20. Witnesses

We filmed several interviews in the UK this week, but perhaps the most memorable was with Maurice Short and Stanley Coombe, both of whom were stationed at Mingaladon in 1945-46 – Maurice as a mechanic with the RAF, and Stanley as a soldier, first with the the Royal Sussex, 9^th Battalion, and later with an Air Battalion. Both men are now in their late eighties but still clear eyed and spry, with many fascinating stories. Stanley was one of the eight eyewitnesses that David Cundall had tracked down in the late 1990s; the others have unfortunately passed away. Maurice we met through serendipity: the archivist at Kew, when learning of our researcher’s interest in Mingaladon, mentioned off-handedly that an elderly gentleman had visited just the day before, to inquire about donating his papers about his service at Mingaladon. We got in touch.

We met Stanley at the Holly Bush pub in North London. Stanley spoke with us at length about his experience in the Burma Campaign (1940-44) and – after being posted in India and Singapore – his return to Mingaladon after the Japanese surrender. He recounted driving a lorry along Prome Road, which at the time crossed through Rangoon airport near the end of the runway, but which was later rerouted with the runway extension in 1945-46. As he passed the end of the runway, Stanley told us he saw an odd sight that stuck in  his mind – a half dozen very large wooden crates lined up along a deep trench, being pushed down an earthen ramp with a bulldozer. “They were brand spanking new,” Stanley told us, “I mean, they weren't old dirty old crates, they were brand new… straight from the saw mill sort of thing.” He continued “And it seemed so curious, you know, that they were putting them in there. That's why I've always remembered it.” The next day, Stanley told us he asked an airman what was in the crates and the fellow replied “would you believe Spitfires?”

We interviewed Group Captain Maurice Short later the same day, at his home in North London. His living room attests to a life well-lived, with photos of children and grandchildren, commendations, and photos of him as an RAF pilot after the war. He served in the RAF for fifty two years, joining up at age 16. Maurice told us he could remember the outbreak of the war quite clearly: “We had a festival in my hometown at Scarborough. And it was cancelled. And I remember kicking the wall and saying I’m going to kill Hitler, so I ran home and said to mother  - I was fourteen – I’m going to join up. There, there son, what’s the problem? I said, Hitler’s just canceled our cricket festival!” Two years later he joined the RAF and was assigned to service Hercules bomber engines at Halifax. In 1945, he was posted to Burma and assigned to the 101 Repair and Salvage (101RS), first at Akyab, which was home to three squadrons of Dakota transport planes, and with the end of the war to Mingaladon, where he serviced and maintained aircraft for various squadrons, particularly 267 squadron.

Maurice recounted that in late 1945, Mingaladon became a center of evacuation, with thousands of soldiers and former POWs, many of them in shocking condition from years in captivity. People were pulling out and a lot of war material was simply abandoned. To illustrate his point, Maurice told us a story about when the American squadrons pulled out of Akyab earlier in the year:

“I was servicing one of the Dakotas, up on the engine, and this huge fuel lorry came along, and with a hiss of the air brakes pulled up, out came one of your fine young [American] men and say[s], ‘Hey, buddy, you got a bottle of whiskey?’ And I am up on an engine in the heat of Burma. ‘No, I’m sorry – why?’ He replied ‘well, if you had a bottle of whiskey, you could have this god-damn lorry. We’re leaving it!’ So I’m looking at this 40,000 gallon [lorry] and I’m thinking the guy is mad, but of course, we’re at war. Well, he disappeared and I got on working and there was the sound of a motorbike and up came one of your magnificent, laid back – I’ve forgotten the name of them now, your well known … [Director: Harley Davidson?] The very one! And another young American on it, and his call was, ‘have you got half a bottle of whiskey?’ … And I thought, these Americans love to have whiskey, and I’m absolutely part now a motor bike, I thought I could do something with a motor. I said, ‘No, I’m sorry, so I lost a lorry and a Harley Davidson within half an hour. Isn’t that a bad deal?”

Maurice did not see the crates Stanley described – though Stanley was relating events from early 1946. Nor did he see the planes going into the ground. Rather, he heard the story second-hand from his mates in late 1945, while stationed at Mingaladon. As related to Maurice, the planes weren’t buried, but rather dumped in a marshy area near the airfield, which made him indignant. “And I just thought, oh boy. How can they get rid of such a lovely airplane?  And the thing that the lads around me said, If only we could have got into them and taken the clock.  They felt that the Spitfire clock was perhaps the most important and vital part of that airplane.” Maurice said that he was angry that the brass would discard perfectly good Spitfires. “They’d saved my country, they were beautiful aircraft … how dare they? But was it true? And oddly enough, whether it was true or not did not cross our minds. It had happened. And when you take the case we’d been in Burma some time, we’d met some strange situations, pushing an airplane into a swamp, well, that was just another bit of a day.”

Towards the end of the interview, Maurice grew philosophical. He talked about all the suffering and destruction from the war. “People had been killed. Much more awful. What’s an airplane [but] material? … We were seeing these poor souls coming out of POW camps. What the hell did a Spitfire got to do with that? Nothing.” In the end, he said, taking care of people was more important than war material. As he put it, “everybody had suffered by then and getting rid of airplanes was seemingly the order of the day.”

Stanley and Maurice had never met each other, so we decided to bring Stanley to Maurice’s house for a visit. The two men took an immediate liking to one another and spent hours reminiscing about life at Mingaladon. Maurice asked Stanley if he remembered the fire that destroyed several Dakotas lined up by the taxiway, when an airman had the cleaver idea to make his morning rounds with a tilly lamp rather than an electric torch. Stanley lit up at the memory. Maurice explained for our benefit what happened next. “He puts his tilly lamp down check and to retighten the taps, which are right at the bottom of the tank under the fuselage of the wing, when whoosh!, off it goes. He was all right as it happened, but the airplanes, of course …” Stanley interjected: “Well, ‘til the CO got hold of him.” They laughed about it. Maurice concluded: “Oh, he’s probably still in Burmese jail.”