

  3. Alabama recently had several machine guns dumped in a creek. They were in near pristeen condition I think I heard. They found their way to the batfe I believe.

  4. My Dad served in Europe after the war. He used to tell me that when the SHTF everybody is going to yank a weapon from behind their walls. Stuff was everywhere.

  5. A more contemporary version might be the collections found after a storage unit auction. That seems to come up often enough.

  6. I’m mainly baffled that anyone ever comes forward about these cases.

    A little midnight cleaning, and a replacement of ammunition with fresh supplies, and possibly turning in the unstable explosives, sure, but turn in the whole thing?
    Sh’yeah, as IF.

    You’ve gotta be kidding me.

    • They didn’t find everything, yet. All those BREN mags, and no matching guns? Those are bigger. Probably buried under the barn.

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