You know, when i go to gun shows and find things like old World War Two uniforms and such, I never find anything cool in the pockets. But some guy in England found a map that led him to a massive German bunker complex that had been hidden away for sixty years.

Amateur historian unearths Nazi battery

Maisy German Gun Battery discovered

So, naturally, do the smart thing: buy up all the surrounding property, restore the place, and make it into a tourist attraction.

Why can’t I ever find cool stuff like this???

It’s Pearl Harbor Day… a good reminder that sometimes things happen that you just were not anticipating at all. (Unless, of course, you’re FDR and need to jumpstart a failed economy.)

There are actually a few Pearl Harbor survivors in this town. I met one at the post office years ago. It was kinda weird meeting someone who was there at such a pivotal moment in US history. OLike an idiot, I asked “What was it like?”..a question I’m sure he’d heard thousands of times. I shouldn’t have been surprised that his answer was “Terrifying.”

Well, here’s something you dont see everyday. An extremely well preserved fallout shelter from the Soviet era. I’m running both links through Google’s translator since, as they said in ‘Transformers’, “[Russian alphabet] looks like every key on a calculator that you dont use!”

Automatic translation isnt an exact science, so let’s keep the snarky commentary about mistranslated words out of comments.

Link

Link

Remember guys…we’re celebrating Independence Day, not the 4th of July.

(Although given recent .gov shenanigans the pendulum seems to be swinging from independence to dependence, but that’s another post.)

Get out there and shoot something today!

Besides being a historical curiosity, this forgotten room carries a tangible benefit — a tax break that has saved the Lagos thousands of dollars over the years. They are one of the few remaining beneficiaries of a bill passed by the state’s Legislature in 1961 that provides exemptions for shelters designed “in accordance with plans, regulations and orders of the State Civil Defense Commission.”

It’s kind of ironic…out of all the people I meet who are into preparedness, and over all the years I’ve been interested in it, I’ve only met once person with an actual shelter. Fella I know up the valley from here built a little bunker under his yard, built a patio above it, added a barbecue to disguise the vents, and made a little ‘pumphouse’ looking structure to conceal the entrance. It’s very cool.

I wonder if the program providing the tax credits for having a shelter is still in place….I think thats the sort of behavior .gov should encourage.

No talk of the old days of public/private fallout shelters would e complete without a link to CivilDefenseMuseum.com.

I’m sitting here at the shop, watching through the window as the power company guy wanders the neighborhood hanging disconnect notices on businesses doors. I suppose there might be a recovery going on somewhere but I’m not seeing much of it here. My landlord has nine business spaces to rent..at this moment five are empty with no signs of that changing in the near future. Tough times, man.

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Here’s a link I’ve been sitting on for a while. ( Be prepared to spend an hour or so going through all these…it’s pretty compelling stuff.) It’s first-hand memories of the first Great Depression. In many of the memories there are some parallels to today’s experiences, but many make today’s situations look extravagantly luxurious. There are very few memories of violence or crime. However, two did jump out at me:

“Everybody was stealing. If you were on the street car, the man sitting next to you had a gun and would stick you up, and nobody on the streetcar would know you were robbed. Our house was robbed when we went visiting. The neighbor never helped, everybody was for themselves. If they worked, they were blessed. The butcher picked your pocket and padded the bill. Lots of bathtub Gin was being made by neighbors.”

“I can remember when we went to church one Sunday and my mom had about 300 young chickens about ready to lay eggs. When we came home, all of her chickens were gone and my mom cried for days. People would steal anything that they could. It was terrible in those days. My dad would get up at night and go out and shoot his 12-gauge shotgun to scare people away. We had a dog, but he barked all the time and we couldn’t tell what he was barking at. My dad farmed with horses and he had to keep the barn locked at night. People would kill your cows and butcher them in the field if you didn’t watch them carefully.”

Different time, different people. Definitely a different attitude towards work, charity (giving and receiving it), family obligation and duty. Go read, it’s interesting stuff. It certainly makes you feel that, thus far, things are a lot better now than they were then.

Man, what a rabbit hole I got dropped into. Ever do one of those things where you look up one item on the internet and it leads to information about a related item and then to another and before long your ten degrees of separation from your original topic? Yeah. That happened to me.

How have I never hear of Multi-Purpose Food? This is the sort of thing that, I would think, would be common history among people who are interested in the history of preparedness.

I’ll give you some links in a moment, but let me tell you how I found this stuff. In a quest for some other info, I came across someone’s blog where they posted about a bomb shelter in their grandparents backyard that they finally got access to. Essentially a time capsule from the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were pictures of the things that were found. (Post 1 and post 2 about the bomb shelter) One of the things that fascinated me was the pre-packaged kit of survival food and canned water. See, back then, much like today, enterprising folks set up businesses to cater to the sudden demand for suitable provisions to carry you through the nuclear holocaust that seemed imminent. What was in the kit? Well, in the one that was shown there were 14 cans of water and a can of “Multi-Purpose Food”.

What is MPF? Apparently, one 2-ounce serving met 1/3 of your daily protein and nutritional requirements. So, three 2-oz. servings per day would, in theory, keep you from starving to death.

MPF was the brainchild of Clifford Clinton, a guy who saw starvation up close and decided to do something about it. His restaurant in California would give free meals to those who couldn’t pay. But Clifton wanted to help a much larger population. To do that, he needed the right food. He contacted a biochemist with his parameters:

And…it worked. Tons of this stuff was made up and shipped to the post-war world to relieve famines and hunger. As the ’60s rolled around, General Mills started making this stuff up for use in provisioning bomb shelters. And thats where I found information on it.

Nowdays we have freeze dried, vacuum sealed, foods that last pretty much as long as the container holding them will last. Content-wise, I’m sure that there are similar MPF-type food products out there…lifeboat rations spring to mind. But anyway, it’s an interesting little bit of history that segues nicely into our interest in preparedness.