A
Anonymous
Guest
Lovely story. But how much the cost of excavation, shipping and assembly? six mill may soon dwindle to peanuts...however, I would love to see gleaming, nearly new (guvnor) spitties flying! Hurrah
I vaguely remembered this thread and - yeah - actually found it as I recently found an update on the Mayanmar story. (My son is really interested in WWII planes):
http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/archiv ... 23954.html
http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/archiv ... 23954.html
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- Aug 7, 2001
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- 54,631
RAF aerial photos from WW2 used to discover location of £500m Nazi gold bunker
By Allan Hall
Last updated at 6:30 PM on 9th May 2011
Historians using RAF surveillance photos shot by Mosquito fighter-bombers over Germany during WW2 believe they are poised to uncover a mammoth bunker containing the secret gold reserves of the Third Reich.
After using photos and eyewitness reports from the time to pinpoint the spot, a dig is due to start next month in the Leinawald forest near Leipzig in the hope it will uncover the lost underground complex.
Rumours of the colossal subterranean installation have fuelled a treasure hunt mania in the forest over recent years.
Nazi archives show that battalions of Organisation Todt - the Third Reich's main labour organisation - were shipped into the Leinawald in 1944 on the orders of Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer.
At the weekend human remains were found in the forest; believed to be those of slave labourers forced to assist the Nazis in building the secret bunker.
And Luftwaffe records from 1945 show that a bombing raid by warplanes was ordered on the site in April 1945 - one month from the end of the war - despite the fact that hardly any German planes were able to fly because of total Allied air supremacy.
One photo that excites local historian Hilmar Prosche shows sand workings in August 1944 that resemble the outline of a human skull.
He believes the skull points the way to the bunker entrance Reichsbank gold worth over 500 million pounds on today's markets.
He said: 'They obviously thought it was worth the risk to put aircraft into the sky to drop bombs to try to obliterate surface traces of what had been constructed here.'
In 1961 the German government dug in the forest looking for the missing gold which was trucked out of Berlin as the capital disintegrated in April and May 1945 under the onslaught of the Red Army.
It was abruptly halted when poison gases from old mine workings began seeping to the surface.
Nothing was found, but back then the West German administration did not have access to the RAF reconnaissance photographs which were still classified.
Another historian involved in the planned dig said: 'We have Nazi labour battalions digging in the forest assisted by slaves, British warplanes taking photos of the workings, our own side bombing it - and a report from Berlin of trucks leaving the Reichsbank and headed towards Leipzig under S.S. guard.
'The fact that the government back in 1961 thought it worth digging here makes us certain that the gold is here.'
In 1996 former U.S. soldier Norman Scott searched in the forest for the gold; he was in Nazi Germany at war's end and claimed a dying S.S. man had told him the Reichsbank gold was buried in the area. He too failed to find the bunker.
Should it exist, the booty would certainly be vast. During World War II German troops looted the bank reserves of conquered countries and took the gold back to Germany.
Victims of the holocaust were also stripped of any valuables they had, including gold jewellery. The gold from these sources was then melted down and cast into bars with the mark of the German central bank, the Reichsbank, imprinted on them.
Much of this loot was used to pay for the war effort, but a large portion was still intact and in Nazi hands as the end of the war neared.
By April of 1945 the Allies were closing in on the German capital and Nazi officials decided to move the remaining contents of the Reichsbank, ostensibly to Oberbayern in southern Bavaria.
It never reached there - but Prosche and his backers believe it lies deep beneath the earth of the Leinawald.
General Patton's third army discovered 100 tons of Nazi gold as well as stolen art and other treasures hidden in a salt mine near mockers, southwest of Gotha in 1945.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1Lw7qVrB4
By Allan Hall
Last updated at 6:30 PM on 9th May 2011
Historians using RAF surveillance photos shot by Mosquito fighter-bombers over Germany during WW2 believe they are poised to uncover a mammoth bunker containing the secret gold reserves of the Third Reich.
After using photos and eyewitness reports from the time to pinpoint the spot, a dig is due to start next month in the Leinawald forest near Leipzig in the hope it will uncover the lost underground complex.
Rumours of the colossal subterranean installation have fuelled a treasure hunt mania in the forest over recent years.
Nazi archives show that battalions of Organisation Todt - the Third Reich's main labour organisation - were shipped into the Leinawald in 1944 on the orders of Hitler's armaments minister Albert Speer.
At the weekend human remains were found in the forest; believed to be those of slave labourers forced to assist the Nazis in building the secret bunker.
And Luftwaffe records from 1945 show that a bombing raid by warplanes was ordered on the site in April 1945 - one month from the end of the war - despite the fact that hardly any German planes were able to fly because of total Allied air supremacy.
One photo that excites local historian Hilmar Prosche shows sand workings in August 1944 that resemble the outline of a human skull.
He believes the skull points the way to the bunker entrance Reichsbank gold worth over 500 million pounds on today's markets.
He said: 'They obviously thought it was worth the risk to put aircraft into the sky to drop bombs to try to obliterate surface traces of what had been constructed here.'
In 1961 the German government dug in the forest looking for the missing gold which was trucked out of Berlin as the capital disintegrated in April and May 1945 under the onslaught of the Red Army.
It was abruptly halted when poison gases from old mine workings began seeping to the surface.
Nothing was found, but back then the West German administration did not have access to the RAF reconnaissance photographs which were still classified.
Another historian involved in the planned dig said: 'We have Nazi labour battalions digging in the forest assisted by slaves, British warplanes taking photos of the workings, our own side bombing it - and a report from Berlin of trucks leaving the Reichsbank and headed towards Leipzig under S.S. guard.
'The fact that the government back in 1961 thought it worth digging here makes us certain that the gold is here.'
In 1996 former U.S. soldier Norman Scott searched in the forest for the gold; he was in Nazi Germany at war's end and claimed a dying S.S. man had told him the Reichsbank gold was buried in the area. He too failed to find the bunker.
Should it exist, the booty would certainly be vast. During World War II German troops looted the bank reserves of conquered countries and took the gold back to Germany.
