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Posted: 05-01-2013 07:56 Post subject:

WWII Spitfires digging team leaves for Burma

A team of aircraft enthusiasts is heading to Burma for the final stage of a 17-year search to locate a hoard of Spitfire planes.
The group of 21, lead by North Lincolnshire farmer David Cundall, will fly from Heathrow to begin digging at Yangon International Airport.
Mr Cundall, who first heard stories of the buried planes in 1996, said: "We think we have found them."

He hopes to restore any planes found to flying condition, in the UK.
Mr Cundall believes a large number of brand new Mark XIV Spitfires were buried in wooden crates on the orders of Lord Mountbatten during August and December 1945 as "surplus to requirements" at the end of World War II.
Before flying out to Burma, he said the finds could be on the "same level as the Tutankhamun find in Egypt".

There could be up to 36 buried planes at the end of the airport's runway in Mingaladon and up to 124 aircraft in total, it is thought.
Mr Cundall said he expected the search to include three different airfields and to last about six weeks.
He said: "They'll be in a very good condition. If they haven't been damaged they should be easily restorable to flying condition."

Mr Cundall has been searching for, and digging up, crashed aircraft for 36 years.
In 2004, he conducted an electromagnetic survey of the site with the help of Dr Adam Booth, then of the University of Leeds, along with a further ground-penetrating radar survey.
Dr Booth, of Imperial College London, is still involved in the search for the planes.

The excavation team will also include war veteran Stanley Coombe, from Eastbourne, who responded to Mr Cundall's appeal for witnesses who saw them being buried 68 years ago.
Mr Coombe, who is now in his early 90s, was stationed in Burma at the end of World War II and is one of eight eye-witnesses to come forward.

It took Mr Cundall a further eight years following the electromagnetic survey, to sign an actual contract to start digging for the planes.
The contract allows the dig to go ahead and would see the Burmese government take 50% of the value of aircraft recovered, while Mr Cundall's share will be 30% and his agent 20%.

Mr Cundall said: "It's about preserving aeroplanes. The Spitfire was a very special aeroplane, it saved our neck in 1940 in the Battle of Britain.
"Built as a tool of war I hoping to use them as a tool of friendship to bring Burma and Great Britain closer together."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-20910980

Posted: 05-01-2013 22:30 Post subject:

They've been looking for these things for 17 years? And they think theyre going to find them now?

Even if they find them the planes would have been buried in a rain forest climate for sixty-odd years. I remember when they opened the Blue Peter time capsule; all that was left was a soggy mess.

Posted: 07-01-2013 20:42 Post subject:

Posted: 09-01-2013 17:13 Post subject:

Burma Spitfire hunters discover crate
[ Watch video]

British experts looking for a cache of World War II Spitfire planes believed to be buried in Burma say they have discovered a crate.
The team has lowered a camera into the crate in the Kachin state capital Myitkyina, but says muddy water has stopped them identifying the contents.
Project leader David Cundall described the development as "very encouraging".

The team believes that more than 120 unused Spitfires could be buried in sites across Burma.
"We've gone into a box, but we have hit this water problem. It's murky water and we can't really see very far," Mr Cundall told reporters in Rangoon, Burma's main city.

"It will take some time to pump the water out... but I do expect all aircraft to be in very good condition," he added.
Mr Cundall said a survey was being carried out at the site to locate any modern-day obstacles like electricity cables. He said they hoped to begin excavating within days.

The team hopes to find about 18 Spitfires in Myitkyina, where it has been digging since last month.
It is planning further excavations at Rangoon international airport, where it believes 36 planes are buried, and in the central city of Meiktila.
Research suggests the planes were buried in near-pristine condition by US engineers as the war drew to a close.

Finding out where they were buried has taken 17 years of research by Mr Cundall - a farmer from the Isle of Axholme, North Lincolnshire - and his fellow enthusiasts.
Geophysicists from the University of Leeds have also helped with the investigation.
Among the team is 91-year-old war veteran Stanley Coombe, who says he witnessed the burial of the aircraft.
"I never thought I would be allowed to come back and see where Spitfires have been buried," he said.
"It's been a long time since anybody believed what I said until David Cundall came along."

Only an estimated 40 to 50 Spitfires are believed to be airworthy today.
Mr Cundall said the practice of burying surplus military equipment was common at the end of the war.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20957162

Biggles says: "That old crate will never fly!" Wink

Posted: 09-01-2013 17:45 Post subject:

I doubt there will be much left in the crates that they can salvage, bearing in mind that most of the Spitfire was made from plywood.

