This Looks Interesting.........

[DD_Arthur]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17710598

Twenty crated Spitfires, buried for sixty-seven years!!?

[fruitbat]

I want one.

[T_O_A_D]

Yes, how do we sign up as labor for this job.

A cot, meals, and Booze is all I'll require.

And a big lunch box so I can bring out one Johnny Cash style One piece at a time.

[DD_Arthur]

Some more on this story from the Daily Telegraph

http://www.telegraph...rned-to-UK.html

The more I read about this story the more sceptical I get. None of this makes any sense whatsoever and seems to be based on the hopes of a retired Lincolnshire farmer. They are apparently Mark II's that were buried in their crates in July 1945 because why exactly? If you change the date to 1942 when the British were retreating then this makes much more sense.

It is ironic that the Burma campaign produced Britains best general of the war in the shape of Bill Slim but was also the most pointless. In no way could events in Burma hasten Japanese surrender and the Burmese cetainly didn't want the British back after 1945.

By the summer of 1945 the Japanese armies in Burma were reduced to starving wretches and in no way capable of making any sort of advance that would threaten any major airbase and the re-assembly of crated aircraft would be done at a major base not an operational airfield out in the Arakan. If these things exist in their shipping crates then I would think they would be preserved to a degree. They would have been packed to survive a long and potentially corrosive sea voyage but by 1945 supplies and equipment for Burma were usually landed in and around the Indian ports of Chittagong and the delta. Aircraft would certainly be reassembled at the big bases there and then flown into operational bases in Burma.

Why on earth would Lord Mountbatten, the C-in-C South-East Asia have any say in something as mundane as the disposal of a few Spits? Why Mark II's? Long obsolete by 1945, even in training squadrons. Buried 40' deep!!! That's one big, big hole to dig in what must have been a hurry. None of this adds up.

I think our Lincolnshire farmer has fallen victim to his over-enthusiasm for delightful myths and the local Burmese's willingness to go along with anything as long as someone is feeding them delicious, hard foreign currency!

P38's buried in ice not withstanding, these sort of "discoveries" rarely come to anything tangible. Local rumour here has it that the USAF buried dozens of jeeps and Harleys when they left Dunkeswell airfield in 1946 but nobody has ever found anything.

I once shared a long train journey with a middle-aged train-spotter who assured me that in the mid-sixties British Railways had

sealed up dozens of steam locomotives in tunnels in North Wales as a "strategic reserve" and they were there waiting to be rediscovered. He was quite convinced.

However, I am prepared to eat my hat. You never know.....These things are usually more mundane. The only eldorado of this sort I've ever seen myself was about twenty years ago at the Classic Bike show at Staffordshire showground. A guy was selling fifty complete, battered 850 Norton Commandos out of the back of a container. He'd been a civil engineer out in Saudi and one day come across a scrap yard where the Saudi airforce police had abandoned their complete inventory of Nortons when they got bloody Hondas! He bought the lot from the amazed locals for a pittance and shipped 'em home.

[Snacko]

My niece and her husband are going to Bangladesh on a 9 month mission trip in a few weeks.

I'll ask her to take a day trip to Burma and have a look around for me.

[BadAim]

It's wise to take these stories with a grain of salt, but they do pan out on rare occasions. There's still people looking for a Dornier Arrow and several other German planes that are supposed to be buried near Edwards AFB. Nothing so far.......

[DD_Arthur]

This is a familiar kind of story really. From The Times, 7th. March, 1990

I wonder what happend to these?

[Jabo]

Hmmm, That certainly came to nothing and much as I would love the Burmese Spitfires to be true (60 'new' Mk II's? Yippee!) I fear he's wasiting his money - and made our PM look a bit of a twerp. Again.