Spitfires found buried and in pristine condition after being lost for almost 70 years

Car enthusiasts are always on the hunt for the best " Barn Find" - a classic car that was put in an old barn somewhere and forgotten. Then found and restored to original condition.

This story tops any barn find as they are going to have up to 20 Supermarine Spitfires right out of the crates they were shipped in and likely in pristine condition as they were preserved in the grease that coated all the parts since they left the factory 70 years ago....unbelievable.



Buried treasure in Burma: Squadron of lost WWII Spitfires to be exhumed
Published April 19, 2012

FoxNews.com
It's buried PILOT treasure!

Like a treasure chest stuffed with priceless booty, as many as 20 World War II-era Spitfire planes are perfectly preserved, buried in crates beneath Burma -- and after 67 years underground, they're set to be uncovered.

The planes were shipped in standard fashion in 1945 from their manufacturer in England to the Far East country: waxed, wrapped in greased paper and tarred to protect against the elements. They were then buried in the crates they were shipped in, rather than let them fall into enemy hands, said David Cundall, an aviation enthusiast who has spent 15 years and about $200,000 in his efforts to reveal the lost planes.

The 62-year-old man -- a British farmer by trade -- realized the fate of the aircraft thanks to an offhand comment a group of American veterans made to a friend, he told the Sydney Morning Herald.


'We've done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires.'
- David Cundall, aviation enthusiast


''They told Jim: 'We've done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires.' And when Jim got back from the U.S., he told me,'" Cundall said.

The location of the planes, which remains a closely kept secret, was confirmed during a recent trip to the Far East country, he said.

''We sent a borehole down and used a camera to look at the crates. They seemed to be in good condition," Cundall told the Herald.

The Spitfire Mark XIV planes are rare for more than one reason: They used Rolls Royce Griffon engines rather than the Merlins used in earlier models to achieve tremendous speeds. Griffon-powered planes could reach 440 mph thanks to the hefty, 2,050-horsepower engines.

When production of the planes ultimately ended in 1947, 20,334 Spitfires of all versions had been produced, but just 2,053 of them were Griffon-powered versions, according to Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The planes were deemed surplus and were buried in Aug., 1945 -- potentially along with another eight later in the year. At that time, propeller planes were falling out of fashion in favor of newer jet-engine designs -- Cundall said Spitfires "were 10 a penny." British military officials decided burying them was cheaper and more practical than bringing them home.

International sanctions prevent military material from leaving the country, but a recent visit by British Prime Minister David Cameron may enable the safe exhumation and return of the planes to England.

Only about 35 Spitfires are currently flying.

CAMP BASTION - The HQ for all British Forces in Afghanistan

Last year, I spent from May until September living at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province. Right next door is CAMP BASTION, HQ for the Brits in AFGHN.

I enjoyed spending time there and the writer of this article captures the feel of the place....You have to be there in the summer to experience the 120-125 Degree heat (that's in the shade by the way)

God love the Brits as they are " brilliant" and our best allies.


Inside Camp Bastion

It is home to 30,000 people, has its own airport, fire station and police force – and in six years has grown to a city the size of Reading. Nick Hopkins visits Britain's vast military base in the Afghanistan desert
Nick Hopkins guardian.co.uk,
Monday 15 August 2011

The planes tend to arrive at night, and if the sky is clear, the moon bathes the airport with an ethereal, ghostly light. A film of dust and sand covers the tarmac and shimmers silver in the dark, conjuring familiar images of lunar walks made by astronauts a generation ago.

This place, though, is not some other world, but Afghanistan. And the surroundings are not beautiful or charismatic. It is Camp Bastion: a brutal, functional, military city built from nothing in the desert, from which the UK has orchestrated its conflict against the Taliban for the past six years.

There is probably no place like it on earth. It has grown so much that the perimeter wall is now almost 40km long – making it roughly the size of Reading; and its airport is busier than any other in the UK, apart from Gatwick and Heathrow.

The Afghans will inherit it one day, should they wish. Otherwise it could turn into a vast, derelict Atlantis in the desert – no better monument, perhaps, to the west's invasion of a country that has been an enduring battleground over the past 30 years.