Posted: 09-01-2013 17:57 Post subject:

Posted: 09-01-2013 18:51 Post subject:

Posted: 18-01-2013 09:42 Post subject:

Archaeologists believe no Spitfires buried in Burma

Archaeologists hunting for World War II Spitfires in Burma believe there are no planes buried at the sites where they have been digging, the BBC understands.
The archaeologists have concluded that evidence does not support the original claim that as many as 124 Spitfires were buried at the end of the war, the BBC's Fergal Keane reports.

However, project leader David Cundall has disagreed with the view.
He told the BBC he thought the digging was taking place in the wrong area.
Mr Cundall has spent the last 17 years trying to discover the truth of claims that unused, unassembled Spitfires were packed into crates and buried by the RAF at sites in Burma on the orders of Lord Mountbatten in 1945.
He has eyewitness accounts from American and British service personnel as well as local people to testify to the burial of the planes. One of them, British veteran Stanley Coombe, has travelled to Burma to witness the excavation.

Mr Cundall's project secured funding from Belarusian video games firm Wargaming Ltd, and British Prime Minister David Cameron secured permission for the dig when he met Burmese President Thein Sein last year.
Excavations began at Rangoon International Airport, one of three sites, earlier in January.

A press conference, planned for Friday morning, was cancelled by Wargaming Ltd with a spokesman saying he hoped to give more details later.
When pressed, the spokesman admitted there are no Spitfires, our correspondent says. Crying or Very sad

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21074699

Posted: 18-01-2013 13:27 Post subject:

Posted: 18-01-2013 13:31 Post subject:

So what's in the bloody crate?

Posted: 18-01-2013 14:40 Post subject:

Posted: 20-01-2013 12:51 Post subject:

Spitfire hunter pledges the search will go on
The hunt for 36 lost RAF Spitfires at a Burmese airfield may not be completely over despite the failure to find a single rivet belonging to the aircraft.
By Adam Lusher
8:00AM GMT 20 Jan 2013

Almost two weeks ago David Cundall’s dreams were - it seemed - about to be fulfilled.
The Lincolnshire farmer and warplane hunter had finally achieved his aim of digging at precisely the spot where he believed Spitfire after Spitfire had been buried as the RAF left Burma.
For 16 years, Mr Cundall, 62, had been convinced that dozens of Spitfires were buried in their shipping crates, including 36 at Mingaladon, a former RAF base that is now Rangoon International Airport.

This week, however, his archaeologists and the delegation sent by multi-millionaire backer who had helped fund his search will be heading home, privately accepting there are no Spitfires.
Mr Cundall himself is defiant in his belief that Burma will give up the Mark XIV Spitfires he is convinced were buried there in 1945 and 1946.
Last night he declared: “I will prove to the world that there are Spitfires down there. I am more convinced now than I have ever been before.
“Of course I am not giving up. I will politely prove my critics wrong.”
He added: “My morale now is higher than it has ever been.”

This was despite the fact that when he and the archaeologists dug an exploratory trench at Mingaladon, they found nothing.
After site observations and scouring hundreds of 1940s’ documents, the independent archaeologists concluded no Spitfires had ever been buried at Mingaladon, and suggested privately that the hunter might have swayed by servicemen’s rumours.

One member of the Wargaming delegation muttered despairingly about “white man’s folly” - but Cundall simply says that the archaeologists dug in the wrong place and gave up too early.

The moment Mr Cundall had been striving towards for more than a quarter of his lifetime seemed to have arrived when he and his team flew into Burma on January 7 - in the teeth of scepticism, but with a Burmese digging permit, and financial backing from Victor Kislyi, 36, the Belarusian behind the online computer game company Wargaming.net, who fancied a real-life “Indiana Jones adventure”.

He also brought geophysicists, old soldier Stan Coombe, 86, Cundall’s star witness, and the independent archaeologists: Martin Brown, 47, Rod Scott, 49, and their leader Andy Brockman, 51.

In the tropical heat and rising tension, *The Sunday Telegraph* found a colour code for the gravity of any situation: the pallor of Tracy Spaight, the leader of the Wargaming delegation.
A former schoolteacher who had studied the 18th Century Enlightenment to postgraduate level, he seemed to struggle to comprehend the Burmese approach to business and bureaucracy.

When the JCBs rumbled through the Mingaladon airfield gate to be stopped after five yards for want of the ’correct’ permit - Spaight’s face suggested white alert, approaching translucent.
But a ’correct’ permit was eventually obtained. The site was blessed by a Buddhist monk.

