WWII: Wooden Bombs in the wild
Leo G Simonetta
Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers
(which takes place in the early days of World War II in England)
and found that the fake wooden bombs being dropped on the fake
airfield was retold in all its glory late in the book. Since I
loaned it to my mother-in-law after I finished I can't report the
exact page numbers.
I preferred the two Inneses.
Leo "ersatz" Simonetta
--
"If you send something to this group, it would be appreciated if
you were to give what you send a modicum of thought instead of
just hitting 'send' like a demented automaton."
Daniel Ucko explains another weird afu norm to a confused newcomer
Ben Zimmer
>
> Over the (merkin) Thanksgiving Holiday I was reading A
> Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers
> (which takes place in the early days of World War II in England)
> and found that the fake wooden bombs being dropped on the fake
> airfield was retold in all its glory late in the book. Since I
> loaned it to my mother-in-law after I finished I can't report the
> exact page numbers.
The Amazon "search inside the book" feature is unfortunately not
available for this title, but various other vectors turn up from an
Amazon search:
_Codebreaker in the Far East_ by Alan Stripp
(Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 191:
Whether the story is true or apocryphal, the message is
valuable: that the Germans painstakingly built a decoy
airfield, with dummy aircraft, fuel bowsers, hangars and
control tower all beautifully made of wood, to distract
attention from the real thing. On the day it was
completed the RAF, who had been keeping a quiet eye on
what was hpapening, showed their appreciation by dropping
one wooden bomb on it.
_The Fall of Berlin_ by Anthony Read
(Da Capo Press, 1995), p. 76:
The Berliners, however, did not place too much faith in
their decoy sites -- there was a persistent story that
some British bombers peeled off from the main line of
attack to drop wooden bombs on at least one of them.
_Off Camera: Private Thoughts Made Public_ by Ted Koppel
(Vintage Books, 2001), p. 146:
After the Germans painstakingly built a fake wooden
factory building, having moved the real factory
underground, the RAF reportedly dropped one wooden bomb
on the decoy.
Ben "wooden it be nice" Zimmer
Marc Reeve
What would complete the story, in my eyes, would be the detail that the
aircraft dropping the wooden bomb(s) is/are deHavilland Mosquitoes.
Marc "Bill Stout (designer of the Ford Trimotor) once said that the
problem with wooden aircraft is that they suffer from veneer-eal
disease" Reeve
--
Marc Reeve
actual email address after removal of 4s & spaces is
c4m4r4a4m4a4n a4t c4r4u4z4i4o d4o4t c4o4m
Olivers
>
> What would complete the story, in my eyes, would be the detail that the
> aircraft dropping the wooden bomb(s) is/are deHavilland Mosquitoes.
>
> Marc "Bill Stout (designer of the Ford Trimotor) once said that the
> problem with wooden aircraft is that they suffer from veneer-eal
> disease" Reeve
....and given the notorious inaccuracy of bomb-dropping during WWII, one
might question whether a wooden bomb (hardly the most accurately trajectory
predictable of ballistic objects) could be expected to hit the field upon
which the wooden bombers were arrayed.
None of it so emotional as WWI (or at least Hollywood's view thereof),
before AA and fighters became better, when the ememy would make a low pass
over an airfield to drop the paybooks/ID cards and decorations of the local
aviators downed behind enemy lines that day.
"Bigod, it's liddle Willie's cigaret case, gold toothpick and jockstrap.
The Colonel will have to write his puir mither. 'Tis the fourth son she's
lost in this bloody war." (I should have been dialogue writer during silent
movie era.)
(And, as an aside, the Allies used a lot of fake a/c in the days before
Normandy. All, IIRC, were inflatable, wood and carpenters being reserved
for higher priority tasks like building wooden landing craft and our own
a/c. Meanwhile the then-dastardly Boche were attempting - with mixed
success - to build wooden a/c of their own, and would likely not have
wasted much time, wood and skilled carpenters on sophisticated fakes, when
such tried and true alternatives as "painting" a/c silhouettes on
hardstands seems to have worked pretty well.)
TM "little postwar market for inflatable Sherman tanks" Oliver
John Stevens
> Marc Reeve muttered....
>
> >
> > What would complete the story, in my eyes, would be the detail that the
> > aircraft dropping the wooden bomb(s) is/are deHavilland Mosquitoes.
