Did the Royal Air Force have the means and the motive to get the job done?
When David Cundall claimed to have found a hidden cache of buried World War Two era warbirds – including the fabled Spitfire Mk XIV – in Burma, Wargaming.net was eager to fund the recovery effort. The MMO company, best known for World of Tanks, hoped for a great discovery, but as for what it found out there, well … have a look at this video reveal, hosted at the Royal Air Force Museum. Did the RAF have the means and motive to bury all those planes?
This is the 20 minute version of the lecture; if you want to have a look at the whole thing – all 1 hour 36 minutes of it – that’s over here, and a fascinating story it is. “We understand that many people believed or continue to believe passionately in the story of the buried Spitfires,” says Wargaming.net, which is why it agreed to release the full video presentation. Wargaming.net is confident that its team has solved the mystery, beyond a reasonable doubt, as to what happened to those warbirds all those years ago.
Only 35 Spitfires survive today in flying condition, out of the many thousands that were built. Hence the allure of a ‘find’ like Cundall’s, but – as the lecture demonstrates – there’s more to archaeology than finding buried treasures.