To the frustration of Cundall, who insisted he already knew where the Spitfires were, careful geophysical surveys were also conducted to identify promising digging spots.

Last Tuesday, only about a week later than Cundall expected, digging began.
And by Wednesday morning, he was convinced it was all going wrong.
“All this trowel scraping! They’re jumping up and down when they find a nail,” he said.
The archaeologists proudly held aloft a piece of pierced steel planking, (PSP) part of a makeshift wartime runway or road: clear evidence of ’conflict activity’.

Staying under the shade, representatives of Cundall’s Burmese agents, the Shwe Taung Por (STP) Group seemed bemused; PSP is the stuff that was recycled to make half the garden fences in Rangoon, including the row of houses bordering the dig site. Cool

The Burmese also couldn’t understand the determination of these Westerners to concentrate on Mingaladon, when, with Mr Cundall’s help, they had already found and announced - what they believed was a crate containing a Spitfire at Myitkyina, in the north.
Mr Spaight, however, paled at the ramifications of digging at a military airfield close to an area of conflict with rebel groups.

And now, with the help of archive documents, the archaeologists were constructing a picture - which showed no records of any crated Spitfires arriving in Rangoon to be buried.

Mr Brockman insisted the buried Spitfires legend was “absolutely worthy of investigation.” He also suggested you might have better luck looking for Spitfires in Rangoon market. Twisted Evil

The records showed old Mark VIIIs being broken up and sold for scrap.
“If you found an old wok, it might contain metal from a Mingaladon Spitfire.” Suddenly everyone was “backtracking”. “The archaeologists are backtracking,” said Mr Cundall.
“Cundall’s backtracking,” said a Wargaming executive.

Increasingly convinced there were no buried Spitfires, the Wargaming delegation had a plan.
They would dive in a nearby lake, encouraged by a local suggesting that a retreating American squadron dumped all sorts of things there when Rangoon fell to the Japanese in 1942.
They considered getting Scuba diving equipment from Thailand, and worried that the lake was overlooked by what appeared to be military barracks. The plan was shelved.

On Wednesday night Mr Spaight, now an alarming shade of pale, told Mr Cundall bad news. The Burmese authorities had revoked his digging permit.
They worried that digging so close to Rangoon’s only international runway might undermine it and cause a collapse.
Mr Cundall threw his hands in the air, exclaimed “We’ve lost it!” and sank into a chair with tears in his eyes.

The next morning there was a compromise. Digging could be done, but only by night, when no planes were using the runway.
But there was no digging, and instead a series of crisis meetings. Mr Spaight was ghostly.
Another grown man was crying, muttering “I believed him, I believed him. He’ll keep going and going.”
He added: “Saying the Spitfires are there, over the rainbow. It’s white man’s folly.”

As Wargaming and the archaeologists prepared to go home, they privately conceded that there are no Spitfires to be found.
They said shipping records suggest that in 1945 and 1946, when Cundall insists the planes were being buried, there were in fact no crated Spitfires arriving in Burma at all.
They also discounted Myitkyina, where Cundall and his Burmese partners insisted they had found a waterlogged crate that might contain a Spitfire.

Mr Brockman, 51, the lead archaeologist, said the timber structure at Myitkyina, whose murky interior was inconclusively filmed by Cundall’s Burmese partners using the Englishman’s car reversing camera, was probably an empty Japanese bunker.

Mr Cundall, however, remains convinced he can find Spitfires. Unmoved by the archaeologists’ arguments and the imminent departure of his Wargaming backers, he said he now planned to prove everyone wrong by going to Myitkyina and finding a Spitfire.
“Get me a digger and I will show you a Spitfire in a day,” he said.
“You will see it with your own eyes. There are 18 of them down there. I am 100 per cent certain of it.”

He claimed the archaeologists and Wargaming “took over” and dug in the wrong place at Mingaladon. The archaeologists vigorously dispute this, saying that they clearly agreed the location of the trench with him before they started digging.

Told that the archaeologists claimed that no crated Spitfires arrived in Burma in 1945 and 1946, and that the RAF actually kept meticulous records of their aircraft in Burma, Mr Cundall said: “Well, I disagree.
"There is overwhelming evidence, so many eyewitnesses but the archaeologists don’t trust eyewitnesses.”

He added that the lack of documentary records could be explained by paperwork going missing somewhere between Burma and London, and by the RAF wanting to bury the Spitfires quietly, rather than leave written evidence of what they had done.