Victims of the holocaust were also stripped of any valuables they had, including gold jewellery. The gold from these sources was then melted down and cast into bars with the mark of the German central bank, the Reichsbank, imprinted on them.
Much of this loot was used to pay for the war effort, but a large portion was still intact and in Nazi hands as the end of the war neared.
By April of 1945 the Allies were closing in on the German capital and Nazi officials decided to move the remaining contents of the Reichsbank, ostensibly to Oberbayern in southern Bavaria.
It never reached there - but Prosche and his backers believe it lies deep beneath the earth of the Leinawald.
General Patton's third army discovered 100 tons of Nazi gold as well as stolen art and other treasures hidden in a salt mine near mockers, southwest of Gotha in 1945.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1Lw7qVrB4
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- Aug 23, 2003
- Messages
- 876
rynner2 said:
I've heard about this before. It seems crazy that not a single person who ever knew about it did not either survive, blab a word or go looking for it themselves. Exciting stuff though, searching for hidden Nazi gold has a certain romance to it! My Uncle has an investigation business, back in the 90s he was involved in tracking down Nazi fugitives in South America. I always thought that sounded pretty cool! Take that Fritz! etc etc.
Spookdaddy
Cuckoo
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- Location
- Midwich
Leipzig fell to American forces in the same month - April '45. It's not really surprising that the Germans were bombing their own territory, even with limited resources (götterdämmerung and all that), as it was crawling with Yanks, Tommies and Ivans.
- Joined
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Adventurers search for dumped Nazi gold worth a billion pounds in German lake
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:47 PM on 22nd July 2011
A group of businessmen are to trawl a lake near Berlin in search of almost £1billion worth of Nazi gold allegedly dumped by Hermann Goering.
The Luftwaffe chief is said to have disposed of the treasure in the spring of 1945 to stop the Soviet Red Army getting their hands on it as they closed in on the German capital.
Up to 18 boxes of gold were apparently thrown in Stolpsee Lake, about an hour’s drive north of Berlin in the former Communist East Germany.
Polish slave workers ordered to dump it were allegedly machine-gunned on the shore afterwards, their bodies following the gold into the depths.
In 1986 Stasi chief Erich Mielke ordered a trawl of the water but nothing was found.
Now the search has been reignited after claims by a local priest.
The lake will be searched by submarines from October in a hunt financed by a group of unidentified businessmen.
The priest, Erich Koehler, 77, who has researched the legend of the treasure, said: ‘They didn’t have the technology in the former East Germany to properly examine the lake.
‘But there are enough local people still around to know that the gold is there – and the bodies of the poor souls forced to dump it into the water.'
Goering emptied his country home, Carinhall, of its loot and art treasures shortly before ordering it to be dynamited in the closing weeks of the war as the Red Army marched on Berlin.
According to authorities, the documents Mielke worked from still lie undiscovered in the millions of papers that make up the Berlin archive of the Stasi secret police.
etc...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -lake.html
By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 11:47 PM on 22nd July 2011
A group of businessmen are to trawl a lake near Berlin in search of almost £1billion worth of Nazi gold allegedly dumped by Hermann Goering.
The Luftwaffe chief is said to have disposed of the treasure in the spring of 1945 to stop the Soviet Red Army getting their hands on it as they closed in on the German capital.
Up to 18 boxes of gold were apparently thrown in Stolpsee Lake, about an hour’s drive north of Berlin in the former Communist East Germany.
Polish slave workers ordered to dump it were allegedly machine-gunned on the shore afterwards, their bodies following the gold into the depths.
In 1986 Stasi chief Erich Mielke ordered a trawl of the water but nothing was found.
Now the search has been reignited after claims by a local priest.
The lake will be searched by submarines from October in a hunt financed by a group of unidentified businessmen.
The priest, Erich Koehler, 77, who has researched the legend of the treasure, said: ‘They didn’t have the technology in the former East Germany to properly examine the lake.
‘But there are enough local people still around to know that the gold is there – and the bodies of the poor souls forced to dump it into the water.'
Goering emptied his country home, Carinhall, of its loot and art treasures shortly before ordering it to be dynamited in the closing weeks of the war as the Red Army marched on Berlin.
According to authorities, the documents Mielke worked from still lie undiscovered in the millions of papers that make up the Berlin archive of the Stasi secret police.
etc...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -lake.html
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
Spitfires in Burma 'could be found'
British and Burmese authorities could work together to find 20 Spitfires buried in Burma at the end of the World War II, officials say.
The case of the missing planes was raised when PM David Cameron met Burmese President Thein Sein.
A Downing Street source said it was "hoped this will be an opportunity to work with the reforming Burmese government".
The exact location of the planes is unknown.
The planes were buried in 1945 by the RAF amid fears that they could either be used or destroyed by Japanese forces, but in the intervening years they have not been located.
At the time they were unused, still in crates, and yet to be assembled.
Until a general election in 2010, Burma was ruled for almost half a century by a military junta.
It has been reported that experts from Leeds University and an academic based in Rangoon believe they may have identified the sites where the craft are concealed using sophisticated radar techniques.
On Friday, officials said President Thein Sein was "very enthusiastic" about the prospect of finding and restoring the planes.
A Downing Street source said: "The Spitfire is arguably the most important plane in the history of aviation, playing a crucial role in the Second World War.
"It is hoped this will be an opportunity to work with the reforming Burmese government, uncover, restore and display these fighter planes and get them gracing the skies of Britain once again."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17710598
British and Burmese authorities could work together to find 20 Spitfires buried in Burma at the end of the World War II, officials say.
The case of the missing planes was raised when PM David Cameron met Burmese President Thein Sein.
A Downing Street source said it was "hoped this will be an opportunity to work with the reforming Burmese government".
The exact location of the planes is unknown.
The planes were buried in 1945 by the RAF amid fears that they could either be used or destroyed by Japanese forces, but in the intervening years they have not been located.
At the time they were unused, still in crates, and yet to be assembled.
Until a general election in 2010, Burma was ruled for almost half a century by a military junta.
It has been reported that experts from Leeds University and an academic based in Rangoon believe they may have identified the sites where the craft are concealed using sophisticated radar techniques.
