UKH

Just been reading about some of the fake airfields the Germans made in WW2 in order to divert attacks away from camouflaged real airfields. I knew the Allies did this on the run up to D-day but had no idea that the Germans did it too. Obvious I suppose.

 But what really tickled my fancy was that when the Allies discovered a fake airfield they would drop fake bombs on them made from wood. On each bomb they painted the words 'Wood for Wood'. A fascinating insight into humour during the war.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/wooden-bomb/

That's interesting. I wonder what the real truth is? I agree where it points out that there is more value in letting your enemy think he has fooled you rather than letting him know that you know!

Yeah; it would be a significant intelligence failure to give away that you know that a facility is faked. Not only does it give away the fake, it also potentially reveals your intelligence gathering methods, and lets your opponent know they need to up their faking game.

Not sure I'd be sending our guys into occupied territory, risking their lives, for a bad joke to let the enemy know they're pouring resources into something that isn't working...

If you think that’s low, how about delivering a dead Welsh homeless man dressed in an officers suit with a briefcase handcuffed to him in to Spanish waters by submarine? 

That was exactly my first thought. 

A fascinating story, tinged with sadness but also a strange warmth that he served his country.. and did damned good job of it. I’m sure there’s been plenty more operations just as absurd. 
 

Edit - oops thought you were replying to me.

Why does your story ring a bell? 

I like the way his memorial was modified in the light of his identity becoming known.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Martin_(Royal_Marine_officer)

"Glyndwr Michael, served as William Martin, RM"

Exactly, if you've got a limited number of planes and plenty of things that need bombing why would you send them with bits of wood to bomb nothing when they could have actual bombs and bomb something that needed bombed.

Not really comparable, that mission had an intended outcome 

For anyone who is interested a book was published in 2009 called ' The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs ' by Pierre Antoine Courouble.

There are potential favourable outcomes of letting your enemy know that you know their trick, too. 
Whether or not the original story is true or not remains to be seen, but even if it was details remain slim. Could it have been a cheeky fighter/recon aircraft pilot that lobbed the small bomb out of his canopy during a mission to monitor enemy positions? Or was it a Lancaster bomber and entire crew sent primarily for the purpose of dropping it. To dismiss it as waste of resources without knowing the entire story is a little premature. 

Operation Mincemeat. 

Holy hell. That's not what I was thinking of, but what a great read

Plus if you ignored it that would be a give away in itself so if you were pretending it was real you would need to send a shed load more planes over to bomb it anyway.

On a semi related note the response to the discovery of Blockhaus d'Éperlecques shows the general approach. When asked for ideas about it the scientific adviser responded with dunno  but "if it is worth the enemy's while to go to all the trouble of building them it would seem worth ours to destroy them".

I think there was a fake 'airfield' set up on the Anglezarke moors. It was just lights set up to fool the Germans on night raids. I've seen big wooden posts set up on the salt marshes off Carnforth that an elderly resident told me used to support dummy aircraft. No record of either installation being bombed.

Isn’t it! 
 

Then you have bigger raids like the one on St Nazaire dry dock. The chances of it succeeding were so incredibly remote and the basic idea of it so brazen, yet military planners of the time were willing to throw the lives of hundreds of men at it. Happily it did succeed and it put an Atlantic maintenance facility out of action for the rest of the war, crucially stopping the Tirpitz ever leaving its Norwegian fjord. Love him or hate him, Jeremy Clarkson did an excellent documentary on it, it’s on YouTube I think.

Considering how much trouble was taken to conceal enigma code breaking or the trouble taken to conceal details of satellite reconnaissance capabilities more recently, it seems strange to reveal photo reconnaissance capabilities by dropping wooden bombs.

You generally don't want the enemy to know what you know and what you don't know. Better to let them think they're fooling you by dropping a real bomb on the decoy. No point telling them they need to improve their decoys.

Are you comparing the breaking of enigma to discovered a decoy airfield? In which case maybe you do let the enemy know that you know something. If it leads them to think that you’ve discovered a single decoy airfield and are buzzing enough about it to make the point known then maybe that’s all you know… 

I don’t think we should be minimising the games playing by the intelligence services to “generally”, they’re clearly better equipped than any of us. Fascinating as it is.

Dropping a real bomb encourages self-deception as people want to believe they are being successful - "Look, our fake airfield works. No need to improve them".

Yes as you keep saying. Sometimes the obvious deception isn’t always the best as part of a bigger game. 
Let them know their fool hasn’t fooled, and they’ll redirect yet more time, effort, manpower and materials in to trying something else. Which if you’ve got good intelligence sources on the ground, as I imagine you would if they’d discovered the first fool, isn’t a problem.

Edit - as Jim points out below, your solution allows the manpower that created them to be redirected in to other potentially fatal war efforts. 