> >
> (And, as an aside, the Allies used a lot of fake a/c in the days before
> Normandy. All, IIRC, were inflatable, wood and carpenters being reserved
> for higher priority tasks like building wooden landing craft and our own
> a/c. Meanwhile the then-dastardly Boche were attempting - with mixed
> success - to build wooden a/c of their own, and would likely not have
> wasted much time, wood and skilled carpenters on sophisticated fakes, when
> such tried and true alternatives as "painting" a/c silhouettes on
> hardstands seems to have worked pretty well.)
>
it's in, darnit!) pictures of a British decoy base. It had hedges and
fake buildings and silouette A/C, etc. I wish I had a better cite, and
I will try to look it up. The caption was to the effect of they were
abandoned because they took so much effort to maintain.
The thing that kills this story for me is that intelligence gathering
cuts both ways: you would never let on that you knew something was
fake so the enemy would still think you fooled. If it was important
enough you might actually bomb it just to keep up the illusion.
John "bombed to the faux" Stevens
Louise Bremner
> What would complete the story, in my eyes, would be the detail that the
> aircraft dropping the wooden bomb(s) is/are deHavilland Mosquitoes.
> Marc "Bill Stout (designer of the Ford Trimotor) once said that the
> problem with wooden aircraft is that they suffer from veneer-eal
> disease" Reeve
Memory stirs of a book we were expected to read for the Aircraft
Construction part of our Aeronautical Engineering course. After all
these years, I can't remember what it was called or who it was by--just
that it was a small blue paperback. Since Aircraft Construction all too
often deals with aircraft destruction, it tended to dwell with a certain
amount of glee on the various ways in which designers, manufacturers,
and owners discover how not to build/use aircraft.
In that book was an account of a Squadron Leader in a tropical clime,
who had owned a car dealership before the war. Every morning, he'd have
the Mosquitoes of his squadron lined up neatly on the tarmac and have
them hosed down--the way he used to do with his cars. After a while, the
glues within the plywood started to play host to an amazing selection of
fungi, and the aircraft began to peel apart.
________________________________________________________________________
Louise "" Bremner (log at gol dot com)
If you want a reply by e-mail, don't write to my Yahoo address!
David Lesher
>>
>I have seen (and I can't remember which of my books on WWII air war
>it's in, darnit!) pictures of a British decoy base. It had hedges and
>fake buildings and silouette A/C, etc. I wish I had a better cite, and
>I will try to look it up. The caption was to the effect of they were
>abandoned because they took so much effort to maintain.
>The thing that kills this story for me is that intelligence gathering
>cuts both ways: you would never let on that you knew something was
>fake so the enemy would still think you fooled. If it was important
>enough you might actually bomb it just to keep up the illusion.
I too recall reading of decoy RAF bases during the Blitz.
See:
--
A host is a host from coast to coast.................wb8foz@nrk.com
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433
Lots42 The Library Avenger
fall.
(And that trained millitary men would be insane enough to fly over enemy
territory and drop something that would only kill anyone right below it and
give anyone else splinters)
Nick Spalding
<20031205015312...@mb-m12.aol.com>:
There was a war on. People did stupid things for a laugh.
--
Nick Spalding
Paul Tomblin
Especially if it were something they just tossed out while on the way to
or from the base that the decoy was supposed to be decoying them away
from.
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com> http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
I think I'd like to see a Simpsons episode starting up with Bart Simpson
writing 'I will not attempt to undermine the Usenet Cabal'.
-- J. D. Falk
Kenneth Williams
lsimo...@newsguy.com wrote:
> Over the (merkin) Thanksgiving Holiday I was reading A
> Presumption of Death by Jill Paton Walsh and Dorothy L. Sayers
> (which takes place in the early days of World War II in England)
> and found that the fake wooden bombs being dropped on the fake
> airfield was retold in all its glory late in the book. Since I
> loaned it to my mother-in-law after I finished I can't report the
> exact page numbers.
An early vectoring appears in _Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign
Correspondent 1934-1941_ by William L. Shirer (Alfred A.
