soc.history.war.world-war-ii

On Feb 21, 3:05am, Louis C wrote:
> > I was wondering if the related story of the German "wooden airfield"
> > in the Netherlands was indeed true or just a myth.
>
> Wooden airfield is perfectly true, the Germans built lots of these.
>
> There was nothing wasteful about the effort involved: local carpenters
> could manufacture decoy planes but not real ones, so this particular
> project took nothing away from the rest of the war effort.
>
> And the benefit was all the bombs directed at dummy airfields and not
> at the real ones, all the planes shot down in these futile attacks
> (the AA defenses on the decoy airfields were *not* dummies!).
>
> > Yet since it had taken so long to construct, the Allies had passed
> > over it many times and took photos of the construction. Once
> > completed, the Allies sent a single aircraft and dropped a symbolic
> > wooden bomb on it!
>
> Variations of this story have been around for decades, indeed a form
> of that story can be found in the "false rumors" circulated by the
> British as part of their black propaganda. IIRC that particular story
> had been blocked for diffusion as too incredible but soon spread
> throughout occupied Europe anyway.
>
> Anyway, there are dozens of local versions of this story, involving
> dummy airfields (which, again, were quite real) from The Netherlands
> to the French Atlantic coast, and zero mention of any such dummy
> attack in Allied records.
>
> In addition to the common-sense objections like those raised by
> William Black's former teacher, there is the fact that the ballistics
> of wooden bombs would be entirely different from those of real ones so
> they would scatter all over the place, hit other planes participating
> in the raid, etc. Also the fact that if a German dummy airfield was
> identified, it was stupid to tell the Germans that their game was up
> and provide them with confirmation that they should set up shop
> somewhere else (where the airfield would not automatically be detected
> as a dummy).
>
> The one possible element of truth in these testimonies is that, during
> a - real - RAF raid against these wooden planes some wooden fragments
> would ricochet and be identified by local civilians as "wooden bombs"
> because "it was well-known" that the Secret Service was everywhere,
> and that the British valued humor and fair-play over everything else.
> That the British had been taken in by the German ruse was far less
> palatable a truth.
>
> LC

I do indeed have photos of German wooden dummy aircraft on a French
airfield, but since I got them from AHF which does not allow
hotlinking, they will be visible once my rare German a/c section of my
Rare Aircraft site is posted. It is still under construction. I will
post when they are up since this NG is not a binarie nor accepts WPS
documents.

BTW, I asked the question of truth or not concerning the "wooden
airfield" and did not present the tale as factual at all. Mr. Black
omitting my first paragraph of my post and then asking me for
documentation is, well, frustrating.

Here is what I asked:
I was wondering if the related story of the German "wooden airfield"
in the Netherlands was indeed true or just a myth. The story goes
something like this:

Thank you LC for answering that question in a professional manner.

Rob