An exceptional, authentic piece of World War II combat logistics.
This is an original US Army .30 Caliber M1 steel ammunition box, manufactured between 1942 and 1945 for use with the M1919 Browning machine gun manufactured by the Crown Can Company.
The scarcity of the Crown Can Company M1 ammunition box comes down to a mix of mid-war logistics, manufacturing pivots, and industrial scale.
While giant corporations flooded the front lines with millions of standard boxes, Crown functioned on a vastly different level.
Crown was awarded a significantly smaller piece of the ordnance contract because its infrastructure was primarily geared toward bottle caps and specialty containers rather than mass-market infantry hardware.
Because Crown cans were issued in much smaller quantities to troops in Europe and the Pacific, far fewer survived the war.
Over the last 80 years, the vast majority of surplus M1 boxes preserved by veterans or found in European barns have turned out to be the omnipresent CANCO or Reeves models.
For a Crown container to survive the war, avoid being scrapped for metal post-war, and preserve its original yellow paint stencil makes it an uncommon find on today's market.
This box is in an excellent unrestored vintage condition.
The metal is structurally sound with no rot-through or deep pitting.
As is typical for organic materials of this age, the internal sponge-rubber weatherproofing gasket inside the lid channel has degraded over the decades, leaving a standard oxidised residue line, old adhesive and flaky surface rust.
The photographs are of the actual item and form part of the description.
Please examine the photographs carefully and if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us.
