soc.history.war.world-war-ii

narrledudh@hotmail.com wrote:
> 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.

I remember that a long time ago I read about German self-propelled
infantry guns that were turned into "tanks" with plywood to make the
German units look stronger than they really were. Does anyone know
something about this?

Cheers

Torsten