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A SPITFIRE ON THE BOTTOM

Ninety meters deep in the Garda lake it’s black pitch. Even with the help of a torch it’s difficult to see farther than a couples of meters. This is why the secrets the mud hides are so well kept. So was for a long time for a Spitfire fighter plane shot down sixty years ago.
Out the Rocca of Manerba , 700 meters from the shore, the divers of the Leonessa Diving Club” while exploring the bottom of the lake suddenly found themselves in front of an almost intact British fighter. The engine was half covered with mud and the tail was still pointing towards the surface. But the most notable thing was that the canopy was closed, which made them think the pilot had had no time to abandon the plane before hitting the water. The Spitfire – according to Mr. Ignazio Zoda, one of the Diving Club instructors, - is, as said before, still intact, but several holes in the fuselage behind the cockpit suggest that the fighter was shot down during combat. Mr. Zoda added that is hard to say if the remains of the unfortunate pilot are left inside the fighter. The time available at ninety meters, non more than fifteen minutes, and the dark forced the divers to postpone the finding to a successive dive. But what the dives were indeed able to do was to record their findings with a camera.
From the few images taken on the occasion, it turns out that the Spitfire is marked on the fuselage by a letter “V” and the number 9, both painted in white.


(immagine tratta dal sito www.rafweb.org)

The available data suggest that the Spitfire was a fighter bomber of the 1435 Squadron of the R.A.F., flying first out of Malta and in 1944 out of Foggia. The squadron used formerly to be a fighter unit, but in 1943 its role changed to a fighter bomber.
But that’s not all.
Based on records of the period, during the Italian campaign the total number of Spitfires shot down was of 13 planes: two of them were shot down by the 1st Gruppo Caccia of the A.N.R. and eleven by the 2nd. . Of these losses only one seems to be possibly correlated with the presence of the discovered fighter. On October 21st 1944 seven Spitfires of the 72° squadron met few Messsershmitt 109G of the 2nd Gruppo Caccia which had taken off from the Villafranca and Ghedi airports.
The British fighters were intercepted but returned to Foggia without losses, although Sergente Maggiore Attilio Sanson,a pilot of the 2nd Gruppo kept claiming that he had shot down an enemy fighter. The aerial victory was not assigned to the Italian pilot, but the latter’s claim was recorded by the writer Nino Arena in his book “La Guerra aerea in Italia 1943-1945”, where we learn that “[…] on October 21st  S.M. Attilio Sanson intercepted a British Spitfire over the Garda Lake and quickly shot it down”.
After so many years, the finding of the aircraft on the bottom of the lake, in the very same area of the shooting, could lead, on one hand, to assign the victory to the Italian pilot, today still convinced of deserving it, and, on the other hand, to pay a proper tribute to an unlucky pilot still missing after more than 6 decades.
What induces to think that he may be still strapped in the cockpit is the fact that the canopy is closed. To abandon the plane, pilots had to open it, put the aircraft up-side down and then, when at a proper distance, open the parachute. There is no sign this particular pilot tried to bail out or to open the canopy after hitting the water. It might well be that he is still there, missing but perhaps not forgotten.
The divers who reported the finding have now decided to go back to the bottom of the lake, clean the glass and have a look inside the fighter to find out what actually happened.
If the pilot is still there, it would be fair to recover him and tribute honors to the brave, though unlucky, aviator.
                                    Flavio MUCIA

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