On Friday, officials said President Thein Sein was "very enthusiastic" about the prospect of finding and restoring the planes.
A Downing Street source said: "The Spitfire is arguably the most important plane in the history of aviation, playing a crucial role in the Second World War.
"It is hoped this will be an opportunity to work with the reforming Burmese government, uncover, restore and display these fighter planes and get them gracing the skies of Britain once again."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-17710598
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
More info:
Spitfires buried in Burma during war to be returned to UK
Twenty iconic Spitfire aircrafts buried in Burma during the Second World War are to be repatriated to Britain after an intervention by David Cameron.
By Victoria Ward, and Rowena Mason
7:00AM BST 14 Apr 2012
The Prime Minister secured a historic deal that will see the fighter jets dug up and shipped back to the UK almost 67 years after they were hidden more than 40-feet below ground amid fears of a Japanese occupation.
The gesture came as Mr Cameron became the first Western leader to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner held under house arrest for 22 years by the military regime, and invited her to visit London in her first trip abroad for 24 years.
He called on Europe to suspend its ban on trade with Burma now that it was showing “prospects for change” following Miss Suu Kyi’s election to parliament in a sweeping electoral victory earlier this year.
The plight of the buried aircraft came to Mr Cameron’s attention at the behest of a farmer from Scunthorpe, North Lincs, who is responsible for locating them at a former RAF base using radar imaging technology.
David Cundall, 62, spent 15 years doggedly searching for the Mk II planes, an exercise that involved 12 trips to Burma and cost him more than £130,000.
When he finally managed to locate them in February, he was told Mr Cameron “loved” the project and would intervene to secure their repatriation.
Mr Cundall told the Daily Telegraph: “I’m only a small farmer, I’m not a multi-millionaire and it has been a struggle. It took me more than 15 years but I finally found them.
”Spitfires are a beautiful aeroplane and should not be rotting away in a foreign land. They saved our neck in the Battle of Britain and they should be preserved.”
He said the Spitfires, of which there are only around 35 flying left in the world, were shipped to Burma and then transported by rail to the British RAF base during the war.
However, advances in technology and the emergence of more agile jets meant they were never used and in August 1945, officials fearing a Japanese occupation abandoned them on the orders of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of South East Asia Command, two weeks before the atom bombs were dropped, ending the conflict.
“They were just buried there in transport crates,” Mr Cundall said. “They were waxed, wrapped in greased paper and their joints tarred. They will be in near perfect condition.”
The married father of three, an avid plane enthusiast, embarked on his voyage of discovery in 1996 after being told of their existence by a friend who had met some American veterans who described digging a trench for the aircraft during the Allied withdrawal of Burma.
He spent years appealing for information on their whereabouts from eye witnesses, scouring public records and placing advertisements in specialist magazines.
Several early trips to Burma were unsuccessful and were hampered by the political climate.
He eventually met one eyewitness who drew maps and an outline of where the jets [sic] were buried and took him out to the scene.
“Unfortunately, he got his north, south, east and west muddled up and we were searching at the wrong end of the runway,” he said.
“We also realised that we were not searching deep enough as they had filled in all of these bomb craters which were 20-feet to start with.
“I hired another machine in the UK that went down to 40-feet and after going back surveying the land many times, I eventually found them.
“I have been in touch with British officials in Burma and in London and was told that David Cameron would negotiate on my behalf to make the recovery happen.”
Mr Cundall said sanctions preventing the removal of military tools from Burma were due to be lifted at midnight last night (FRI).
A team from the UK is already in place and is expecting to begin the excavation, estimated to cost around £500,000, imminently. It is being funded by the Chichester-based Boultbee Flight Acadamy.
Mr Cundall said the government had promised him it would be making no claim on the aircraft, of which 21,000 were originally produced, and that he would be entitled to a share in them.
“It’s been a financial nightmare but hopefully I’ll get my money back,” he said.
“I’m hoping the discovery will generate some jobs. They will need to be stripped down and re-riveted but it must be done. My dream is to have a flying squadron at air shows.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... to-UK.html
Spitfires buried in Burma during war to be returned to UK
Twenty iconic Spitfire aircrafts buried in Burma during the Second World War are to be repatriated to Britain after an intervention by David Cameron.
By Victoria Ward, and Rowena Mason
7:00AM BST 14 Apr 2012
The Prime Minister secured a historic deal that will see the fighter jets dug up and shipped back to the UK almost 67 years after they were hidden more than 40-feet below ground amid fears of a Japanese occupation.
The gesture came as Mr Cameron became the first Western leader to meet Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy campaigner held under house arrest for 22 years by the military regime, and invited her to visit London in her first trip abroad for 24 years.
He called on Europe to suspend its ban on trade with Burma now that it was showing “prospects for change” following Miss Suu Kyi’s election to parliament in a sweeping electoral victory earlier this year.
The plight of the buried aircraft came to Mr Cameron’s attention at the behest of a farmer from Scunthorpe, North Lincs, who is responsible for locating them at a former RAF base using radar imaging technology.
David Cundall, 62, spent 15 years doggedly searching for the Mk II planes, an exercise that involved 12 trips to Burma and cost him more than £130,000.
When he finally managed to locate them in February, he was told Mr Cameron “loved” the project and would intervene to secure their repatriation.
Mr Cundall told the Daily Telegraph: “I’m only a small farmer, I’m not a multi-millionaire and it has been a struggle. It took me more than 15 years but I finally found them.
”Spitfires are a beautiful aeroplane and should not be rotting away in a foreign land. They saved our neck in the Battle of Britain and they should be preserved.”
He said the Spitfires, of which there are only around 35 flying left in the world, were shipped to Burma and then transported by rail to the British RAF base during the war.
However, advances in technology and the emergence of more agile jets meant they were never used and in August 1945, officials fearing a Japanese occupation abandoned them on the orders of Lord Louis Mountbatten, the head of South East Asia Command, two weeks before the atom bombs were dropped, ending the conflict.
“They were just buried there in transport crates,” Mr Cundall said. “They were waxed, wrapped in greased paper and their joints tarred. They will be in near perfect condition.”
