Possible... WWI find... I need help!!!!??

20 July 2006, 03:56 AM

I am not a big military collector...I was at an auction and got 3 boxes of stuff this is one of similar military items in the boxes... I need WWI and WWII experts to help.... I'm not sure what this means.

its says exactly this...... "A piece of a Boche Fighter plane,

the black is the cross painted,

and all dead jerry papers for identification,

Also a few more Fabric fragments,

And a piece of the prop."

any ID help would be appreciated!!

thanks jd

i will post all 4 pieces separatly...

Flugwuzzi · 21 July 2006, 05:42 AM

j.d.

the secand attachment 000_2461a.jpg is a permin/pass issued by the 15th police station an valid from 18th of jan to 3rd of feb 1919.

the quality of the scan is rather poor to translate the rest. If you have one in better quality it would be easier...

cheers
walter

21 July 2006, 12:07 PM

i have better scans but this site only allows 50kb pics so I cant post any better... thank you

dbahn · 21 July 2006, 02:53 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by j.d. in missouri

i have better scans but this site only allows 50kb pics so I cant post any better... thank you

One option is to post them on a free photo hosting site and then just link to them. Here's a way to do it fairly easily. Just go to step 3 about uploading them to the server, then instead of posting the image itself here, just post the link to the image as described on Photobucket.

For this kind of discussion, the detail of the images is important, and although I'm definitely not one of the experts, there are plenty that do come here.

Jim · 27 July 2006, 11:50 AM

I can not see the details of the writing on the postcard, but I do see that it does not have the rubber stamp of a military unit that one would expect to see on outgoing mail, including from aviation units. Aviation units all had their unique identifying rubber stamps that they would apply to outgoing mail. These are typically either a two-line cachet or a circular cachet which has information that includes their unit number. It is possible the card could have been sent by someone in an aviation unit and just never received the required markings, but I would not rely on this possibility to explain away the fact that it is not properly marked.

Without examining the bits of painted cloth up close it is not possible to say if they actually were taken from an aircraft. For many decades there has been a thriving cottage industry of crooks who create fake WW I aircraft fabric, especially fabric with recognizable paint schemes and even more especially fabric purportedly from German aircraft. The note you mention that says it is from a "Boche fighter plane" sounds on the suspicious side to me. If the writer was of the era and using the slang term "Boche" I might have expected them to use the term "machine" rather than "plane". Plane is a more modern term and seems out of place with the WW I slang. This is not to say there is not some real material out there and yours could be such. It is just that the proportion of fake to real in the market place makes the likelihood of getting real fabric is small. You really would need to show it to an expert in WW I German aircraft fabric to know what exactly it is. By expert, I do not mean your typical militaria dealer - they are not experts in something like this.