there is still surplus military ammo floating around originally sold by cmp. greek or otherwise re imported.
i have a certain amount. this is from poor memory, but during wwII think there were at least seven plants making ammo.
i know i managed to get a can from a number of the plants from cmp.
i also know that the army repacked ammo from the pacific in hawaii in the early 50's in sealed containers. I have several of them never opened.
as to cupernickel, a few years back we ran across about 17000 rounds of early 50's french produced m2 ball. it had sat in storage in phoenix in a uncooled garage for all those years. ammo was bad for primer, brass reasons and other things. but the bullets were pulled, cupernickel, and the powder of an unknown type was saved. cupernickel bullets were reset in new brass/primers, and working up from a light load of that powder, and using a chrony, we got to 2750fps. interesting thing was even given the history of the original powder etc, there was only maybe
10/15fps variance between rounds in five shot strings.
another little oddity. few years back i bought a complete untouched arisaka from a very old man that wanted it to go to good home. it had been fired four rounds from some norma ammo, thats it. he was on mcArthurs's staff in tokyo at the end of the war, and brought it home along with a original sling and bayonet from the same plant. What he also brought home was a single round or ammo he said was for the gun.. except it wasn't, it was 30.06 stamped frankfurt arsonel something like 1935. I pointed that out to him, and how it got to tokyo is anyones guess.
as to the a.p. stuff, a now deceased brother in law was a landing craft driver in a number of pacific campaigns, but often went a shore. of course he was navy, but said prefered the springfield to a garand as the sand and stuff didn't jam them as bad and easier to clean.. also prefered the a.p., as japs thinking they were safe in bunkers made out of palm tree trunks found out to late there were not safe. for what it's worth.
the price of a.p. when you find it, is kind of rich these days, but i know of one distributor a few years ago that had over a million rounds of it for sale, it didn't last long.
ammo can be functional for a long time. I have personally fired 8mm german stuff out of a mg42 originally produced for operation barbarosa, have a case, unopened of WWII german 8mm, and another case made for the austrian/hungarian 91/30 straight pull. works just fine.
what i can't bring myself to do is to open an unopened box of ammo for the spencer carbine, and fire a round or two, but it is tempting.
Last edited by RoninPhx; 06/29/20.
