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20 Spitfires Gifted to the UK from Burma!


tonyot

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Yeah it sounds a bit like one of those Nigerian e-mails, if it turns out true then fanastic but it doesn't sound vert credible to me.

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Hmmmmmmm,i have a feeling all they are going to find will be some lovely lumps of corroded, crushed, bent and twisted bits of ally with a dash of rusty bits of steel.I wouldnt get your hopes up chaps.But i hope i am wrong.

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im have to agree this must have being put before him before any meetings im surprised that its considered serouis enough to warrant the hm govt intervention

Not quite a bona fide political matter, but I'm very glad Cammeron did mention them arn't you?

Trubbie

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I really want to beleive there is some truth in this, but the realist in me thinks that it'll come to nothing in the end.

However, if they do exist and are in pristine condition, someone take some colour swatches of the cockpit green!!!! And any of the Sky painted bits. :wicked:

Mark.

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Hmmmmmmm,i have a feeling all they are going to find will be some lovely lumps of corroded, crushed, bent and twisted bits of ally with a dash of rusty bits of steel.I wouldnt get your hopes up chaps.But i hope i am wrong.

Ah, but the pea bulb in the reflector sight may be saveable and the restoration can proceed around that!

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It's interesting how the news appears to be more focused on the possibilities of the Spitfires than anything else Mr Cameron's delegation is discussing.

On balance it's about as likely as finding a Wellington in Loch Ness, a Halifax in a Norwegian Fjord, a flight of P-38s and a B-29 in Greenland. several B-17s parked and forgotten in the middle of Nellis boneyard ...added to which who knows what we have buried in our stores? A friend told me he was looking for some Sea Vixen parts in a store under a Welsh mountain and came across a pile of Spitfire Mk 47 tailwheels. On PPrune someone remarked that some Nation Service Erks were told to clear out a store at Cardington in 1952 which resulted in the destruction of 4 crated unused Sopwith Camels!

I hope they will at least film the search which should be fascinating in itself.

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Truth being stranger than fiction, anything could happen in the next half century and probably will!!!!!

I hope that the condition is not too poor, some are good enough to be returned to the air after restoration, with some being sent to suitable museums for the likes of us to pour (paw?) over.

Lets face it an FW190 was found in a hanger in Poland a few years back, which, whilst in poor condition at least proves that the stuff is still out there.

A rumour is that a couple of fields near Kemble have B25's buried in them!!!!

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If the story is true, it would still be a very interesting find for any aviation enthusiast, regardless of the version, the condition of the aircrafts and the truth behind the find.

Even if the aircrafts are not in top condition, they can be restored. When the remains of a IMAM Ro.37 were found in Afghanistan a few years ago, they were in quite poor conditions, yet now there's a Ro.37 in a museum (a type of which none was thought to have survived).

Even if the spitfire is well represented in museums, having a few ore Mk.VIII or XIV around will not hurt anyone.

It would be great if things like the colours on the various parts could be checked before any restoration occurs. Maybe we'll find something new we didn't know yet about ? Ok, maybe this is unlikely, as if the aircrafts were new they would have probably been delivered in good old DFS.

"In 1945, Spitfires were ten a penny. Jets were coming into service. Spitfires were struck off charge, unwanted. Lots of Spitfires were just pushed off the back of aircraft carriers into the sea." Not many British jets in the Pacific theatre, and while carrier aircraft were certainly routinely jettisoned if not worth repairing, mass disposals of surplus aircraft took place after the end of the war. And, if the Spitfires were as worthless as this implies, why "put teak beams over the crates so they wouldn’t be crushed by the earth when they were buried”?

I agree with you that several parts of the article don't sound right. Still while there were no jets (and these did not appear in the theatre for several years) there were more modern prop fighter already arriving, types like the late mark spitfires or the tempest II that eventually formed the backbone of the RAF in the far east for several years after the war. Maybe the idea was to temporarily store aircrafts for later recovery... and most likely scrapping, as these aircrafts would have been made useless by the newer types. A destiny not different from that of several Sptfire VIII sent to australia before the end of the war that were scrapped a few years later without even being uncrated. Fingers crossed !