Nobody ever imagined this eight years ago when the British started looking for a safe place to fly supplies for the troops who were to be sent to the southern province of Helmand. The British didn't want to set up camp too close to any fighting, and they wanted somewhere flat, to build a landing strip for aircraft. They chose a place in the plains of north-west Helmand, where the Soviets had once had a small base, and dug a trench. The Soviets had recognised the area's strategic importance.

"It used to be a trading crossroads. And we can see everything around us," says Commodore Clive Walker, the Royal Navy officer who is currently in charge of the entire camp.

Though the land is arid, it also has boreholes filled with fresh water that has taken years to flow hundreds of miles from the peaks of the Hindu Kush to the underground aquifers in the middle of the desert.

The British decided to call the new camp Bastion – a reference to the huge earth-filled bags that have been used to define its boundaries. The bomb-proof bags are made by a UK company called Hesco Bastion, which was set up by a British inventor, Jimi Heselden. Heselden, who died last year, made a fortune selling his invention to the British military, and thousands of the bags now line the roads around this camp, and almost every other in the country.

The other ubiquitous building block of the city is the Iso freight container, the sort you see on lorries or the decks of ships at ports around the world. There are now 10,000 Iso containers at Bastion, almost all of them brought in by road through Pakistan, after being shipped from Europe or America to Karachi. By some estimates, it would take a decade to remove them all from Helmand, though many of them are likely to stay put.

Rather than bringing in water supplies from elsewhere, the British set up a water-bottling plant on site, drawing the water from the two existing boreholes. The plastic bottles are made at the plant, which provides one million litres a week for Bastion, as well as many of the other smaller bases and checkpoints across the province.

Most of the fresh food is flown in, with the rest coming by road. There is a central warehouse where most of it is stored – it is thought to be the second-biggest building in the whole of Afghanistan. With between 20,000 and 30,000 people on the base at any one time, the quantities needed to feed them are vast; 27 tonnes of salad and fruit come in every week alone. Convoys of lorries, with armoured support, thunder out of the camp most days to supply other bases, often leaving in the middle of the night to minimise the disruption to the villages and towns that they rumble through.

The base has become so big that it has eight incinerators and a burn pit to get rid of the rubbish. The camp also has its own bus service, fire station and police force. There are on-site laws and regulations too. One of them is the speed limit – 24kph (15mph). It is enforced by officers with speed cameras, who can leap out from behind containers, or from inside ditches, to catch anyone flouting the rules. Anyone caught speeding more than three times is banned from driving on the base. Though the limit is quite low, many of the military vehicles are so big, and the dust they churn up so blinding, that it is dangerous for them to be going any faster.

There aren't any pavements at Bastion, or street lights, so walking around at night can be perilous without a torch. The airport is busy day and night. It dealt with 2,980,000 pieces of freight in June alone, including 73,000 pallets of mail.

There isn't much in the way of nightlife – but there is a Pizza Hut takeaway restaurant that trades from inside a converted Iso. Customers can sit outside on pub-style benches. There is also a bar next door called Heroes, which has giant TV screens showing news channels from the UK.

For thousands of staff here, their lives revolve around huge air-conditioned gymnasiums. Bodybuilding has become a near obsession for many of the soldiers who live on site, who have little else to do once they have finished work. The gyms are busy from 5am. There are no weekends at Camp Bastion.

While the airport is the hub for flights in and out of the country, the heliport is busier. Every day, RAF Chinook, Sea King and Merlin helicopters run like buses, ferrying troops to and from the base. They are responsible for the bulk of the 600 movements undertaken across Helmand every day.

"We can take things by road, fly them in by helicopter, or throw it out of a back of a plane," says Commodore Walker. "It all depends what is being transported and where it is going. We used to have 60 or 70 vehicles leave the camp in convoys. But that was not good for relations with the local population. We try to go out first thing in the morning so the convoys don't disrupt the bazaars. We try to time them carefully."

