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Burma Spitfires , check your piggy banks


ruxy

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It'll have to wait till I get home, but I have a series of photographs from the RAF Museum showing a crated spitfire being towed through Gibraltar by a WOT3 based Tructor. Let's just say that 1- there is nothing to show that it is a Spitfire from anything other than a few feet away where you can read the shipping markings. 2- It's HUGE, and a 100 odd of them would be, firstly, easily noticed by all the RAF servicemen on site who have so far failed to corroborate the story and secondly bloody hard to neatly bury.

 

And if we go from "they were brand new in the box aircraft neatly buried" to "assembled aircraft on the station declared surplus to requirements" then there is something else to bear in mind. They didn't dig a hole with a nice sloping ramp and wheel the aircraft in. They dug a pit, got preferably a bulldozer but any suitable large vehicle would do, and just pushed it in, oblivious to the crunching, screeching noises coming from what was the aircraft. If it wasn't needed then it didn't have to kept in anywhere near a good condition.

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Prompted by the recent Nazi Gold Train saga, I downloaded a copy of "Assumed Missing, Reported Buried", the formal technical report on the 2013 Burma Spitfire excavations. Well worth reading and it does a thorough debunking of the buried Spitfires myth.

 

Andy

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Just as an aside, I was watching a TV documentary about the retreat out of Burma in front of the Japanese advance, in which a gunner said they were forced to bury their guns as there was no boats available to carry them across the Irrawaddy (I think it was).   So I wonder if enterprising scrap dealers have ever found them, or did they just bury the breech-blocks, which seems more likely. Or perhaps they were retrieved during the subsequent re-capture, who knows, but burying large objects during a retreat seems to me to take too much time.

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