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Modern restorations only need a dataplate, to make the paperwork easier. The more usable parts the merrier, of course, but even 20 Spitfire dataplates would be valuable to some.

If there is any truth to the story being in 1945, then I think we are looking at Mk.VIIIs belonging to a unit re-equipping with Mk.XIVs where it wasn't worth sending the older types back. Most of the rest seems to be the kind of bar tale that grows in the telling. Would Mountbatten himself really rule on the disposal of a mere 20 aircraft? Didn't he have rather more important things to do? Teak beams to save the condition of the crates - that sounds like it was made up to answer an obvious criticism.

As for crates of Camels in 1952 - yeah, right. Like the Canberra still in Suez stripes found in the back of a hangar at Kemble when the RAF finally retired the Canberra. Great story, lads, have another beer. The difference from the other examples is that the Halifax in the lake was known about, as were the aircraft on Greenland. They were not surprise discoveries, they were just difficult to get at.

Mr. Cundall, of course, could argue that these are known about......

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I have read and heard so many of this sort of story over the years. In the 1990s I used to go to the RAFA Club in Newark and talked to a wartime MT driver who told me that he had been part of a section that had taken AW Albamarls (not sure of the spelling) to a disused gravel pit in the midlands somewhere. Apparently they were being replaced by Dakotas and were taken from storage and dumped. Needless to say I was very interested but when I asked where this place was he couldn't say but he was adamant it was true. I was also told that the US Forces buried loads of 'stuff' around the bases in the UK at the end of the war but again locations where very vague.

In this case it seems much more hopeful. I think that the timing of the atomica bombs is relevant to theses aircraft being buried. From reading ir seems that there was some concern over the effects of the explsions and to be on the safe side equipment that could have been affected by the blast's electromagnetic pulse was buried deep to protect it. I guess that the concern over Japanese re-invasion was a cover story to avoid worrying those less in the know.

Either way let's hope they were properly prepared for storage and are viable restoration propositions when they are recovered.

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Well, that's one potential explanation that Mr Cundall doesn't seem to have put forward. But, from what I can make out, while American scientists conducting atomic weapon testing at Los Alamos in July 1945 were certainly concerned about the potential impact of EMP and took precautions, they seem to have amounted only to shielding signal lines in the immediate vicinity of the test site. Burma is something like 1500 miles from Japan. Tinian, where any number of B-29s (including Bockscar and Enola Gay) were based, is at roughly the same distance. As far as I know, nobody has suggested that precautions against EMP were taken there, or on Okinawa, around 500 miles away, or on Allied warships operating off Japan. If you look at a map of the US, there are a lot of population centres far closer to Los Alamos than Burma is to Japan. Nobody would have been worrying about the impact of EMP on aeroplanes in Burma.

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Did anyone in Burma even know about the A-bombs being dropped ? I'm quite skeptical that commanders at a relatively low level were informed about anything, especially considering how little the US commanders in the pacific cared about the British forces.

Besides, theres not much on a Spitfire VIII that can suffer from the effects of a nuclear explosion induced EMP.

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Apparently these Spitfires are a previously unknown type - Fox News in America (or should that be "Faux News") has apparently reported that they are in fact Submarine Spitfires...obviously a very secret Royal Navy development!

LOL

Graeme

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Apparently these Spitfires are a previously unknown type - Fox News in America (or should that be "Faux News") has apparently reported that they are in fact Submarine Spitfires...obviously a very secret Royal Navy development!

LOL

Graeme

Maybe the news services think the planes are these Manta

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Apparently these Spitfires are a previously unknown type - Fox News in America (or should that be "Faux News") has apparently reported that they are in fact Submarine Spitfires...obviously a very secret Royal Navy development!

LOL

Graeme

LOL :D

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  • 5 months later...

Bad news I'm afraid people, talkng to a customer of mine who is in the restoration game, this is an elaborate scam....they are not there!

We can only dream I suppose.

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I guess the truth will out in time but my source is reliable. I hope he's wrong but he's a restoration authority having been involved in rebuilding 3 Spits amongst others.

Edited by PHREAK
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