Clearly stung by the fact that his Wargaming backers appear to have stopped believing him, Cundall said: “All of sudden everything I have done in 16 years is supposedly wrong.
"But they are basing their comments on archaeologists who say they can’t find anything about it in the records, so therefore it didn’t happen.”
He said many observers failed to understand the bureaucratic complications of digging on an active airfield in areas peppered with sensitive fibre optic cables.

“People sat in their armchairs saying 'where are these Spitfires?’ don’t’ understand the difficulties.”
He added: “I believe it is better to have tried and failed than never have tried at all.”

Although the Wargaming delegation is preparing to leave Burma, the company will continue to fund Cundall, meeting the expenses of his Myitkyina dig.
Yesterday, in what appeared to be a deliberate show of unity, the excavation team returned to the site to begin preparatory digging in Cundall’s preferred area.

Mr Spaight said digging would continue until the moment they left, which would probably be Tuesday.
He said the expedition had always been about much more than just Spitfire hunting.
“We would love to pull a Spitfire out of the ground, but we have always said this is about the story, the background, the archaeological research.
“No-one has been able to come here and dig for the archaeology before. We feel so privileged to have been given the opportunity to do so.” The imminent departure of the archaeologists and his Wargaming backers seemed to please Mr Cundall.

His buoyant morale, he explained, was because he would now be able to go to Myitkyina with his Burmese partners, but without the 21-strong entourage that was the Wargaming delegation and their archaeologists.
"There is nothing worse than having 21 'experts’ telling me how to do things in 21 different ways."
He would press on to Myitkyina “as soon as possible”. "I can’t wait," he said.

The hunt for the missing squadrons is not - yet - entirely over.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/burmamyanmar/9813074/Spitfire-hunter-pledges-the-search-will-go-on.html

Posted: 16-02-2013 09:32 Post subject:

Search for 'buried Spitfires' in Burma called off

Archaeologists have called off a hunt for World War II Spitfires in Burma.
Originally it was thought as many as 124 Spitfires were buried by the RAF at the end of the war but they have now concluded it was a myth.
A dig at the international airport near the city of Rangoon, which used to be RAF Mingaladon, has drawn a blank.

The project was financed by Wargaming Ltd, who have said they believe the story about Spitfires being delivered in crates and then buried was not true.
Tracy Spaight, Wargaming's director of special projects, said: "No-one would have been more delighted than our team had we found Spitfires.
"We knew the risks going in, as our team had spent many weeks in the archives and had not found any evidence to support the claim of buried Spitfires."

Wargaming Ltd said they now believe no Spitfires were delivered in crates and buried at RAF Mingaladon during 1945 and 1946.
The company said that archival records showed that the RAF unit that handled shipments through Rangoon docks only received 37 aircraft in total from three transport ships between 1945 and 1946.
Most of the Spitfires that were in Burma at the time appear to have been re-exported in the autumn of 1946, they said.

Last month project leader David Cundall said he believed they would find the Spitfires but were just digging in the wrong place and said he would apologise if he was proved wrong.

Mr Cundall has spent the last 17 years trying to discover the truth of claims that unused, unassembled Spitfires were packed into crates and buried by the RAF at sites in Burma on the orders of Lord Mountbatten at the end of the war in 1945.
He collected eyewitness accounts from American and British service personnel as well as local people.
One of them, British veteran Stanley Coombe, travelled to Burma to witness the excavation.

The dig got the go ahead after it secured funding from Belarussian video games firm Wargaming.net, and received permission from Burmese President Thein Sein during a meeting with British Prime Minister David Cameron last year.

Before the dig, scientists had discovered large concentrations of metal under the ground around Rangoon's airport, lending support to the theory that up to 36 planes were buried there.
Last month a crate was discovered in the Kachin state capital Myitkyina, but muddy water stopped an immediate identification of its contents.

The central city of Meiktila was another site identified as a possible location for the buried Spitfires.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21483187

Ho hum, another dream shattered. Now, "Here be Spitfires" joins "Here be dragons" in the realm of myth. Sad

Posted: 24-09-2013 14:09 Post subject:

Secret of Nazi Treasure Encoded in Sheet Music?

It was more pleasant to dwell in a world where the first thing to spring to mind was not "cynical scam." As the story points out, this chap has form: a 2006 book about the CIA's hunt for Jesus! rofl

But I might try crowd-funding to launch my hunt for the Moon Fannies! Smile