[jboot]

You'd be astonished what restorers can do. Back in '88 I toured Paul Garber. They had a Japanese Aichi seaplane that had just been found somewhere in an Indonesian jungle. They had shipped it home in a huge crate with all the soil and vegetation around it still attached. It looked like a burnt log, not an aircraft. There were no recognizable aircraft forms. I recently say it on display at the Udvar-Hazy museum. It looks like a new aircraft (which it mostly is, I'm sure).

In the right hands, these Spits will live again.

[tanknetter]

You may be mixing up your planes. The Seiran floatplane on display at UH was captured intact (at Yokosuka) at the start of the US occupation and shipped back to the US for evaluation. It languished in storage for a few decades until the Tamiya model company donated a lot of money to restore it.

I’ve seen it at both Garber and UH. Even have a picture of the model (Tamiya of course) I built of it in front of it. It’s really a beautiful and amazing aircraft and piece of engineering.

[Stonewall Jackson]

A number of WW2 tanks and armored vehicles have been recovered and restored in recent years.

The Patton Museum at Fort Knox had a German assault gun that had been recovered from a bog in Latvia and it still had all of the mud and gunk on it. I haven't been to the Museum since they started moving most of their inventory down to Fort Benning, so I don't know if it moved or not.

One of my grandfather's M-4's is still out at Fort Knox. They were conducting training maneuvers for the invasion of the Japanese home islands when one of the tanks in his platoon hit a sinkhole and flipped over. The crew bailed out through the belly hatch just before the ground gave way and the tank dropped about fifty feet. Since there was no way to recover a tank from a hole that deep, it was written off and left down there.