Nov 4, 2014: Shrapnel

[Carruthers]

One of the comments in the NY Daily News article suggests the following:

This makes much more sense. The shrapnel is probably the small chunks scattered here and there. The rest is from the casket.
I suppose that stuff is routinely removed by the cremation service before ashes are returned. In this case, since the family was requesting the shrapnel, the crematory simply sent along the whole pile, rather than sift through it for the relevant bits.

I have no wish to lessen what Mr Brown manifestly endured over the decades, but I suspect that there is a kernel of truth in the above comment.

[xoxoxoBruce]

"He'd said there was a bullet in his leg but I was imagining one romantic piece of metal,” daughter Jane Madden, 55, told the Telegraph.

That does NOT mean he and his Army doctors didn't know the real story, it means he chose not to tell people.

TIM FARRELL said...

The average knee-cap is about 1/3 of the size of 2 handfuls of debris. I think that with that amount, someone would have noticed.

1- Nobody said it was in his knee. 2- Somebody noticed. Duh.

Bigjake (BigEgo) questions Browns honesty...

He may not have been truthful, either. According to the UK Ministry of Defense, "More than 11 million troops served in the British Commonwealth during the Second World War with 580,000 killed or missing and 475,000 wounded, giving a casualty rate of almost 11 per cent", which is actually just under 10%). Blah blah blah

WTF, he wasn't testifying or writing a report. The paper quotes somebody who claims they heard Brown say... C'mon, war stories, folks, war stories.

BUFFMUFFIN says...

Germans *never* used material like this in their weapons, they were extremely meticulous with their weapons right up to the end of the war.

Like I said in the original post, it might have been a booby-trap, not a mine.

Since the Brits are not ecologically diligent like us, and insist of burning the coffins, it's possible some of the hardware might have been inadvertently from the coffin. Also, since British crematoriums have a magnet to remove ferrous metal from the ashes before they are returned to next of kin. Since the family specifically requested the metal be returned, it could be an accumulation of more than one cremation. The screws and tacks especially might be coffin hardware, although the odd bits of wire are curious. One piece of wire looks like a binder clip. Maybe it's stuff the army docs used to put him back together.