Hey all. Have a friend whose father was a Colonel in the army, circa 1950s?
He was going through an old attic footlocker and found the following ammo. We cant for the life of us figure out waht it is or what it would be fired from. Can anyone shed some light on this?
Thanks. It says .45 Cal. Auto, but has this funky brass cylinder protruding from the bullet. Obviously wouldnt fit ant modern magazine i can think of.

was he in the artillery? i think the second line is the clue - perhaps there were inert training rounds that took these so you would get a report when "fired" perhaps for a 75 mm howitzer/

just my thoughts

It could be a sub-caliber round for training, those were common. But it does look small.

I'm just throwing out a guess based on the previous posts. Maybe some sort of primer for mortar practice rounds? It looks like an incomplete sabot round, though not designed to actually allow a smaller projectile to exit a barrel, but rather use the .45 to propel a smaller round forward and compress the powder behind it.

Sort of like space shuttles used booster rockets to get up to speed until the shuttle could go on it's own. Definitely an odd looking round.

I figured there might be some old timers on the board that might have seen them. Sound like good possibilities

I don't have an answer for you but I did wander off to internet land and got lost looking for ideas.

I've spent 30 minutes looking at some of the strangest and most interesting ordnance from all around the planet.

Try here - http://cartridgecollectors.org/ - and they have a forum to post your question. I'm betting someone there will find the answer for you.

The only thing I can think of is it's a component of a reusable training round. Field artillery practice could mean gun drills. The crews perform all the actions needed to lay the gun in, then load and fire a blank round.