16 News THE MYANMAR TIMES JULY 8- 14, 2013
Anatomy of a le
16 News THE MYANMAR TIMES JULY 8- 14, 2013
Experts now agree there is almost zero chance of un
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DEREK TONKIN
THE Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon in North London was the venue for a special presentation on the evening of June 19 given by a team of archaeologists and geophysicists associated with Leeds University. This was promoted by Wargaming, a leading online game developer and publisher that funded the project to investigate and if possible recover World War II Spitfires rumoured to have been buried in 1945 and 1946 at airfields in Myanmar, notably at Mingalardon.
Both Wargaming and the scientists made it clear in mid-January that reports of buried Spitfires were no more than a captivating legend and that despite weeks of carefully targeted surveys on the ground, no trace had been found of a single aircraft. The lead archaeologist at Leeds University, Andy Brockman, confirmed that there was no evidence that crated Spitfire Mark XIVs had ever been delivered by sea to Yangon, from its capture on May 3, 1945, to the departure of the Royal Air Force in late 1947 just prior to Myanmar’ s independence on January 4, 1948.
Several British personnel have now written to discount the legend based on their own operational experience at Mingalardon.
Dubious archival evidence
Indeed, my own investigation has shown that the sole piece of archival evidence revealed by the entrepreneurial farmer from Lincolnshire David Cundall( who beat the competition to secure the recovery contract, but has since fallen out with both Wargaming and the scientists and so did not appear at the presentation) has now vanished without trace. It supposedly recorded that 124 Mark XIV Spitfires had been“ delivered to Burma” and struck-off charge(“ SOC”) in August 1945. Despite my persistent enquiries, no one – Wargaming, Leeds University, the RAF Air Historical Branch or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that gallantly supported efforts to find the Spitfires – has actually been able to provide a file reference, let alone a photocopy of the document.
Lead archaeologist Andy Brockman offered the plausible explanation in response to a question I put during the evening that the record cards of aircraft shipped to Bombay and Karachi for use in Air Command South East Asia( ACSEA) may well have shown numbers of aircraft unaccounted for at the end of the Second World War which had been variously scrapped, reallocated to other theatres, or transferred to the French Air Force for use in Vietnam. The record cards could in any case have been in such a state that wholesale archival disposal of aircraft may have been the only sensible way to draw a line under the end-of-war chaos. Indeed, I now suspect that the alleged file annotation that they had
been“ delivered to Burma” was pure invention.
At all events, this piece of archival evidence is of no relevance to support rumours of Spitfires buried in teak-reinforced crates 12 metres( 40 feet) under the ground, an undertaking that would have required earth-moving machinery and equipment that Andy Brockman said the RAF simply did not have at the time. Its records show how difficult it was even to keep Mingalardon operational in the months after the end of the war.
The numbers game and how the story went viral
As the evening was primarily a presentation of the scientific evidence by the various experts concerned, which they accomplished in a way that was entertaining, informative and persuasive, there was little time to discuss how the Spitfire legend had come to be so widely believed by both the public and the media. Lead archaeologist Andy Brockman suggested that these issues might be a matter for more detailed examination and discussion on another occasion. For Wargaming, director of special projects Tracy Spaight described how initial reports in UK paper The Telegraph had gone viral, no doubt much to Wargaming’ s delight, though he was careful not to say so himself.
Indeed, the number of supposedly buried aircraft – which had first been mentioned in an article in The Yorkshire Post on May 9, 2001, as“ 12 brand new Spitfires”, or hardly enough for a single squadron of 16 aircraft – had mushroomed to several squadrons, even passing the 124 mark set in an untraceable archive and reaching 140 or more. As the number grew, so did the depth of their supposed burial, from 6 to 40 feet. These reports were accompanied by unfounded speculation that it must have been Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia Lord Mountbatten who gave instructions for the burial.
There was also a photograph of one particular Spitfire supposedly being crated up prior to burial. This photograph, highlighted by Andy Brockman, appeared in several newspapers – for example, the Daily Mail on October 19, 2012, which captioned it“ Men on a mission: The Spitfire pilots of 607 Squadron at an airbase in Burma during World War II” and credited it to Sean Spencer of Hull News & Pictures. In fact the photograph was almost certainly of a Mark V Spitfire with the serial number“ ER 213”( note this number on the box bottom right) that had been delivered to the Middle East via Gibraltar and had eventually been written off in Palestine in March 1945.
US“ Seabees” and their penchant for telling the tallest of shaggy-dog stories
Just as the archival evidence was thin and unconvincing, so too were the depositions that Leeds University had studied from eyewitnesses of little or no value in support of the legend. Andy Brockman said that, after careful examination, they had had to discount evidence given by men in former US construction battalions as simply not credible. The US Navy“ Seabees”( from“ CB” or construction battalion) never operated in Myanmar at all and reports that a group of“ Seabees” happened to be passing through Yangon at the time and volunteered to carry out the burials was no more than a tale of fiction by old soldiers from highly merited, fighting construction units with a reputation for telling the tallest of stories. My own research with the University of California at Santa Barbara, where photographic records from US construction battalions have