soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Feb 20, 5:39 am, Louis C wrote:
> > Any reason for this?
>
> The main reason for using decoys is to have the enemy waste bombs on
> useless decoy targets.
>
> The Germans built quite a few decoy sites with wooden aircraft
> replicas in France (well, technically French workers built them for
> the Germans). Some of these were correctly identified by the Allies
> and not attacked much, but a few received their share of attacks.
>
> As it's very difficult to actually destroy such a target - wooden
> planes don't blow up when hit by a hot bomb fragment - it was, when
> successful, a cost-effective way to limit bombing of Luftwaffe
> installations.

I had forgotten all about this. I also seem to have forgotten which
side (both perhaps?) in North Africa would make plywood shells to make
non-combat vehicles look like tanks to enemy photo-recon.

Narr