Above all else, though, the camp is a military base. The US Marines, and the Afghan security forces, have their own areas now, but the core of the base remains – and is run by – the British. Soldiers arriving from the UK for a six-month tour will stay at the camp for about a week before being deployed elsewhere. In that time, they will spend five days acclimatising to the heat or the cold. In summer the temperatures reach up to 55C. In winter, it will freeze.

One of the most surreal sights in the city is its Afghan village, a replica built by the British. It even has a small number of local residents who tend to a bread oven, riding motorbikes and selling food at a market. It is supposed to give the soldiers a better feel for what to expect when they go on patrol. There is also a training area designed to help them identify the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have been used to such deadly effect by insurgents. There are tell-tale clues the soldiers need to learn; they can be taught about the different techniques used by the insurgents for planting IEDs, and how the villagers might be trying to warn them of their whereabouts. If an Afghan has stopped using a bridge to cross a stream or a river, there is often a reason.

Elsewhere in the camp, there is a kennel for the dozens of dogs that are used on patrols, and for sniffing out drugs and explosive material. One of them is called Charm – a german shepherd so big that he rarely has to raise growl to deter potential troublemakers.

The medical facilities at Camp Bastion rely on a taskforce of helicopters, which are controlled by Colonel Peter Eadie, the commander of the UK joint aviation group. In the past, patients were brought into the trauma unit at Bastion before major surgery could begin. Now, consultants fly out in specially adapted Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters to any emergency, so they can start work on the injured as soon as they set eyes on them.

"The system is one that has evolved over the years," says Eadie. "Countless lives have probably been saved this way. We take the hospital to the patient."

He can hope to get a helicopter from Bastion to an injured soldier in less than 19 minutes. And the most serious cases can be back in the UK in less than 24 hours.

All of this is beyond the capabilities of the Afghan security forces, and that situation is unlikely to change before the end of 2014, when Nato forces will have ended all frontline combat operations against the Taliban.

"The Afghans are starting to get themselves into a position to support their own troops but they cannot leap up to our level of technology overnight," says Walker.

How much of this remains when the British and Americans leave has yet to be decided. Even though the drawdown of British forces will be modest this year and next, Walker is already thinking about what equipment will be left in the desert, and what will be carted back home, to be put in storage.

"It took us eight years to get to this stage and now we have to start thinking about what to bring back," he says.

The huge canvas tents in which most people live will be repaired, folded up and returned to warehouses in the UK. Some of them sleep up to 32 people on bunk beds. Only VIPs and some of the pilots have better "tier 2" accommodation, which means they sleep in a prefabricated metal pod with has a hard roof rather than a soft one.

"The tents can be refurbished and put back on the shelf in the UK for the next time," he says.

How many of the 3,000 British military vehicles will return is less clear. Though bomb-damaged trucks and armoured cars can be entirely rebuilt at the workshops in Bastion, some of them are likely to remain in Helmand – they will have taken too much punishment to be of value again.

Walker is trying to look ahead without losing grip on the day to day, which remains the priority. Providing British forces with the right equipment, food, and first aid is a juggling act he performs every day. "If I don't get it right, we're in a bad place. We can't fail."

The Solemn Tribute by the Village of Wooten Bassett to British Military who made the ultimate sacrifice - Soon to be no more.

My affinity for the British people and all that Britain represents is understandable as they are the one true ally we have in the world. I have served alongside Britain's military and they are a good lot. The President has demonstrated he doesn't see it that way but our disagreement is based on his warped view of what is right and my knowledge that he is dead wrong.

The special relationship we share with the British goes beyond politics and all things current. We are a nation borne from the original 13 colonies which were British and our greatest minds were educated in the British tradition. We share military and folklore, we are cut from the same cloth. I feel that the people of Britain will always be there for us as we will always do our part to assist our neighbors "across the pond".

Here is a story that details how the citizens of one small British town decided to do their part to recognize the sacrifice made by their military and how due to changes mainly driven by cost cutting, they will no longer be able to pay their solemn tribute to those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

SPECIAL INVESTIGATION: Ending Wootton Bassett repatriation procession is a cynical attempt to conceal the price of Britain's misguided wars
By Gerald Seymour- UK MAIL

6th August 2011

Nothing had quite prepared me — certainly not the occasional clips on TV news broadcasts — for the raw emotion and pain on the High Street in Wootton Bassett when a repatriation procession in honour of dead British soldiers goes through the town.

