Possible field grave in Gronsveld – June 2016
The location
Study Group Missing Soldier decides to try and locate the possible field grave in Gronsveld, The Netherlands in June 2016. Tino, Ton and Peter are staying in a hotel in Maastricht for the night. They will meet Bart at the Gronsveld location on June 26.
The evening of the 25th we have an appointment with the family who asked us for help. With them, we drive to the field to view the location. It’s a grassy field with fruit trees and some cattle. At the back of the field is a slope. Rumors suggest that the soldier is buried at the bottom of the slope, but that’s not certain. The exact location remains unknown.
Findings
On the morning of the 26th we drive towards the meadow in Gronsveld. The heavy rainfall the night before doesn’t help, as the ground is boggy and the clay is muddy. Nevertheless, we search the entire slope and find a considerable number of shell casings. They are all fired U.S. casings with two different calibers and most of them date from 1943.
Finding shell casings is a positive development. It at least suggests that a field grave is plausible and that war activities took place in this part of Gronsveld. It is strange thought that almost all the shell casings are halved, with only the bottoms intact. We haven’t seen that anywhere else before. Furthermore, most of the shell casings are located on the upper edge of the slope and on the flat meadow area just in front of the slope. We didn’t find a single unfired cartridge nor any bullet points.
A metal fence surrounds the field. This severely interferes with our metal detectors and makes searching the edge of the plot nearly impossible. We’d also like to search the edges, but that will have to be done differently. Furthermore, there’s quite a bit of clutter scattered throughout the plot, which doesn’t make searching any easier. Many nails, screws, and other metal objects are being dug up.
Search dogs
By the end of the day, we haven’t made much progress. We did not find any human remains, and the metal fencing is a problem. We’ve contacted the Dutch Signi Search Dog Foundation (Stichting Signi zoekhonden) in the past. Perhaps they’d be willing to help us with this project.
June 26, 2016 Attendees – Project field grave in Gronsveld
Ton de Louw, Peter Mulder, Tino Dam, Bart van der Sterren