The married father of three, an avid plane enthusiast, embarked on his voyage of discovery in 1996 after being told of their existence by a friend who had met some American veterans who described digging a trench for the aircraft during the Allied withdrawal of Burma.
He spent years appealing for information on their whereabouts from eye witnesses, scouring public records and placing advertisements in specialist magazines.
Several early trips to Burma were unsuccessful and were hampered by the political climate.
He eventually met one eyewitness who drew maps and an outline of where the jets [sic] were buried and took him out to the scene.
“Unfortunately, he got his north, south, east and west muddled up and we were searching at the wrong end of the runway,” he said.
“We also realised that we were not searching deep enough as they had filled in all of these bomb craters which were 20-feet to start with.
“I hired another machine in the UK that went down to 40-feet and after going back surveying the land many times, I eventually found them.
“I have been in touch with British officials in Burma and in London and was told that David Cameron would negotiate on my behalf to make the recovery happen.”
Mr Cundall said sanctions preventing the removal of military tools from Burma were due to be lifted at midnight last night (FRI).
A team from the UK is already in place and is expecting to begin the excavation, estimated to cost around £500,000, imminently. It is being funded by the Chichester-based Boultbee Flight Acadamy.
Mr Cundall said the government had promised him it would be making no claim on the aircraft, of which 21,000 were originally produced, and that he would be entitled to a share in them.
“It’s been a financial nightmare but hopefully I’ll get my money back,” he said.
“I’m hoping the discovery will generate some jobs. They will need to be stripped down and re-riveted but it must be done. My dream is to have a flying squadron at air shows.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/ ... to-UK.html
but a wonderful story.
BlackPeter
Ancient Badger
- Joined
- May 5, 2006
- Messages
- 449
Bizarre cincidence this story is currently on 'The One Show' :shock:
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
It’s Spitfires at dawn in Burma
The hunt for valuable planes buried at the end of the Second World War is turning nasty.
By Neil Tweedie, and Victoria Ward
7:30AM BST 27 Apr 2012
This is a story of buried treasure, a map with X marking the spot and the race to recover untold riches. The treasure in this case is of the winged variety, some 60 Spitfires, maybe more, quite possibly in pristine condition, never flown in anger, interred in Burma at the end of the Second World War. There are only three dozen Spits in flying condition around the world, commanding prices of £1.5 million or more. So this is big money. And as with all tales of treasure-seeking, there is mistrust, manoeuvring and bad blood.
The story begins in August 1945 as the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smouldered. The war against the Japanese in Burma, always something of a strategic sideshow, was suddenly truncated, leaving the British with vast quantities of war material too expensive to ship home. What to do, then, with some of the latest versions of the Spitfire, Griffon engined Mark XIVs, recently delivered and still in their crates? Wary of leaving high-performance aircraft in a country with an uncertain future, Britain’s South East Asia command decided to bury them. As many as 120 Spitfires, original cost about £12,000, may have been disposed of in this way. There they have lain for 67 years, protected by tar seals and grease, steadily accumulating in value, just waiting for someone to find them and dig them up.
“Spitfires were ten a penny in 1945,” says David Cundall. “You have to remember that we built more than 20,000 of them, and by the end of the war they were nearing obsolescence, thanks to the advent of jets.”
Mr Cundall, 62, a farmer and aviation enthusiast from Lincolnshire, has devoted much of the past 16 years and a lot of money (“I stopped counting after £130,000”) to unearthing the Spitfires and restoring them to flying condition. The project has involved hundreds of hours of research and interviews and repeated visits to Burma, until very recently a pariah state run by a corrupt and very dangerous military regime.
“I had an AK47 pointed at me once,” says Mr Cundall, who has endured mosquitoes and jungle heat in his search for the aeroplanes, many of which were buried around the old British airfields at Myitkyina and Mingaladon. “There were also six non-crated Mark VIIIs,” says Mr Cundall. “They are very rare and I believe they were buried in a quarry.”
Then, in February, he finally struck gold. Geophysical returns combined with eyewitness testimony narrowed the search to specific points. But to get the aircraft out Mr Cundall needs money, about half a million pounds. That is where Steve Boultbee Brooks came in.
Mr Boultbee Brooks, 47, is a self?confessed Spitfire lover and owner of a trainer version of the fighter. He is also very rich, the result of a career in property investing. In need of a backer, Mr Cundall approached Paul Beaver, a former defence journalist, now in public relations, who suggested Mr Boultbee Brooks. There was a meeting, an agreement in principle to proceed and a fairly rapid falling?out.
Mr Cundall was presented with a “memorandum of understanding”, which effectively placed his activities in Burma under the control of Mr Boultbee Brooks’s company, Spitfire Display Limited. Mr Boultbee Brooks then took off for Burma to lobby support from David Cameron, who was making a landmark visit to the country as part of its slow reintroduction into the international community. The Spitfire story provided Number 10 with a stirring example of future Anglo-Burmese co-operation. Cameron met with Boultbee Brooks and duly climbed on the bandwagon, waxing lyrical about Spitfires gracing the skies. The millionaire was also allowed a ride home on the prime ministerial jet. Mr Cundall says he knew nothing of the trip until contacted by Mr Boultbee Brooks from Burma. He was also appalled at the terms of the memorandum, calling them an insult.
“I had an hour with him [Boultbee Brooks]. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. He had all the information he wanted to make up his mind. People tell me he was on television making claims that it is his project. Last Sunday he said if we didn’t come to an agreement, the Prime Minister would close the door. I can do it without Brooks, I can do it without anybody. I’ve been digging up aircraft for 35 years. I’ve pushed the boat out financially. I’ve struggled like hell to keep it going. I’ve dug up Burma before, and I don’t need them.”
Mr Boultbee Brooks says he did inform Mr Cundall of the Burma visit in advance and that the memorandum did not represent a contract.
“I totally see why he [Mr Cundall] could be rather annoyed,” says Mr Boultbee Brooks. “I see that the letter could be misunderstood. We have therefore gone to some great lengths to explain that to him.