The experience of watching the hearse with the flag-draped coffin come up the hill and then crawl to a stop in front of the bereaved families and friends, and in front of the solemnly lowered standards of the organisations for veteran servicemen, is gut-wrenching.

The civilian population of Wootton Bassett has taken over, reclaimed these young men who are brought into the town on their way to an Oxford mortuary

It is also, for most of us, our only moment when we can touch, feel, experience something of the distant and faraway wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I have seen military men being mourned before. During the scorching summer of 1967, I witnessed the soldiers of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders — the battalion commanded by the charismatic Colonel Colin ‘Mad Mitch’ Mitchell — make their farewells to their colleagues killed in Aden and buried in the Silent Valley cemetery.

As a reporter for ITN’s News At Ten, I covered the final withdrawal of British forces from that God-forsaken colony, much of it under sustained attack from local gunmen. A formal ceremony, with pipes and an officer’s address and a padre’s prayers and impeccable parade ground drills, was on show.

It was a demonstration of the military’s respect for their own. Not a wet eye, and not a choke in a voice.

In the Lower Falls of Belfast, in the early days of the Army’s war with the Provisional IRA, after a sniper had killed an infantryman the soldiers would react with a bloody-minded defiance.

With a camera crew, I was there to watch an intensely moving few minutes staged by the Green Jackets in that blood-soaked time at the end of 1971 when Army casualties soared.

Under leaden skies, the main street outside the barracks was blocked off. The traffic of this principal artery into the city of Belfast log-jammed and a coffin was brought and laid on hurdles on the central white line.

There are so many people who have never heard a shot fired in anger but feel obliged to stand in solidarity with the mourners

Prayers were said, a hymn was sung. Only when the hearse had left for nearby Aldergrove airport was the traffic in that vehemently Republican area allowed to flow again.

Many years ago I handed in my Press cards and became a full-time writer: setting myself the goal of trying to be a witness of my country’s sentiments and moods, to feel its pulse and reflect it.

With an idea for a new book about our soldiers who die in Afghanistan jostling in my mind, I was drawn to that small Wiltshire town on a repatriation day.

Compared with those ceremonies I’d seen in Aden and Belfast, Wootton Bassett is so different. The civilian population has taken over, reclaimed these young men who are brought into the town on their way to an Oxford mortuary.

It’s not the soldiers in uniform who stand on the pavements, erect and unblinking as they salute in pressed fatigues and polished boots, who are in the forefront.

Instead, dominant among the silent watchers are the men and women of humble housing estates, of the British Legion clubs, the shop staff and the bank workers who line the High Street four or five deep — or the grey-haired and grizzled bikers in their leather jackets.

There are so many people who have never heard a shot fired in anger but feel obliged to stand in solidarity with the mourners, and so many who know next to nothing of Basra and Al Amarah and the communities of Helmand province, but would feel a sense of shame if they missed a fallen soldier coming through.

The military are there, but are sidelined. Dignitaries are absent, and not missed.

My most poignant memory of Wootton Bassett is the sound of the heart-breaking weeping of a mother beside the hearse, breaking the quiet all around her . . . and so many people that day blinked away tears.

However, not for much longer will the crowds, quiet in respect, be on the High Street.

By next month, the nearby base into which the bodies are flown — RAF Lyneham — will be winding down for closure, and all further fatalities will be taken to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire.

The hearses, then, will avoid Wootton Bassett and will divert instead from Brize and around the outskirts of the town of Carterton, and have a shorter run to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford where post-mortems are performed for local coroners.

Don’t hold your breath and expect ministers and MoD civil servants to facilitate the recreation of the Wootton Bassett mood at Carterton.

Families I’ve spoken to, and the NCOs who escort them, have told me of the comfort the bereaved take from the solidarity of the crowds on the pavements. The support is tangible but not welcome at the top echelon.

