Historic Aircraft Recovery

Wargaming are funding an expedition to recover 20 Spitfires, believed to have been buried in Burma after World War II.  In this blog entry, we meet Wargaming’s Director of Special Projects, Tracy Spaight, and we learn about the man who is the driving force behind the project – David Cundall.

My name is Tracy Spaight. I am the Director of Special Projects at Wargaming. I began working for Wargaming in January 2012, with a directive to go forth and – as our CEO Victor Kislyi put it – “do cool stuff.” I’m a historian by training, so I decided to focus on historic preservation, restoration of WW2 vehicles, and educational projects with WW2 museums. In the spring, I forged a partnership with the Pacific Battleship Centre, the non-profit group that restored the 887 foot long WW2 battleship USS Iowa, which recently relocated to pier 87 in Los Angeles. My tank commander colleague Nicholas (Chieftain), who wrote about the ship here, put me in touch with the director. Wargaming – in conjunction with Vertex Productions and Babich Design – produced a three minute CG film about USS Iowa, which now plays in the museum’s digital theatre. We’re in the process of building a 1,000 square foot game room on board the ship, as well as a custom game scenario in World of Warplanes. Museum visitors will be able to fly Corsairs and Hellcats to defend USS Iowa from Japanese planes. You can read about our work with USS Iowa here. 

In the wake of the battleship project, I was a bit at a loss for what to tackle next – after all, how do you top a 45,000 ton WW2 battleship? That’s when I ran across the Spitfire story. I’m not an expert in Spitfires by any means. Indeed, everything I know about them I learned from the Spitfire Mark 1 plastic model I painstakingly assembled and painted when I was twelve years old. I’d also built a P-51 Mustang and a BF 109 fighter. The three planes were suspended from my boyhood ceiling by fishing line, locked in an improbable dog fight, with the German fighter the getting the worst of it. In the coming months I would learn a great deal about Spitfires, from their design and manufacture, to how they were transported and assembled in the field, to their operation and use in various theatres. Along the way I would also learn about ground penetrating radar, conflict archaeology, and the bitterness of the Burma campaign.

I first met David Cundall in person on May 15, 2012 in the lobby of the historic Westin St. Francis Hotel in Union Square, San Francisco. During the Second World War, the hotel had accommodated thousands of sailors, soldiers and officers transiting to and from the Pacific theatre, including among them General Douglas MacArthur, so it seemed a fitting place for our first meeting. I recognized David right away from his newspaper photo. He stands above the crowd at 6’4” (193 cm), with broad-shoulders, and a weathered face. He is 62 years old, but robust from a life time of hard work on his 300 acre family farm in Lincolnshire. David is a do-it-yourself, roll-up-your-sleeves, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy – who just happens to have a passion for aviation and digging up lost WW2 aircraft.

David grew up listening to war time stories from his father, who was wounded at Dunkirk in 1940 and would later serve in the British Home Guard. As a boy, David developed a life-long fascination with Spitfires. He had to leave school at a young age to help out on the farm, but he dreamed of flying, like the WW2 aviators he so admired. David earned his glider’s license at 16 and a powered flight license at 17 and – unbeknownst to his mother – flew whenever he got the chance.

David got into the recovery of crashed historic aircraft quite by accident, when he heard a story about a Spitfire that had crashed in 1942 in Lincolnshire, not far from his farm. Intrigued, he tracked down the farmer who had seen it go down as a young lad – when he and his mates were playing football. The farmer led him to the spot, David’s metal detector pegged the needle, and a week later he had a JCB excavator on site. He found the rudder at two feet and the engine block at eight feet underground. He was hooked. The plane was a Spitfire Mark 2B, which he would later learn had been piloted by an American named Samuel Fisk Wheeldon. While on a training exercise, Wheeldon’s plane had collided with his squadron mate William Arrand’s plane. Both fighters crashed. Wheeldon managed to bail out but his parachute failed to open; Arrand made it down but died later in the war, killed on patrol over France. David found and recovered what was left of Arrand’s plane a few miles away.

David tracked down the remains of many other WW2 aircraft in the 1970s and 1980s, including a Lancaster bomber that crashed in Lincolnshire in 1944. It was returning from a raid over Germany, badly shot up and on fire, when the crew was forced to ditch before they could reach the airfield. David and his friend Dave Pantry (another Lincolnshire farmer) found the plane at Owston Ferry. According to witnesses, the plane plunged straight down and slammed into the ground. The fuselage disintegrated on impact and the four engines buried themselves ten feet into the earth. David managed to recover the engines and a few other parts. Other digs would follow. In 1990, he found a Hawker Hurricane at Grinsby, in the Tetney Marsh. The pilot who flew it came to the dig and mentioned that he’d left his wallet in the cockpit. David fished out a muddy walletfrom the cockpit and gave it back to him!! Finally, in 1992, David found a Spitfire Mark V at Goole in Yorkshire. The impact was so violent that the plane buried itself twenty six feet down in the wet clay, tearing off the wings and rudder, and twisting the propeller blade into a curved pretzel. In each case, David donated the recovered artifacts to museums and historic aviation groups. 

Ever since learning about the Burma Spitfires in 1996 (a story for a later entry), David has been a man on a mission. He has travelled to Myanmar sixteen times since 1998, written hundreds of letters to veterans of the Burma campaign, and tracked down and interviewed eye-witnesses who were at Mingaladon airfield during the war. He has commissioned two geophysical surveys and spent a great deal of his own money in pursuit of a dream: to find and recover intact Spitfires. The British have a long tradition of enthusiastic amateurs, adventurers, and explorers, from Ernest Shackleton’s ill-fated quest to cross Antarctica in 1914-1917, in which the Endurance became entrapped and later crushed by ice flows, to Howard Carter’s long and fruitless search for Tutankhamen’s tomb – which he finally found in 1922. David possesses the same kind of fierce determination and obsessive focus. He has suffered many setbacks – failed excavations, running out of money, the arrest of the Burmese Prime Minister, who had backed him in the early 2000s, demands for large cash payments from his agents, and at one particularly low point on his quest, having an AK-47 pointed at his head.

Over the next several months, I would – alongside David – spend hundreds of hours traveling back and forth to Myanmar, meeting with government officials, negotiating with our Burmese business partners, and tracking down documentary evidence. All of us here at Wargaming would be drawn into this story. What happened here 70 years ago, in what has come to be called “the forgotten war?” What will we find – if anything – when we begin excavating? Will we find the planes, and if so in what condition? What follows is a race between determined rivals, a mystery buried in military archives, and a quest to find lost treasure in the jungle.