Knoph, 1941) pp. 575-576:
Berlin, November 27 [1940]
Many stories about increasing sabotage in Holland. The Germans
are furious at the number of their men, in both the army and
police, who are being shoved into the numerous Dutch canals on
dark nights and drowned. X tells me a funny one. He says the
British intelligence in Holland is working fine. Both sides in
this war have built a number of dummy airdromes and strewn them
with wooden planes. X says the Germans recently completed a
very large one near Amsterdam. They lined up more than a
hundred dummy planes made of wood on the field and waited for
the British to come over and bomb them. Next morning the
British did come. They let loose with a lot of bombs. The
bombs were made of wood.
Ken "Wooden? Wasn't he the one-eyed god in Wagner's Ring?" Williams
Burroughs Guy
> An early vectoring appears in _Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign
> Correspondent 1934-1941_ by William L. Shirer (Alfred A.
> Knoph, 1941) pp. 575-576:
>
> Berlin, November 27 [1940]
>
> Many stories about increasing sabotage in Holland. The Germans
> are furious at the number of their men, in both the army and
> police, who are being shoved into the numerous Dutch canals on
> dark nights and drowned. X tells me a funny one. He says the
> British intelligence in Holland is working fine. Both sides in
> this war have built a number of dummy airdromes and strewn them
> with wooden planes. X says the Germans recently completed a
> very large one near Amsterdam. They lined up more than a
> hundred dummy planes made of wood on the field and waited for
> the British to come over and bomb them. Next morning the
> British did come. They let loose with a lot of bombs. The
> bombs were made of wood.
I might believe someone dropped a single wooden bomb, but not a lot of
them. On plane dropping one wooden bomb is a plausible practical
joke. Lots of wooden bombs would be a waste of resourses.
--
Burroughs "after all, there was a war on" Guy
I knew the MCP when it was just a chess program.
Mary Shafer
> I have seen (and I can't remember which of my books on WWII air war
> it's in, darnit!) pictures of a British decoy base. It had hedges and
> fake buildings and silouette A/C, etc. I wish I had a better cite, and
> I will try to look it up. The caption was to the effect of they were
> abandoned because they took so much effort to maintain.
The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban housing
tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really very
convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
Mary
--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
mil...@qnet.com
Ray Heindl
> The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban
> housing tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really
> very convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
When I first heard about this, lo these many years ago, there was an
added detail about someone whose job was to go out on the roof each day
and move hanging laundry around to different clotheslines, to add
realism. But the pictures I could find don't show anything that looks
like laundry hanging out:
<http://www.militarymuseum.org/LockheedAirTerminal.html>
<http://www.nasm.si.edu/galleries/lae/script/compare_camo.htm>
Maybe those pictures were taken on cloudy days. Has anyone else heard
the laundry story?
--
Ray Heindl
(remove the Xs to reply)
Ben Zimmer
Here's the earliest vector I can find on the ProQuest historical
newspaper database:
In Lighter Vein
Christian Science Monitor, Aug 5, 1941. p. 21
To trick British airmen into throwing away bombs the
Nazis in Holland built a fake airfield of wood, with
hangars and planes painted on it. The night after
it was finished a British plane flew overhead -- and
dropped one wooden bomb. -- Answers, London
("In Lighter Vein" was the Monitor's equivalent to the Wall St.
Journal's "Pepper and Salt" column, reprinting amusing squibs from a
variety of sources.)
It's interesting that both contemporaneous accounts localize the story
to occupied Holland. That's also the location of the version told in
Seymour Reit's _Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World
War II_, which footnotes a 1943 source (M. E. DeLonge's _Modern Airfield
Planning and Concealment_). Reit's version has come up on AFU before
(e.g. <http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=502mv7$6...@news2.cais.com>)
and appears on Snopes: <http://www.snopes.com/military/woodbomb.htm>.
Ben "there's a wooden shoes joke in here somewhere" Zimmer
Donna Richoux
>
> Ben "there's a wooden shoes joke in here somewhere" Zimmer
Sabotage, innit?
Simon Slavin
Kenneth Williams <ken...@huntingdon.edu> quoted quoted quoted:
>[snip] Both sides in
> this war have built a number of dummy airdromes and strewn them
> with wooden planes. X says the Germans recently completed a
> very large one near Amsterdam. They lined up more than a
> hundred dummy planes made of wood on the field and waited for
> the British to come over and bomb them. Next morning the
> British did come. They let loose with a lot of bombs. The
> bombs were made of wood.
