Revealed: the wealthy backer helping the hunt for the buried Spitfires of Burma

Already it was a tale of buried treasure, and of explorers heading into the jungles of a far-off land to see whether it was real or just a legend.

Now, however, the story of the buried Spitfires of Burma has taken yet another extraordinary twist.

The man providing the financial backing to the Lincolnshire farmer who has devoted 16 years to quest for the Burma Spitfires can be revealed as a 36-year old from Belarus who made his fortune with an online game based on Second World War-style tank battles.

Victor Kislyi and his company Wargaming.net have offered to pay up to $1 million (£621,400) to help David Cundall, 62, of Sandtoft, near Scunthorpe, dig up dozens of Mark XIV Spitfires buried in Burma at the end of the Second World War.

As was revealed in April when David Cameron discussed the project with Thein Sein, the Burmese president, it is believed that the factory-fresh fighters were buried in their tarred transport crates after being waxed with an oily grease to protect them from decay. It has raised the possibility that if the Spitfires could be found, they could perhaps be flown.

Wargaming’s backing has brought Mr Cundall tantalisingly close to fulfilling a dream that began when he heard of a chance remark by some American veterans: “We have done some pretty silly things in our time, but the silliest was burying Spitfires.’”

It has allowed him to sign a deal with the Burmese government earlier this month giving him permission to excavate the fighters.

For Mr Kislyi, who made his fortune with the worldwide success of his online game World of Tanks, the romance of the project was impossible to restist.

“When the shovel hits that wooden box, when you go to open in it, in a land of jungles and temples, and you wonder 'What’s in there?’ – it’s an Indiana Jones adventure.

“It’s about legends, rumours, fragments of recollections. It tickled our nerves a little bit.”

Mr Kislyi, Wargaming’s CEO, estimates that the first phase of the excavation and restoration project – working out if the planes really are there, and in what numbers, - will “probably come to $250,000 [£155,300].

“If the planes really are there, it will mean going up to $1million.”

Finding the Spitfires, which are believed to have been buried deep underground, involves the use of specialised machinery capable of passing a massive electric current through the ground. By measuring the resistance to the electric current, it is possible to establish whether you have found just soil or the metal of a Spitfire.

Digging can only take place during the brief window of opportunity between the earth drying out following one monsoon and the onset of the next. There is no question of hurrying the job, however, because indiscriminate mechanical digging might destroy the very Spitfires you are trying to find.

Nor, until the first crate is opened, will anyone know for sure the condition of the 67-year old aeroplanes.

“It’s a gamble,” said Mr Kislyi happily. “We are prepared to accept the risk that there is nothing there. But it is a risk we are prepared to take because of David’s track record.”

Mr Kislyi knows that Mr Cundall has been successfully finding and excavating wrecked wartime aircraft since the 1970s.

He also admits that for his company, the sums of money being gambled are “replenishable”.

World of Tanks, which his company created in 2010, now has 40 million registered players, fighting Second World War-style tank battles against each other online. Accessed via a website, the game is free to play, but enthusiasts can pay real money to acquire better equipped tanks with better trained crews.

It means, says Mr Kislyi, that Wargaming’s monthly revenues are “counted in many millions of dollars.”

His company has been able to expand from 120 employees two years ago to 1,200 people in 11 offices dotted around the world.

It is a far cry from Wargaming’s beginnings in 1996, when Mr Kislyi and his brother Eugene, 33, started work on their first online game in their parents’ apartment in Minsk.

“It was called Iron Age,” said Mr Kislyi. “It took us two years to develop, and only four people ever played it. My brother and I were two of them.”

With the help of their slightly sceptical father, a finance director, the brothers persisted, while Mr Kislyi completed a physics degree at Belarus State University.

In 2003, as a team of about 35 friends operating from their apartments in Minsk, they achieved considerable success with the fantasy battle game Massive Assault.

It was World of Tanks, however, that secured their fortunes.

Mr Kislyi had always been fascinated by such battle games. As a ten-year old he had drawn a battlefield on the linoleum floor of his family’s new apartment, and lined up watermelon seeds to represent imaginary cavalry. As a teenager, he became a Minsk schoolboy chess champion. Now living in Nicosia, Cyprus, with his wife and four-year old son, he has clocked up 9,000 battles (or 1,050 hours), playing World of Tanks, although he insists: “I am not a hardcore gamer any more. I pace myself now.”

For him and his Belarusian friends, tanks held an obvious attraction.

Soviet forces in the Second World War did have their own legendary fighter planes, like the Yakovlev Yak. They even had some Spitfires, given to them by the British. But Mr Kislyi and his friends were brought up on tales of the epic tank battles that secured Soviet victory on the eastern front in the Second World War.

“The T-34,” he said, “Is our Spitfire.”

Wargaming is already helping other historical projects around the world. In Los Angeles, it is producing a virtual video recreation of the Second World War landings at Okinawa, as viewed from the bridge of the battleship USS Iowa, which is being turned into a museum.

With a new game, World of Warplanes, due to released within months, however, the hunt for the Burma Spitfires was too good to miss.

Mr Kislyi said: “For our most loyal players, who are so evangelical about the game and who spread the word, historical accuracy is all-important. This way, the guys can see that we don’t just talk about historical accuracy, we act on it.”

Mr Kislyi and his team have been working quietly with Mr Cundall since April, after he fell out with a previous potential backer, Steve Boultbee-Brooks, a wealthy property investor.

If the fighters are there to be found, stresses Mr Kislyi, “They are not our Spitfires.”

The Burmese government will have the final say on what happens to them.

He hopes that at least a proportion of the Spitfires will end up on public display and, if possible, flying.

There, are however, limits to his enthusiasm.

“Personally, I would be afraid to fly in a very old, small aircraft.

“I would like to watch the Spitfires from the ground."