So you drop wooden bombs so the enemy have to expend more effort on building better ones......

It's rather generous to provide accurate feedback to the enemy.

Dropping wooden bombs on real airfields might be a more usefully deception.

Except for the risk of any intelligence leaks/intelligence gathering methods being discovered?' I can envisage 'the powers that be' deciding it's not worth the resources used and lives risked to bomb a fake airfield, and not sensible to tip them off that their ruse has failed too.

What, you think think the Germans didn't know why solitary a Mosquito  flew over their heads? In the early war years detecting and intercepting individual aircraft was virtually impossible. And trying to find where the intelligence leaks where (like orders from sawmills or concrete works) was a drain on war resources as valid as any other war activity.

There was, famously, a mission to drop a tin leg to Germans for Douglas Bader after he was captured!

You seem to be putting words in my mouth ( or thoughts into my head). 

See my original reply to you, nothing other than what is written is to be inferred. I've no knowledge of, or suppositions about, what the Germans may have observed in relation to any of their fake installations, other than that which is explicitly expressed. 

The Germans offered safe passage for a solo RAF drop. The RAF declined and preferred to drop the leg during a routine bombing mission. 

If this is correct I wonder at what risk the airmen were put when dropped wooden bombs on decoy airfields??

As others have said, it gives the game away.

If only we all decided to drop wooden bombs on each other - particularly today - what a f**king wate

There are at least 2 "starfish' sites on the North York moors and one very near where I live.  The remains are still visible but unless you know what you are looking at you wouldn't really know it as such.  

These sites were designed to appear from the air as cities - in this case Teesside, being bombed to decoy bombers away.  The starfish  site near our village never was bombed.  Clearly it didn't work and the Luftwaffe was never fooled.

My memory might be a little wanting but During the Falklands war, we attempted ot put the main runway at Stanley out of action and there was the famous Vulcan/V bomber raid over Stanley to put the runway out of action along with multiple later attempts by Harriers to render it unusable.    The bombing  had little if any effect on the Argentine   airlift capacity, and what damage was done was quickly repaired.  But the Argentines didn't want us to know that the airfield was still usable and repaired for use only at night so they built 'dummy' bomb holes/craters which could be put back over the runway during the day when our planes were able to carry out photo reconnaissance.  

That info about the false bomb craters is fascinating. Never heard it mentioned before. 

 When cycling up Carlton Bank ( on the edge of the N.York Moors) I noticed some deep holes on the left as you go up. I was told these were bomb craters from WW 2 from German planes dropping unused bombs before returning over the channel.

That's assuming all war decision making is entirely rational, which it decidedly is not. Especially during large scale conflicts such as WW2 some key decisions were made decentralised and sometimes even on a whim by local commanders.

Another good example is that Soviet (submarine?) commander during the Cuban Missile Crisis who almost singlehandedly averted nuclear war. 

British counter deception - send over a plane made of wood.

I agree with your sentiment.

Curiously, did you know there are laser guided concrete bombs. If you want to take out something but don't want to collateral damage.

The British also made fake cities in the countryside  to divert German bombing raids away from the real ones, lighting fires to simulate the real city's layout when viewed from the air at night. One in particular was in the countryside near Belfast.

Before the introduction of the Pathfinder squadrons, a common error the RAF night bombing raids suffered from was "creepback" caused by the natural temptation of many of the crews to release their bombs just slightly too early during the bomb run onto the target when they had to fly straight and level for several minutes during which time they were more vulnerable to searchlights, flak and night fighters. This caused fires to develop on the ground onto which following aircraft would bomb, again releasing a little too early. Very quickly, particularly during a big raid, this resulted in  the countryside for up to 30 miles or more before the target being bombed, causing little damage. Becoming aware of this the Germans would light fires/flares on the lines of the predicted bombing runs further extending the "creepback".

The introduction of Pathfinder squadrons who were made up of the best navigators went a long way towards reducing creepback by dropping pre-determined coloured marker flares a few minutes before the main force arrived, and the raid would be controlled by a Master Bomber in a Mosquito circling over the target directing the main force onto which fires or flares to ignore and which to bomb on.

What does Mark Felton have to say about this?

The Pathfinders adopted Oboe, a radio navigation system. The Germans had a couple of radionavigation systems too, which were cunningly disrupted to take the bombers off course.

RV Jones' book 'Most Secret War' is pretty fascinating.

Was this another or the same person they used from HMS Dasher. The Aircraft carrier that blew up off Arran and was hushed up. Hundreds of dead bodies washed up just disappeared. To this day no one knows where they went. My mother in law can remember as a kid having the burning ship pointed out to her on the beach.

Quite possibly.