“We have got nothing against Mr Cundall. We do not want to push him off this team. We would love to be working with him, and we cannot understand how this wonderful situation is turning into such a ridiculous situation. It’s very sad.”
Mr Cundall has already moved on, however. He has secured new backing from an anonymous investor, who wants to buy all the Spitfires recovered from Burma. Under the deal, Mr Cundall and the Burmese government each net 40 per cent of the sale proceeds, while Mr Cundall’s agent in the country gets 20 per cent.
“He [the backer] wants to buy all the aeroplanes,” says Mr Cundall. “He’s putting half a million pounds into the project for me to go over, dig them up, and I will then sell them to him. The Burmese have agreed to sell their share to him. My agents have agreed to sell their share to him, at a fair and reasonable price. Between £1.25 and £1.5 million.”
Undeterred, Mr Boultbee Brooks is proceeding with his own recovery project. “It is a massive project, and it is between two nations that haven’t traded for 50 years. We think it is an opportunity that just can’t be passed off: to bring these machines back to England and get them flying again. We train pilots to fly Spitfires, we train engineers to build them, so yes, we would love to. We will keep this project on the road.”
The race is on. Mr Cundall says he has given the millionaire detailed information about the whereabouts of aircraft so far detected, which should not be acted upon because it is his intellectual property. Mr Boultbee Brooks says: “I would dispute that we got the information [from Mr Cundall]. He didn’t pass anything across to me. He assured me that he had the information, and I’ve taken him at his word.”
Time is running out. The monsoon breaks at the beginning of June and the ground in Burma will be so waterlogged as to be unworkable until the end of the year. A temporary holiday on sanctions against Burma means the recovery work should soon be deemed lawful. Mr Cundall is counting on his ties with the Burmese, cultivated over many years, to see him through. But Mr Boultbee Brooks is obviously not a man to back down at the first fence.
“The Brits had a real chance here to get ahead,” he laments. “The Americans are really keen. The Israelis are really keen. There is talk of an Australian team that is very keen. What a terrible day this is when the Prime Minister has gone out and got a British team, we put a British team together, and then we squabble so much that we allow other nations to walk in and take the Spitfires from under our noses. We’re absolutely nuts, aren’t we?”
But then, the lure of treasure has always driven men mad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/worl ... Burma.html
The hunt for valuable planes buried at the end of the Second World War is turning nasty.
By Neil Tweedie, and Victoria Ward
7:30AM BST 27 Apr 2012
This is a story of buried treasure, a map with X marking the spot and the race to recover untold riches. The treasure in this case is of the winged variety, some 60 Spitfires, maybe more, quite possibly in pristine condition, never flown in anger, interred in Burma at the end of the Second World War. There are only three dozen Spits in flying condition around the world, commanding prices of £1.5 million or more. So this is big money. And as with all tales of treasure-seeking, there is mistrust, manoeuvring and bad blood.
The story begins in August 1945 as the irradiated ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki still smouldered. The war against the Japanese in Burma, always something of a strategic sideshow, was suddenly truncated, leaving the British with vast quantities of war material too expensive to ship home. What to do, then, with some of the latest versions of the Spitfire, Griffon engined Mark XIVs, recently delivered and still in their crates? Wary of leaving high-performance aircraft in a country with an uncertain future, Britain’s South East Asia command decided to bury them. As many as 120 Spitfires, original cost about £12,000, may have been disposed of in this way. There they have lain for 67 years, protected by tar seals and grease, steadily accumulating in value, just waiting for someone to find them and dig them up.
“Spitfires were ten a penny in 1945,” says David Cundall. “You have to remember that we built more than 20,000 of them, and by the end of the war they were nearing obsolescence, thanks to the advent of jets.”
Mr Cundall, 62, a farmer and aviation enthusiast from Lincolnshire, has devoted much of the past 16 years and a lot of money (“I stopped counting after £130,000”) to unearthing the Spitfires and restoring them to flying condition. The project has involved hundreds of hours of research and interviews and repeated visits to Burma, until very recently a pariah state run by a corrupt and very dangerous military regime.
“I had an AK47 pointed at me once,” says Mr Cundall, who has endured mosquitoes and jungle heat in his search for the aeroplanes, many of which were buried around the old British airfields at Myitkyina and Mingaladon. “There were also six non-crated Mark VIIIs,” says Mr Cundall. “They are very rare and I believe they were buried in a quarry.”
Then, in February, he finally struck gold. Geophysical returns combined with eyewitness testimony narrowed the search to specific points. But to get the aircraft out Mr Cundall needs money, about half a million pounds. That is where Steve Boultbee Brooks came in.
Mr Boultbee Brooks, 47, is a self?confessed Spitfire lover and owner of a trainer version of the fighter. He is also very rich, the result of a career in property investing. In need of a backer, Mr Cundall approached Paul Beaver, a former defence journalist, now in public relations, who suggested Mr Boultbee Brooks. There was a meeting, an agreement in principle to proceed and a fairly rapid falling?out.
Mr Cundall was presented with a “memorandum of understanding”, which effectively placed his activities in Burma under the control of Mr Boultbee Brooks’s company, Spitfire Display Limited. Mr Boultbee Brooks then took off for Burma to lobby support from David Cameron, who was making a landmark visit to the country as part of its slow reintroduction into the international community. The Spitfire story provided Number 10 with a stirring example of future Anglo-Burmese co-operation. Cameron met with Boultbee Brooks and duly climbed on the bandwagon, waxing lyrical about Spitfires gracing the skies. The millionaire was also allowed a ride home on the prime ministerial jet. Mr Cundall says he knew nothing of the trip until contacted by Mr Boultbee Brooks from Burma. He was also appalled at the terms of the memorandum, calling them an insult.
“I had an hour with him [Boultbee Brooks]. He didn’t say yes, he didn’t say no. He had all the information he wanted to make up his mind. People tell me he was on television making claims that it is his project. Last Sunday he said if we didn’t come to an agreement, the Prime Minister would close the door. I can do it without Brooks, I can do it without anybody. I’ve been digging up aircraft for 35 years. I’ve pushed the boat out financially. I’ve struggled like hell to keep it going. I’ve dug up Burma before, and I don’t need them.”
