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Aviation History
1945
1945 - 2328.PDF
ayra, 1945 FLIGHT 571 Red Herrings for Luftwaffe Another War Secret Disclosed : How Airfields, Factories and Even Cities Were Protected by a Country-wide System of Decoys OF all the wartime secrets which have been disclosedto the public since the end of hostilities—the'' official'' end, that is—probably none had such wide application as the decoy system of protection against German air raids. Obviously, it was not possible to pre- serve complete secrecy with dummy airfields, factories, and other decoy equipment scattered all over the country, but the fact that a very large measure of secrecy was main- tained speaks volumes for the integrity and good sense of the many thousands of Britons who must necessarily have known about them. And even when the Luftwaffe did -», finally tumble to the dodge, it still worked reasonably well because it was so cleverly applied. For example, the dummy target was always located quite near the real target so that the two could not be differentiated by mere navi- gation, and the dummies were cunningly devised to look, from the air, as though an attempt had been made to camouflage them. It began at the start of the war, when the Air Staff established a special branch to develop a technique of decoy protection to draw off attacks made on R.A.F. air- fields and stations by day and night. It was, of course, realised from the first that the big pre-war R.A.F. stations with their concentrations of large buildings and constant Movement of aircraft and ground transport could not be simulated by any practical form of decoy. But even at that early date there were a fair number of smaller satellite airfields, with few buildings or made roads, which it was possible to copy very effectively, and during the period of maximum daytime attack in 1940 and early 1941 these dummy satellites drew off 36 attacks. It Could Not Last Later on, when the real satellites expanded and acquired long runways and camps, it was realised that the enemy was soon bound to recognise the dummies for what they were. This expectation was duly confirmed when an enemy reconnaissance aircraft was shot down and in it was found a map with a number of the dummy airfields marked as such. That was the end of their usefulness, so they were closed down. About the same time as the dummy airfields were func- tioning—in 1940—it was also decided to apply the same kind of protection to some of our all-too-few aircraft pro- duction centres, and four dummy factories were constructed adjacent to four of the genuine article. These dummy production plants were complete with parks of (derelict)v cars, dummy roads, real smoke from dummy chimneys, and all the other necessary trimmings, including dummy aircraft on the alleged tarmac. These also worked fairly well and drew upon themselves nine day attacks and 14 night raids. Decoy airfields at night were a much easier and simpler proposition because it was only necessary to reproduce the lighting used on the real ones, and keep it up to date. Ordinary farmland or other open country could be used, because the lights were carried on poles and the nature ttl the ground did not matter; it did not even have to be level. In fact, the less it looked like an airfield in the daytime the better, for that minimised the chances of its presence being detected. Cables leading to the lights were, of course, buried—in the case of arable land, below ploughing depth. There was one obvious snag with these night decoy air- fields, however, that had to be guarded against. That was the risk of any of our own aircraft being led astray and trying to land on them. This was avoided by having certain small differences in the lighting which could only be recognised by our own and Allied pilots, who were regularly briefed in this important matter. During the month of June, 1940, no fewer than 36 attacks were wasted on the 40 decoy night airfields in operation by that time. As more and more real airfields were constructed, the number of decoys also increased, until there were 200 of them dotted about the country. This proved to be the saturation limit, for by this time the country was so crowded with airfields, factories, depots, training grounds, and so forth that no more safe sites were left for further decoys. Lives and Property Saved By this time, of course, the Luftwaffe was well aware that it was being offered almost as many decoy targets as those it was really seeking, but the Hun was able to do so little about it that, by the end of June, 1941, he had thrown away his bombs in 322 night attacks on the dummies as compared with 304 on genuine airfields. It is fairly certain, however, that by no means all of those 322 attacks on decoy lighting systems had been really meant for R.A.F. airfields. Many of them had been carried out by enemy aircraft seeking civil targets, and so the dummy night airfields gave considerable protection to the civilian population, and undoubtedly saved many thousands of British lives as well as valuable property. Realisation of this was, no doubt, largely responsible ior the recommendatxon to the Air Ministry by the Civil Defence Committee 'hat similar protection should be pro- vided for civil targets and built-up areas, and this resulted, first of all, in the Air Ministry taking over responsibility * for the co-ordination of all decoys at night in order to pre- vent overlapping and, very likely, mutual interference Patently one could Dot set up a dummy town cheek-by- jowl with every populated centre, but an air reconnaissance was made of the various forms of civil lighting used at night —railway yards, for instance, had to be permitted a certain amount of light to work by—and experiments were made with a few decoy types to imitate them. Then came the Coventry blitz and Hitler's amiable threat to "rub out" all our cities in turn This altered the picture completely, because decoy lighting could do little to draw off such massed attacks, and once a fire or two had been started in a large town, the enemy could see for himself that he was "bang on " the real target. The answer was pretty obvi- ous. The enemy used fires as a target marker; then we'd provide them for him—but outside the borough boundary! "Starfish" Thus an elaborate system ot decoy fires which could be electrically ignited was installed as quickly as possible wherever considered practicable. Swift experiment showed that by using three different types of inflammable material it was possible to imitate a town fire quite faithfully, and these decoy fires were known by the code name of "Starfish." Again the ruse worked very well indeed, and by the end of the war no fewer than 100 attacks on big industrial and civil targets had been drawn off by the Starfish installa- tions. Incidentally, civil decoy lighting to imitate ship and railway yards, factories, coke-ovens and so forth were still used, and some of these were actually on Starfish sites and so made the deception all the more perfect. The degree of success of the Starfish decoys, as might be expected, varied inversely with the size of the target. London and Birmingham decoys achieved a number of successes, but the proportion of the whole attack drawn off was much greater in the case of Bristol, which was
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