Senior officers will be happy to get rid of the Wootton Bassett business.

They believe the stop in the town, not more than one minute, to be ‘mawkish’, ‘sentimental’, no doubt similar to the ‘emotional incontinence’ with which a columnist described the reaction to Diana’s death, and — above all — they fear it is leeching away the nation’s tolerance of these overseas adventures.

Also they don’t like the nation being reminded of what many lining the route call ‘these bloody bombs’, or these ‘bastard things’ that take so many of the lives, and maim so many more.

The roadside explosives that wrought havoc in Iraq, and those buried and hidden beside tracks and in compound walls through Helmand in Afghanistan, are a new weapon in warfare, terrifying to troops and creating nightmarish tensions.

They have stripped away the superiority of the training of Nato troops and their equipment. The bombs have tilted the balance between the resources of western forces and a peasant militia, perhaps to the level where such wars are unwinnable.

Three out of every four repatriations have been the result of deaths from so-called Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).

In addition, there are hospital wards and rehabilitation units crammed with the cruelly injured amputees, struck down by IEDs. Alongside them are the hidden time-bomb victims of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

The Help For Heroes campaign is a truly wonderful expression of the public’s generosity — but as valuable and with little of the glamour is a charity called Combat Stress, dedicated to helping the young men who have patrolled in Basra or Helmand and are left devastated by the tensions created by the hidden bombs, nerves stretched to breaking point.

Many of the PTSD symptoms of acute depression, alcohol-dependency and violence will surface when the soldier is back home. The IEDs have left a devastating legacy in our society, and it will be with us for many years.

I’ve been at Wootton Bassett when the bodies of Ammunition Technical Officers — the bomb disposal people — have come through the High Street. Some have been killed when, exhausted from the number of jobs heaped on them, they have made one fatal mistake while defusing a device.

Others have been targeted by Taliban snipers who know that a bomb disposal man will always try to make safe a bomb, and will linger there and expose himself, not simply blow the wretched thing up.

Why? Why do these men take such fearful risks to defuse the devices? Why do so many hazard their lives in dismantling IEDs?

Only by standing in the crowds at Wootton Bassett can you begin to appreciate the extent of their commitment, their sacrifice. They treat these lethal pieces of electronic engineering as if they were potential evidence in a criminal prosecution. They act, almost, like the scenes-of-crime teams in a British city.

They are defusing the bombs so that the working parts can be flown back to laboratories in Britain and the U.S. where state-of-the-art science can examine them. Which bombs are made by which engineers at which work bench is basic to the investigation: every engineer leaves a trace of his work in manufacture and assembly.

They’ll look for the origin of the parts — where the circuits, fuses, wires, computer chips came from and where they were shipped to. And they’ll hunt for the engineer’s DNA: was the air-conditioning not functioning in his workshop, did a bead of sweat drip on to the circuit board’s plastic surround? Did he prick his finger and leave a microscopic speck of blood inside the bomb package?

The Americans alone have spent $20 billion on the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organisation, a U.S. Defence Department body established to help overcome these infernal weapons.

It’s an incredible sum, but it points up the devastating power and influence on the battlefield of the roadside bomb. In this cat-and-mouse game there would be few American or British scientists, or soldiers, confident of supremacy.

Top of the target list are the bomb-makers. If identified by the laboratories and located by intelligence they will suffer ‘interdiction’, the sanitised phrase for extra-judicial assassination.

The difficulty — not inconsiderable — is that the bombs are mostly made in Iran and smuggled into Iraq or Afghanistan.

A British bomb disposal expert, who has defused scores of sophisticated devices, gave me a word picture of his typical enemy.

‘An Iranian engineer in his mid-30s, he would have a family — wife and children — has an electronics degree from a Tehran university, and perhaps another from one in Europe.

'His religion would be a major motivation along with a fervent patriotism. He believes his intellect is a gift from God, is an egotist and a perfectionist, something of a genius.’

A genius intent on carnage and whose bloody handiwork can be seen week by week in the tragic procession of bodies through Wootton Bassett.

