As of 2 days ago:
http://mmtimes.com/index.php/national-n ... fires.htmlAnatomy of a legend: the Spitfires that never were
By Derek Tonkin
The Royal Air Force Museum at Hendon in North London was the venue for a special presentation on the evening of 19 June 2013 given by a team of archaeologists and geophysicists associated with Leeds University.
This was promoted by Wargaming, a leading on-line game developer and publisher which funded the project to investigate and if possible recover as many World War II Spitfires as possible rumoured to have been buried in 1945 and 1946 at airfields in Burma, notably at Mingaladon.
Both Wargaming and the scientists had 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 3 May 1945 to the departure of the Royal Air Force in late 1947 just prior to Myanmar's independence on 4 January 1948.
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) and which supposedly recorded that 124 Mark XIV Spitfires had been "delivered to Burma" and struck-off charge ("SOC") in August 1945, has now vanished without trace.
Despite my persistent enquiries, no one - Wargaming, Leeds University, the RAF Air Historical
Branch or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office which gallantly supported the efforts of David Cundall, Wargaming and Leeds University - has actually been able to provide a file reference, let alone a photo-copy 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-was chaos. Indeed, I now suspect that the alleged file annotation that they had been "delivered 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 40 feet into the ground, an undertaking which would have required earth-moving machinery and equipment which Andy Brockman said the RAF simply did not have at the time, and whose records show how difficult it was even to keep Mingaladon 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 ways which were both 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 thatthese issues might be a matter for more detailed examination and discussion on another occasion. For Wargaming, Tracy Spaight Director of Special Projects, described how initial reports in 'The Telegraph' (UK) has 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 over 12 years ago had first been mentioned in an article in 'The Yorkshire Post' on 9 May 2001 as just "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 Lord Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia, who gave instructions for the burial, as well as by photographs 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 19 October 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 to Sean Spencer, Hull News & Pictures. In fact the photograph was almost certainly of a Mark V Spitfire Serial Number "ER 213" (note this number on the box bottom right) which 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 so thin and so unconvincing, so too were the depositions which Leeds University had studied from eye-witnesses 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 Burma at all and reports that a group of "Seabees" happened to be passing through Rangoon 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 researches with the University of California at Santa Barbara, where photographic records from US construction battalions have been deposited, likewise drew a complete blank.
As for other eyewitnesses, their depositions were mostly hearsay or second-hand and would be discounted as evidence in a court of law. One British eyewitness, Stanley Coombe, was present at the evening occasion and although he did not speak, Andy Brockman described his evidence as
important. He would however offer another hypothesis for the crates which Stanley Coombe had seen as a young soldier in 1946 from the back of an army truck, and it was that they had contained Auster spotter aircraft which had indeed been delivered by sea from Calcutta in the spring of 1946 - four aircraft on 17 April and another fourteen on 30 April 1946.
The legend deflated by senior personnel based at Mingaladon
Not mentioned during the evening was the fact that several British personnel, both military and RAF, have now written to discount the legend,based on their own extended operational experience at Mingaladon during 1945 and 1946 as commissioned and noncommissioned officers.
They include from my own knowledge two RAF pilots, a senior air mechanic and an accountant all based at Mingaladon as well as a British Army Warrant Officer in charge of an adjacent vehicle park and an Officer commanding an Indian Engineering Unit.
These 'witnesses' have all made the point that, quite simply, no burials could possibly have taken place without them knowing about - and, I would add, without scores of Burmese workers and staff at Mingaladon, not least pilots and ground crew under training for the Burmese Air Force which came into existence in January 1947 twelve months before independence. Mingaladon was throughout the final years of British rule as thoroughly penetrated by Burmese intelligence agents working for General Aung San and the patriotic forces as was any US military base or airfield in Vietnam by the Viet Cong.
Apart from the operational files available for public consultation at the National Archives in Kew and which were a source of evidence during the evening, I would add that the British Library at St Pancras in Central London is the depositary of a substantial number of private and other official papers, some Top Secret, recording events at the time and these would surely have confirmed the burial of large numbers of Spitfires if that had taken place for whatever reason. (The papers include fascinating records of discussions between Governor Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith and General Aung
San.) In my own researches I could find not a hint of any such burial anywhere in these private papers.
All's well that ends well?
I am delighted that Leeds University felt able to say during the presentation that their involvement in the project had given them invaluable experience and that their engagement had coincidentally resulted in agreements about future academic cooperation with and support for Yangon institutes. Wargaming would also seem to be very pleased with their involvement and they are now actively supporting the renovation project for the Dornier 17 which was recently recovered from the Goodwin Sands.
David Cundall meanwhile continues his search for the Phantom Spitfires, about which I first wrote in 'The Myanmar Times' on 4 February 2013. At the time I expressed both my incredulity that these aircraft could have been disposed of by burial in this remarkable way when they were so much in
demand throughout the South East Asian region until the mid-1950s and even later, and my disbelief that in any case they could have remained undiscovered all this time when Spitfires were so much sought after by the government of the country after independence and their burial could not
possibly have been concealed from General Aung San's military and political supporters.
I hope Leeds University will not mind if I say that I was a little surprised that they maintained their interest for so many years when the historical evidence was so thin, though I can well understand that they might feel that they could not reach any definitive conclusions until they had studied all
the evidence made available to them.
I also heard during my visit to Myanmar in May that there is puzzlement still in Myanmar that Prime Minster David Cameron should have raised the issue with President Thein Sein in April 2012 without No. 10 Downing Street first doing even a basic check on the reliability of the information. But the level of British engagement with Myanmar is nowadays at such a level of intensity across the political, commercial, development and even defence spectrum that the UK has no doubt long been forgiven for the latent feeling in Nay Pyi Taw that they might just possibly have been a trifle misled.
So is all well that ends well? I have the niggling feeling that this saga was in retrospect in considerable measure a waste of time and resources, a legend based on oral myth which used the charismatic icon of the Spitfire to seduce all and sundry. A classic case of mass hysteria induced by
irresponsible media hype. A rich source for the sociologist and psychologist seeking to explain the gullibility of so many normally intelligent people who so uncritically abandoned their common sense.
We all pray though that David Cundall might still uncover something, almost anything.
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