My mother and a couple of other ancient locals told me there were a string of bom holes across the fields near Hawsker as one German bomber dropped his bombs before crossing the North Sea.   As a child I'm reasonably certain I can remember being taken to one - which certainly wasn't the enormous crater I expected.  Now there all gone with a combination of filling in and continued ploughing.

There are two or three near the road as it winds up Carlton Bank. They are just pools of water now I think. Not very big either. 

 There was some talk of a secret facility near Great Busby which the bombs were aimed at but obviously missed by a long way. I think it more likely they were jettisoned to lighten the aircraft after an aborted mission to Teesside.

During WW2 Britain employed (details may be slightly inaccurate), an ex magician or illusionist to divert German aircraft.  I think he was made an officer  in charge of a unit involved in visual deception.  I'm pretty certain he was also behind the inflatable tanks, lorries and so on we used.

One illusion he was involved in was either the camouflage  of a river or faking one (details fuzzy).

The Secret War by RV Jones mentioned by Captain Paranoia is well worth the read.

I read the book about Operation Mincemeat a while back (and saw the documentary). There are some quite gruesome photos of the body and the details of the set up are nonetheless fascinating. I think he was a homeless Welshman who'd died a sad death in London. 

He was called Jasper Maskelyn I believe. I will look The Secret War up. Sounds good.

Thats the official line. There are some researchers who argue thats incorrect and it was someone from the Dasher. The argument does seem to make sense since a homeless person is unlikely to be in great shape and also an autopsy could have shown the cause of death as not being drowning. The sub which participated in the operation also departed from that area.

I believe the rather wonderful Colin Kirkus was a navigator in a Pathfinder squadron.

Mind you, while not doubting his courage, I have sometimes wondered how sensible he was being, as he had to game the sight test because his vision was so poor...

not to mention Sir Bernard Lovell leading the group who created H2S terrain mapping radar! Truly revolutionary.

The TV series was amazing in its detail (eg blind landing receivers being found on examination to be unusually highly sensitive eventually giving away their function as detectors of the radio beams used for navigation to target).  At Kishorn I knew someone who'd studied under Jones at Aberdeen and said that if you didn't take the detail of what he mentioned about his wartime activities seriously you could come unstuck in your exams as there would be questions to which it was highly relevant.

My father was in the RAF, after D Day he was in a truck with radio navigation gear that was embedded with the Americans.  No idea which system but it would be interesting to learn more. 

Another deception plan was that performed 617 Squadron on the night before D Day when they flew a highly complex and accurate pattern between Dover and Calais over the Channel dropping "Window" the code name for strips of tin foil which created a false pattern on German radar screens simulating the zig zag pattern of a very large fleet of ships approaching the French Coast and reinforcing their belief that this where there assault was going to take place.

This deception was used in conjunction with the build up of the fake invasion army that had been "established" under Gen Patton in East Anglia with false radio traffic and rubber tanks, landing crafts etc during the month preceding D Day

There is uncertainty as to how effective the deception was, but it certainly increased the general confusion in the German defences, and for many hours/days they continued to believe that the actual Normandy landings were a diversionary raid. This bought the Allies valuable time in which to establish the Beachhead before stronger reinforcements arrived in Normandy.

I suspect a lot of the "German bomber jettisoning bombs miles from anywhere" stories would most likely be a cover story for auxillary units training with explosives. Especially as many of these locations tend to be near the 'stop lines' where British forces would have been falling back to from the east coast following a German invasion.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auxiliary_Units

Mosquito ?

what was the most important aircraft for the RAF during WW2?

Fighter/Reconnaissance/Weather - Spitfire 

Heavy Bomber - Lancaster 

Multi role - Mosquito

Transport - Dakota

Short take off and landing - Lysander

Anti shipping/submarines - Wellington and Sunderland (endurance and range)

Ground Attack - Typhoon, Tempest and later Hurricane

Tiger moth, without trained pilots all the above are 1:1 scale airfix kits.

In reply Trangia

Surely the Hurricane preceded the other two.

I took that to mean the later Hurricanes equipped with the 40mm Vickers S gun firing AP shot. A pretty formidable ground attack aircraft.

The Hurribomber was built from quite early on I think.   Hurricane was still the mainstay during the Battle of Britain

There was still the "Hawker" pride at sturdy airframes around when I was at Kingston

Yes, that's the Hurricane I was referring to.

And I agree re Tiger Moth, and the Harvard which provided the next stepping stone during training.

Actually the RAF accepted the offer of safe passage, droppped the leg but then continued on a bombing mission (much to the Germans annoyance) see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Bader

It depends what you define as "Important".

If I was being dropped off with kit into occupied france I'd consider the Lysander a/c doing the drop off as important.  

I'd consider the one picking me up from France as even more important!

Brilliant reply Trangia.  Now you mention it so would I!!