Mr Boultbee Brooks says he did inform Mr Cundall of the Burma visit in advance and that the memorandum did not represent a contract.
“I totally see why he [Mr Cundall] could be rather annoyed,” says Mr Boultbee Brooks. “I see that the letter could be misunderstood. We have therefore gone to some great lengths to explain that to him.
“We have got nothing against Mr Cundall. We do not want to push him off this team. We would love to be working with him, and we cannot understand how this wonderful situation is turning into such a ridiculous situation. It’s very sad.”
Mr Cundall has already moved on, however. He has secured new backing from an anonymous investor, who wants to buy all the Spitfires recovered from Burma. Under the deal, Mr Cundall and the Burmese government each net 40 per cent of the sale proceeds, while Mr Cundall’s agent in the country gets 20 per cent.
“He [the backer] wants to buy all the aeroplanes,” says Mr Cundall. “He’s putting half a million pounds into the project for me to go over, dig them up, and I will then sell them to him. The Burmese have agreed to sell their share to him. My agents have agreed to sell their share to him, at a fair and reasonable price. Between £1.25 and £1.5 million.”
Undeterred, Mr Boultbee Brooks is proceeding with his own recovery project. “It is a massive project, and it is between two nations that haven’t traded for 50 years. We think it is an opportunity that just can’t be passed off: to bring these machines back to England and get them flying again. We train pilots to fly Spitfires, we train engineers to build them, so yes, we would love to. We will keep this project on the road.”
The race is on. Mr Cundall says he has given the millionaire detailed information about the whereabouts of aircraft so far detected, which should not be acted upon because it is his intellectual property. Mr Boultbee Brooks says: “I would dispute that we got the information [from Mr Cundall]. He didn’t pass anything across to me. He assured me that he had the information, and I’ve taken him at his word.”
Time is running out. The monsoon breaks at the beginning of June and the ground in Burma will be so waterlogged as to be unworkable until the end of the year. A temporary holiday on sanctions against Burma means the recovery work should soon be deemed lawful. Mr Cundall is counting on his ties with the Burmese, cultivated over many years, to see him through. But Mr Boultbee Brooks is obviously not a man to back down at the first fence.
“The Brits had a real chance here to get ahead,” he laments. “The Americans are really keen. The Israelis are really keen. There is talk of an Australian team that is very keen. What a terrible day this is when the Prime Minister has gone out and got a British team, we put a British team together, and then we squabble so much that we allow other nations to walk in and take the Spitfires from under our noses. We’re absolutely nuts, aren’t we?”
But then, the lure of treasure has always driven men mad.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/worl ... Burma.html
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Revealed: the wealthy backer helping the hunt for the buried Spitfires of Burma
Victor Kislyi, who made a fortune from the online game World of Tanks, is funding the search for Second World War Spitfires believed to have been buried in Burma.
By Adam Lusher
7:00AM GMT 28 Oct 2012
Already it was a tale of buried treasure, and of explorers heading into the jungles of a far-off land to see whether it was real or just a legend.
Now, however, the story of the buried Spitfires of Burma has taken yet another extraordinary twist.
The man providing the financial backing to the Lincolnshire farmer who has devoted 16 years to quest for the Burma Spitfires can be revealed as a 36-year old from Belarus who made his fortune with an online game based on Second World War-style tank battles.
Victor Kislyi and his company Wargaming.net have offered to pay up to $1 million (£621,400) to help David Cundall, 62, of Sandtoft, near Scunthorpe, dig up dozens of Mark XIV Spitfires buried in Burma at the end of the Second World War.
As was revealed in April when David Cameron discussed the project with Thein Sein, the Burmese president, it is believed that the factory-fresh fighters were buried in their tarred transport crates after being waxed with an oily grease to protect them from decay. It has raised the possibility that if the Spitfires could be found, they could perhaps be flown.
Wargaming’s backing has brought Mr Cundall tantalisingly close to fulfilling a dream that began when he heard of a chance remark by some American veterans: “We have done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires.’”
It has allowed him to sign a deal with the Burmese government earlier this month giving him permission to excavate the fighters.
For Mr Kislyi, who made his fortune with the worldwide success of his online game World of Tanks, the romance of the project was impossible to restist.
“When the shovel hits that wooden box, when you go to open in it, in a land of jungles and temples, and you wonder 'What’s in there?’ – it’s an Indiana Jones adventure.
“It’s about legends, rumours, fragments of recollections. It tickled our nerves a little bit.”
Mr Kislyi, Wargaming’s CEO, estimates that the first phase of the excavation and restoration project – working out if the planes really are there, and in what numbers, - will “probably come to $250,000 [£155,300].
“If the planes really are there, it will mean going up to $1million.”
Finding the Spitfires, which are believed to have been buried deep underground, involves the use of specialised machinery capable of passing a massive electric current through the ground. By measuring the resistance to the electric current, it is possible to establish whether you have found just soil or the metal of a Spitfire.
Digging can only take place during the brief window of opportunity between the earth drying out following one monsoon and the onset of the next. There is no question of hurrying the job, however, because indiscriminate mechanical digging might destroy the very Spitfires you are trying to find.
Nor, until the first crate is opened, will anyone know for sure the condition of the 67-year old aeroplanes.
“It’s a gamble,” said Mr Kislyi happily. “We are prepared to accept the risk that there is nothing there. But it is a risk we are prepared to take because of David’s track record.”
Mr Kislyi knows that Mr Cundall has been successfully finding and excavating wrecked wartime aircraft since the 1970s.
He also admits that for his company, the sums of money being gambled are “replenishable”.
World of Tanks, which his company created in 2010, now has 40 million registered players, fighting Second World War-style tank battles against each other online. Accessed via a website, the game is free to play, but enthusiasts can pay real money to acquire better equipped tanks with better trained crews.
It means, says Mr Kislyi, that Wargaming’s monthly revenues are “counted in many millions of dollars.”
His company has been able to expand from 120 employees two years ago to 1,200 people in 11 offices dotted around the world.
