World War II Spitfire Planes May Have Been Found In Burma (updated with VIDEO)

[Omaha Steve]

UPDATE: Video and more news here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-20957162


http://www.inquisitr.com/476640/world-war-ii-spitfire-planes-may-have-been-found-in-burma/




The search for several lost Spitfire planes that were packed in crates and buried in Burma toward the end of World War II may be over. David Cundall’s 17-year quest to unearth the long-lost planes has cost him his life savings. A news conference today reports that searchers have found a crate buried in muck in Myitkyina. Photos from a camera lowered into the wet ground were inconclusive, but Cundall is encouraged by the discovery.

Cundall told reporters in Rangoon, Burma’s main city:

“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. It will take some time to pump the water out… but I do expect all aircraft to be in very good condition.”

If the historic aircraft is indeed hidden in the crate, Cundall, an elderly British farmer who has been competing with others to find the planes, will have been finally vindicated for all his trouble and expense. He also hopes to win the right to unearth them from the secretive Burmese government, says FOX News.



FULL story at link. To old to post in LBN.

[Arctic Dave]

1. I'm hoping they can salvage these.

Beautiful planes.

[Sherman A1]

2. Interesting

I hope they can find, recover & restore these aircraft.

[central scrutinizer]

3. paging Geraldo Rivera

nfm

[Trajan]

4. I remember drawing Spitfires in elementary school

Awesome lines on that sleek beauty ....

[dipsydoodle]

5. Crate ?

They were packed in containers the size of modern day containers 30 feet underground with the parts fully protected against damp. They will probably be "as manufactured"

[enlightenment]

6. Very interesting.

It got me thinking about something my dad told us about not long before he died 13 months ago. He was a navigator in a bomb squadron in the CBI theatre during the war - afterward, he - along with quite a few other young, single officers - was reassigned to a post in Germany (they just didn't have a place for so many, so quickly, at wars end and it was more important to get the GIs and married men home).

Anyway, he was given a few different assignments - editor of the base paper, for one - and then as an inspector to the various depots the US had set up to collect government equipment. The job of the depots was to destroy the stuff . . . his job was to verify that they were doing it. He told us the quantity and variety of stuff was hard to fathom; one depot in particular about broke his heart - they had pallet after pallet filled with crates. In the crates were brand new Leica cameras (and he loved photography). To be destroyed, presumably because the US didn't want the stuff going on the black market.

We have a roll of film - not negatives, but processed photos (larger than slides but the same idea). I've managed to look at a few of them, but the roll is in a relatively fragile state and I'm no expert. Even so, they are all pictures he took (in his official capacity) of these depots. It's pretty amazing to see the amount of stuff that went up in smoke . . . I presume.

This article made me wonder how much of it was squirreled away - like the cars they found in the woods not long ago.

[Jackpine Radical]

7. I had a cousin who worked as a civilian on Guam just after the war. He too

had a lot of stories of equipment being pushed off ships into the sea. Trucks, Jeeps, crawler tractors, all kinds of stuff being dumped at the end of the war.

[enlightenment]

8. Yep - planes and bombs and desks and typewriters . . .

everything. As a friend of mine pointed out, it must have been especially difficult for people who lived through the Great Depression to fathom so much waste.