It was common to bury surplus stuff after the war from what I've heard; Hethel (Lotus Factory) was rumoured to have a hoard of B24 engines and jeeps buried somewhere on site, and MIRA had trouble with magnetic anomolies due to big lumps of ferrous material buried by the RAF.
"So I've heard". "rumoured".
Quite.
The odd thing is that almost every airfield I've worked at has some "rumour" of piles of buried aircraft/engines/jeeps etc but its even more odd that no one's ever found any of them, anywhere. As this bizarre and labour intensive activity was so "common" there should be hundreds of vets who would remember doing this, yet there are none, scores of photos and other records (because the military are scrupulous record-keepers), yet there are none, and piles of geological evidence all over the world. All of which are unaccountably absent.
The statement that these things are buried 6m deep is the clincher. I simply don't believe it. ANo one - but no one, buries anything except nucler wasye that deep. It is a massive operation. If you want to get rid of or hide something you scrape as shallow as you can get away with, a 6m hole is a major engineering exercise requiring months of labour or weeks with several bulldozers , and one that deep to take 20 crated aircraft would be hald the size of a football pitch. 6m of soil would crush wooden crates flat instantly. I doubt an ISO box would survive that for 60 years. Engines might survive, airframes never.
Now, does anyone have ;
a) Pictures of Spitfires or similar a/c crated with wings packed next to the fuselage
in theatre as opposed to on docks or ships? Did that ever happen? Surely the crates would be stripped off at the docks and the load broken down into smaller pieces to ease transport, taken to the nearest airfield and assembled there for delivery in the conventional manner. Were crated aircraft ever delivered to airfields? Any info about crated aircraft in fact. It would be good to know just how common crated transport was.
b) Dimensions and weight of said crated aircraft.
c) Were armament, engines & props included in crated aircraft or boxed seperately? That's going to mak one heck of a heavy crate if its all together.
d) How far from the coast (ie docks) is this burial site?
Wiki says of ground penetrating radar;
Good penetration is also achieved in dry sandy soils or massive dry materials such as
granite,
limestone, and
concrete where the depth of penetration could be up to 15 m. In moist and/or clay-laden soils and soils with high electrical conductivity, penetration is sometimes only a few centimetres.
They certainly didn't dig 6m into granite ot limestone, and dry sandy soil doesn't sound like soggy monsoon ridden Burma.
And finally, why go to such massive effort when a platoon of erks with a few cans of gas could do the same job before tea-break. It just doesn't add up, or even start to.