It is a far cry from Wargaming’s beginnings in 1996, when Mr Kislyi and his brother Eugene, 33, started work on their first online game in their parents’ apartment in Minsk.
“It was called Iron Age,” said Mr Kislyi. “It took us two years to develop, and only four people ever played it. My brother and I were two of them.” 8)
With the help of their slightly sceptical father, a finance director, the brothers persisted, while Mr Kislyi completed a physics degree at Belarus State University.
In 2003, as a team of about 35 friends operating from their apartments in Minsk, they achieved considerable success with the fantasy battle game Massive Assault.
It was World of Tanks, however, that secured their fortunes.
Mr Kislyi had always been fascinated by such battle games. As a ten-year old he had drawn a battlefield on the linoleum floor of his family’s new apartment, and lined up watermelon seeds to represent imaginary cavalry. As a teenager, he became a Minsk schoolboy chess champion. Now living in Nicosia, Cyprus, with his wife and four-year old son, he has clocked up 9,000 battles (or 1,050 hours), playing World of Tanks, although he insists: “I am not a hardcore gamer any more. I pace myself now.”
For him and his Belarusian friends, tanks held an obvious attraction.
Soviet forces in the Second World War did have their own legendary fighter planes, like the Yakovlev Yak. They even had some Spitfires, given to them by the British. But Mr Kislyi and his friends were brought up on tales of the epic tank battles that secured Soviet victory on the eastern front in the Second World War.
“The T-34,” he said, “Is our Spitfire.”
Wargaming is already helping other historical projects around the world. In Los Angeles, it is producing a virtual video recreation of the Second World War landings at Okinawa, as viewed from the bridge of the battleship USS Iowa, which is being turned into a museum.
With a new game, World of Warplanes, due to released within months, however, the hunt for the Burma Spitfires was too good to miss.
Mr Kislyi said: “For our most loyal players, who are so evangelical about the game and who spread the word, historical accuracy is all-important. This way, the guys can see that we don’t just talk about historical accuracy, we act on it.”
Mr Kislyi and his team have been working quietly with Mr Cundall since April, after he fell out with a previous potential backer, Steve Boultbee-Brooks, a wealthy property investor. [See previous post.]
If the fighters are there to be found, stresses Mr Kislyi, “They are not our Spitfires.”
The Burmese government will have the final say on what happens to them.
He hopes that at least a proportion of the Spitfires will end up on public display and, if possible, flying.
There, are however, limits to his enthusiasm.
“Personally, I would be afraid to fly in a very old, small aircraft.
“I would like to watch the Spitfires from the ground."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9638613 ... Burma.html
Victor Kislyi, who made a fortune from the online game World of Tanks, is funding the search for Second World War Spitfires believed to have been buried in Burma.
By Adam Lusher
7:00AM GMT 28 Oct 2012
Already it was a tale of buried treasure, and of explorers heading into the jungles of a far-off land to see whether it was real or just a legend.
Now, however, the story of the buried Spitfires of Burma has taken yet another extraordinary twist.
The man providing the financial backing to the Lincolnshire farmer who has devoted 16 years to quest for the Burma Spitfires can be revealed as a 36-year old from Belarus who made his fortune with an online game based on Second World War-style tank battles.
Victor Kislyi and his company Wargaming.net have offered to pay up to $1 million (£621,400) to help David Cundall, 62, of Sandtoft, near Scunthorpe, dig up dozens of Mark XIV Spitfires buried in Burma at the end of the Second World War.
As was revealed in April when David Cameron discussed the project with Thein Sein, the Burmese president, it is believed that the factory-fresh fighters were buried in their tarred transport crates after being waxed with an oily grease to protect them from decay. It has raised the possibility that if the Spitfires could be found, they could perhaps be flown.
Wargaming’s backing has brought Mr Cundall tantalisingly close to fulfilling a dream that began when he heard of a chance remark by some American veterans: “We have done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires.’”
It has allowed him to sign a deal with the Burmese government earlier this month giving him permission to excavate the fighters.
For Mr Kislyi, who made his fortune with the worldwide success of his online game World of Tanks, the romance of the project was impossible to restist.
“When the shovel hits that wooden box, when you go to open in it, in a land of jungles and temples, and you wonder 'What’s in there?’ – it’s an Indiana Jones adventure.
“It’s about legends, rumours, fragments of recollections. It tickled our nerves a little bit.”
Mr Kislyi, Wargaming’s CEO, estimates that the first phase of the excavation and restoration project – working out if the planes really are there, and in what numbers, - will “probably come to $250,000 [£155,300].
“If the planes really are there, it will mean going up to $1million.”
Finding the Spitfires, which are believed to have been buried deep underground, involves the use of specialised machinery capable of passing a massive electric current through the ground. By measuring the resistance to the electric current, it is possible to establish whether you have found just soil or the metal of a Spitfire.
Digging can only take place during the brief window of opportunity between the earth drying out following one monsoon and the onset of the next. There is no question of hurrying the job, however, because indiscriminate mechanical digging might destroy the very Spitfires you are trying to find.
Nor, until the first crate is opened, will anyone know for sure the condition of the 67-year old aeroplanes.
“It’s a gamble,” said Mr Kislyi happily. “We are prepared to accept the risk that there is nothing there. But it is a risk we are prepared to take because of David’s track record.”
Mr Kislyi knows that Mr Cundall has been successfully finding and excavating wrecked wartime aircraft since the 1970s.
He also admits that for his company, the sums of money being gambled are “replenishable”.
World of Tanks, which his company created in 2010, now has 40 million registered players, fighting Second World War-style tank battles against each other online. Accessed via a website, the game is free to play, but enthusiasts can pay real money to acquire better equipped tanks with better trained crews.
It means, says Mr Kislyi, that Wargaming’s monthly revenues are “counted in many millions of dollars.”
His company has been able to expand from 120 employees two years ago to 1,200 people in 11 offices dotted around the world.
It is a far cry from Wargaming’s beginnings in 1996, when Mr Kislyi and his brother Eugene, 33, started work on their first online game in their parents’ apartment in Minsk.
