Dozens of Spitfire fighter planes that were buried by British troops in Burma as the second world war drew to a close are to be excavated after an agreement to dig up the historic aircraft was signed by the Burmese government and an aviation enthusiast from Lincolnshire.
After 16 years of searching and lobbying, David Cundall, 62, has signed a deal to recover the lost RAF planes, which are believed to have been packed in crates and hidden by British forces on the orders of Earl Mountbatten shortly before the United States bombed the Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945.
AndesSMF wrote:I don't understand why these airplanes were hidden as the war drew to a close. Though the idea of some more of these beauties showing up is awesome.
ORFflyer wrote:This thread is useless without pics.....
Seriously - didn't we already have a thread on this? I know I've heard this story, and if I didn't here it from here, I think I would have posted it then.
It's the confession that no excavation team ever wants to make – that its search has come up empty. But for Spitfire hunters in Burma, who have been on the prowl since early January for dozens of second-world-war-era British fighter planes, that seeming admission came on Friday, when archaeologists were forced to cancel a news conference after their search turned up not planes but cables and pipes instead.
The British-led archaeology team, headed by the Lincolnshire farmer and Spitfire enthusiast David Cundall, has been on the hunt for as many as 140 fighter planes believed to be buried in three sites around the country, with 36 of them supposedly buried close to the runway at Rangoon airport. Armed with mechanical diggers and quite a lot of hope, the 21 archaeologists have spent the past fortnight digging up various holes around the airport looking for the giant crates reportedly housing the planes.
But all the team has found so far is bundles of electric cables and water pipes, a retired Burmese geology professor who has been involved in the Spitfires search told the Associated Press. "We haven't stopped [searching] and we cannot stop," said Soe Thein. "It is just a delay in our work."
No map exists with details of where exactly the planes might be.