An hour or so before a repatriation, the bay at Swindon bus station for the 55 or 55A services to the Wiltshire market town begins to fill. There are men from the last National Service intakes and widows whose late husbands were long in the military. A few have dressed smartly for the occasion, most are in their everyday clothes, but men wear miniature medals and often have a faded beret with a polished cap badge.

They are utterly decent people and I came to feel privileged to know them a little. Friendships will have been formed since Wootton Bassett began, but the greetings are subdued and there’s no laughter.

When dropped off by the bus, they wander down the High Street to find a place to stand — near the book shop or the bakery or the bank or close to the Cross Keys pub. There is a man from the West Midlands who has missed only one — when his road was deep under snow. There is a veteran who flies in from Northern Ireland each time.

They have become a Band of Brothers. But I sense that most find it hard to link this sleepy little town with the precision work done in a workshop in Iran, with the foot- soldiers bringing the crates of ready-to-use bombs towards Basra or Al Qurnah or along desolate mountain trails skirting military outposts in Herat province.

Only when the bell in the tower of St Bartholomew and All Saints in the town tolls is the link forged.

It is so difficult for us who have never seen the combat, first hand, in Iraq and Afghanistan, but have only stood and watched and been a witness in Wootton Bassett, to comprehend the new warfare of the roadside bombs, and assimilate the cost we have asked our servicemen to pay.

When the hearse and its escort pulls away, the town is left with a great numbed sadness, and a sense of a fogged confusion . . . and soon repatriations will shift to RAF Brize Norton, and the High Street here will see no more of these gatherings.

It is wishful thinking to hope that Government will intervene and offer mourning families more of an occasion on the new route from Brize Norton.

They’ll draw the least possible attention to the price paid for involvement in the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Myself, I don’t want politicians or the Ministry anywhere near the cortege once it leaves an RAF base. Wootton Bassett grew from a small and unlikely beginning and developed a unique character.

After the move to Brize Norton, perhaps something new will be forged with its own mood and singular identity — the people dubbed as ‘ordinary’ will surely make it happen. But it will never be able to match the proud dignity of this town where spontaneity, not ceremony, has always ruled.

A man broke the silence at one repatriation. While family and friends loaded the hearse roof with red roses, he shouted, ‘Well done, lad, well done’.

Another man took the cue and called out, ‘Good boy, good boy’. Tears flowed free.

Whatever the future route, however much Government might wish to keep hidden the sorry toll of its foreign adventures, there are — thank God — so many good people who will make sure the families know that the sacrifice of a loved one in that awful dust and dirt of a faraway place will not be forgotten.


Gerald Seymour’s latest novel A Deniable Death is published by Hodder at £12.99.

Class Act - Prince William & Kate salute our servicemen & women

The British are our best allies regardless of the crap you hear from the White House. President Obama has a personal grudge against England as he feels they mistreated his Grandfather in Kenya but true Patriots know that the Brits are our steadfast partners in keeping the West safe. They have serious internal issues (as do we) and our shared sacrifices & mutual support are part of the "Special Relationship" that we have shared for decades.

The Heir-To-The-Throne and his Bride came to the US and demonstrate class and all that makes us proud to call them our friends. Brilliant....Good Show.


We salute you: William and Kate wrap up their U.S. tour by paying tribute to brave Americans who serve in the military
By Rebecca English - UK Daily Mail
11th July 2011

The royal couple's last event saw them attend a jobs fair at Sony Pictures Studio staged by Service Nation: Mission Serve.

The body is an umbrella organisation set up by the US government which brings together different service charities to support the re-integration of servicemen and women into civvy street.

The royal couple arrived in a motorcade with an escort of 17 officers from the Californian Highway Patrol - affectionately known as Chips - who had British flags fixed to the back of their large bikes.

The couple were greeted by Sir Howard Stringer chairman and chief executive of Sony Corporation and then led inside a building for a 25 minute-long private meeting with the senior staff from Service Nation: Mission Serve.

In Sound Stage 15, a huge 42,000 square foot open-plan building, dozens of business recruitment stands for the former US servicemen and women were set up.