“It was called Iron Age,” said Mr Kislyi. “It took us two years to develop, and only four people ever played it. My brother and I were two of them.” 8)
With the help of their slightly sceptical father, a finance director, the brothers persisted, while Mr Kislyi completed a physics degree at Belarus State University.
In 2003, as a team of about 35 friends operating from their apartments in Minsk, they achieved considerable success with the fantasy battle game Massive Assault.
It was World of Tanks, however, that secured their fortunes.
Mr Kislyi had always been fascinated by such battle games. As a ten-year old he had drawn a battlefield on the linoleum floor of his family’s new apartment, and lined up watermelon seeds to represent imaginary cavalry. As a teenager, he became a Minsk schoolboy chess champion. Now living in Nicosia, Cyprus, with his wife and four-year old son, he has clocked up 9,000 battles (or 1,050 hours), playing World of Tanks, although he insists: “I am not a hardcore gamer any more. I pace myself now.”
For him and his Belarusian friends, tanks held an obvious attraction.
Soviet forces in the Second World War did have their own legendary fighter planes, like the Yakovlev Yak. They even had some Spitfires, given to them by the British. But Mr Kislyi and his friends were brought up on tales of the epic tank battles that secured Soviet victory on the eastern front in the Second World War.
“The T-34,” he said, “Is our Spitfire.”
Wargaming is already helping other historical projects around the world. In Los Angeles, it is producing a virtual video recreation of the Second World War landings at Okinawa, as viewed from the bridge of the battleship USS Iowa, which is being turned into a museum.
With a new game, World of Warplanes, due to released within months, however, the hunt for the Burma Spitfires was too good to miss.
Mr Kislyi said: “For our most loyal players, who are so evangelical about the game and who spread the word, historical accuracy is all-important. This way, the guys can see that we don’t just talk about historical accuracy, we act on it.”
Mr Kislyi and his team have been working quietly with Mr Cundall since April, after he fell out with a previous potential backer, Steve Boultbee-Brooks, a wealthy property investor. [See previous post.]
If the fighters are there to be found, stresses Mr Kislyi, “They are not our Spitfires.”
The Burmese government will have the final say on what happens to them.
He hopes that at least a proportion of the Spitfires will end up on public display and, if possible, flying.
There, are however, limits to his enthusiasm.
“Personally, I would be afraid to fly in a very old, small aircraft.
“I would like to watch the Spitfires from the ground."
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9638613 ... Burma.html
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
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- 58,224
- Location
- Eblana
Not a spitfire but fits the theme.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
Search for missing Spitfires in Burma due to begin
By Margaret Ryan, BBC News
Work is due to start in January to unearth dozens of missing British Spitfires believed to have been buried in the Burmese jungle at the end of World War II.
What began as one man's quest to discover the truth of claims that unused unassembled aircraft were packed into crates and buried by the RAF in Burma in 1945 has captured the imagination of a war games company and a team of experts, including archaeologists and scientists.
They all gathered at the Imperial War Museum in London on Wednesday to outline their plans for the dig, due to get under way in the New Year.
It is thought 36 planes could be lying undiscovered in Mingaladon - one of three sites where it is believed as many as 60 Spitfires in total may be located.
Farmer and aviation enthusiast David Cundall, from Lincolnshire, is spearheading the dig, having spent 16 years and thousands of pounds already researching the project.
"I have been flying airplanes for 45 years and been digging up sites looking for military aircraft for 36 years. It's in my blood," he said.
etc...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20515659
By Margaret Ryan, BBC News
Work is due to start in January to unearth dozens of missing British Spitfires believed to have been buried in the Burmese jungle at the end of World War II.
What began as one man's quest to discover the truth of claims that unused unassembled aircraft were packed into crates and buried by the RAF in Burma in 1945 has captured the imagination of a war games company and a team of experts, including archaeologists and scientists.
They all gathered at the Imperial War Museum in London on Wednesday to outline their plans for the dig, due to get under way in the New Year.
It is thought 36 planes could be lying undiscovered in Mingaladon - one of three sites where it is believed as many as 60 Spitfires in total may be located.
Farmer and aviation enthusiast David Cundall, from Lincolnshire, is spearheading the dig, having spent 16 years and thousands of pounds already researching the project.
"I have been flying airplanes for 45 years and been digging up sites looking for military aircraft for 36 years. It's in my blood," he said.
etc...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-20515659
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
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
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
eburacum
Papo-furado
- Joined
- Aug 26, 2005
- Messages
- 5,805
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.
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.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
They've got good geophys results for buried metal, plus eyewitnesses who saw the burials.eburacum said:
And the crates containing the planes have been underground, away from the 'rainforest climate'. If the components were packed as expected, properly greased, etc, there's a chance they could still be 'as good as new'. And they have financial backers who could make a lot of money if this excavation succeeds, and money-men take some convincing.
I wish them the best of luck, anyhow. 8)
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
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!"
[ 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!"
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
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- Location
- Inside a starship, watching puny humans from afar
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.
Mythopoeika
I am a meat popsicle
- Joined
- Sep 18, 2001
- Messages
- 51,662
- Location
- Inside a starship, watching puny humans from afar
rynner2 said:
I stand corrected! Me and my dodgy memory - it's because they look very similar.
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
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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. :cry:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21074699
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. :cry:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-21074699
- Joined
- Apr 10, 2012
- Messages
- 478
rynner2 said:
Why is the project leader letting them dig in the wrong place then?! Surely, he's the bloke with the most knowledge, he needs to get digging where he believes them to be, not somewhere else.
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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. 8)
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.
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/worldne ... go-on.html
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. 8)
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.
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/worldne ... go-on.html
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2001
- Messages
- 54,631
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.
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.
JamesWhitehead
Piffle Prospector
- Joined
- Aug 2, 2001
- Messages
- 14,199
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!
But I might try crowd-funding to launch my hunt for the Moon Fannies!
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!
But I might try crowd-funding to launch my hunt for the Moon Fannies!
ramonmercado
CyberPunk
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2003
- Messages
- 58,224
- Location
- Eblana