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My late great uncle was in the RAF during WW2 and was at the liberation of Belson.

I remember him saying that the RAF buried Spitfire engines, so it's definitely a real practice.

The terms of the lend lease agreement meant that Britain only had to pay for the equipment it kept after the war. So in some cases they were pushing aircraft of the deck of carriers into the sea so they didn’t have to pay for them.

Spitfires were British planes, so not part of the American lend lease program. Maybe if they were build with American loans, though?

Sorry, I wasn’t meaning to say that they were spitfires in particular that they pushed into the sea. I believe they were actually F4U Corsairs in that case.

>in some cases they were pushing aircraft of the deck of carriers into the sea so they didn’t have to pay

You may be shocked to learn that practices such as this exist in the modern US military as well.

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