Sets from iconic movies were built in the huge area from the yellow brick road from the Wizard of Oz to elements of the latest Spiderman movie and Sir Paul McCartney has used it as a rehearsal space.

The royal couple were cheered by the ex-servicemen and women and their partners who were attending the fair when they arrived, and the couple did a short walkabout.

The royal said: 'This is the last event on our tour of North America, but to my mind, it is one of the most important.

'This is because it is about men and women who - of their own free will - choose to put their life on the line for their country.'

He added: "Service Nation Mission Serve, and all the companies and employers taking part today, are providing opportunities which mean something very immediate and personal to us.

'Catherine and I both have friends back in Britain who could benefit from a brilliant initiative like this.'

William made the audience laugh by taking a swipe at his brother Prince Harry: 'I am delighted, therefore, that our Foundation – and in that I include my low-flying Apache very average brother – is a partner in today’s event.'

The royal went on to tell the audience 'how grateful we are to have been welcomed so warmly in the Golden State and the City of Angels. Thank you so much.'

The couple then filled boxes given to youngsters whose parents have been deployed to Afghanistan.

William and Kate were first shown a teddy bear called Cuzzie who was dressed in a scarf, goggles, jacket that was one of the main items.

The royal couple stood next to each other and filled the package with a journal for the children to jot down their feelings,
dogtags, so they can be just like mum or dad, a DVD that takes them through the issues around deployment, and postcards to send to the frontline.

When william picked up the popular American toy - Uno playing card - he said: 'I haven't seen these in ages, I used to play this a lot,' then put it in the box.

The couple then left to catch their scheduled flight back to the UK.

The aircraft carrier built in a conservatory - - Made from LEGO

Lego has been a family favorite in our house for years - The best loved toy in the world has been used to create some great pieces of art and now a model of the biggest warship in the world...Bloody brilliant !!

The aircraft carrier built in a conservatory: Made from Lego, it weighs more than 500lb, is 23ft long and took 600 hours to build

By Daily Mail Reporter
4th November 2010

Britannia rules the waves once again boasting the the world's biggest aircraft carrier - but this one is made from Lego.

The 23-foot-long, quarter-of-a-ton model is an exact replica of the USS Intrepid and was built by British Lego fan Ed Diment.

The enormous model took a whopping 600 man hours over nine months to complete and weighs a hefty 551 lbs.

It is made from 250,000 separate Lego pieces collected over the last 30 years and even comes with its own planes, life rafts and crew to make it extra-realistic.

The intricate 1:40 scale model is an identical copy of the USS Intrepid as it appeared in 1945, and is estimated to be worth around £15,000 to buy new.

The completed ship is even too big to fit in Mr Diment's house and is currently being stored in neatly-stacked boxes in his garage in Waterlooville, near Portsmouth, Hampshire.

Mr Diment, 38, a management consultant, completed the ship last month, just before Government announced massive cuts to the defence budget.

He said: 'I did wonder for a moment whether they might like to buy it - at this rate we may need it!

'I've been a huge Lego fan since I was two or three, and have been collecting pieces for more than 30 years now.

'In the past I've made the HMS Edinburgh, which was nine or ten feet long, and the HMS Hood, at 20 feet long. But this is the largest ship I've ever attempted.

'It's built on a 1:40 scale, which I chose deliberately so that I could use Lego pieces as the crew to make it look more realistic,' he said.

'I used pictures on the internet and a book called The Anatomy of Ships, which has very detailed drawings and diagrams of the actual ship.

'I then built a skeletal framework out of rainbow colours, which is now hidden away inside the grey exterior of the ship.'

It was a case of all hands on deck as Mr Diment press ganged his wife into helping with the project, while friend Ralph Sabelsberg also lent a hand.

'We have a couple of hundred Lego figures aboard, in their different uniforms, around a hundred life rafts and two whaler boats which would have resupplied the ship,' Mr Diment said.

'There is a working lift to the main deck which moves up and down, the gun turrets move and the radar spins - all radio controlled.

'It's been a huge project and I was very relieved and excited to finally finish it after nine months.'