I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
time and money constructing a ground installation then you
put AA emplacements all around it. The mere fact that you
haven't done this is a give-away that it's not worth
protecting.
So let's assume that those nasty Nazis have put AA guns all
around the dummy airfield. Then the brave Brits send enough
bombers over to 'let loose with a lot of bombs' and those
bombers get cut to shreads. It doesn't matter whether the
airfield is genuine or fake: the bombers are still down.
So I think it has to be one bomber. And the poetry of the
earlier version of the story, where it's just one bomb,
appeals more than many bombs.
Of course, underneath the dummy surface layer resembling an
airfield is the real thing: factory or something. Having
established that it's not worth targeting they put something
valuable there.
Paul Tomblin
>I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
>Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
There isn't any - just wooden guns.
Remember, the attacking planes are flying very fast and don't have
extremely accurate navigation. Your decoy only has to be good enough to
fool a few bombers to have done some good. If you fool the Pathfinders,
you've done a lot of good. If you fool the war planners into mounting a
whole raid on your decoy, you've done more than good.
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com> http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
Whenever someone says something exceedingly stupid, I feel it my duty to
educate them. Plus, everyone else leaves and the meeting becomes de
facto over. -- Rob Russell understands meetings
Olivers
> On 4 Dec 2003 14:52:17 -0800, jsst...@usa.net (John Stevens) wrote:
>
>> I have seen (and I can't remember which of my books on WWII air war
>> it's in, darnit!) pictures of a British decoy base. It had hedges and
>> fake buildings and silouette A/C, etc. I wish I had a better cite, and
>> I will try to look it up. The caption was to the effect of they were
>> abandoned because they took so much effort to maintain.
>
> The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban housing
> tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really very
> convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
>
In between these posts and Paul Tomblin's is to be found the "truth" behind
many of the "wooden airfields" tales.
Deception was continously attempted by both sides suring the war in Europe.
The employment of deception in the Air War included attempts to conceal
important targets, airfields, factories, etc. Soon, in the face of
successes and failure, it became apparent that big doses of "hiding" (or
causing targets to be misidentified) was not as successful as less complex
and expensive efforts to "move" the target a short distance.
If a factory roof has been repainted to resemble a rural village, an
accompanying deception, a new "factory" painted/built on nearby landscape
might draw attackers' attention and bombs. Unfortunately, all too often
the deceiving fake target might end up being close to "civilian" targets,
homes and schools, bound to collect a lot of off target bombing.
Aerial navigation, 1939-45, was often little more than a desperate exercise
in "Dead Reckoning", using pre-briefed (or once aloft, "wild ass guess"
input for wind drift and ground speed. Bombing on the drop of formation
"lead bombardiers" or at night "Christams Trees", similar aerial
illumination, or even early-drop incendiary stimulated ground fires from
Pathfinder bombers (the best navigators), often thru broken cloud
cover/clag, the legends which went with Norden bombsights, "bomb in a
pickle barrel" simply didn't apply, and even the most modest of deceptions
occasionally functioned quite well (although routine mistakes in navigation
probably brought more misdirected bombs than any other cause). Even the
much vaunted electronic aids to navigation available, most consisting of
narrow radio beams which could be followed by adjusting course to signal
changes or "intersections" of separate transmitter emissions, improved but
did not cure what remained extremnely dangerous tests of individual, crew
and organizational skills.
Side bar to the aerial war....Most USAAC/USAAF bombing missions were
forbidden to bomb unless they located the principal or alternate targets,
yet did not routinely attempt to land with bombs aboard. SOP was to drop
over the Channel on the way back to England by routes which often led
across Polderland/Netherwhere and Flemberg/Walloonville. Cloudy
day....nervous aircraft commander anxious to rid a/c of vast load which
slows speed and gulps fuek. Savo bombs! Meanwhile, far below it ain't La
Manche, but is Holland, often veritably spoiling the day of the unwary (or
even the wary, gone to ground at the first hum of a/c engines in the
distance) below.
Even with the 1940 Schirer cite (and "X" sure sounds like Schirer's version
of FOAF), while Schirer occasionally and obviously went to some lengths to
protect sources who might fall into the maw of the Security Services (a
reutedly nasty lot in the view of both historians and Hollywood) in Berlin
in 1940, the wooden bomb tale sounds like the creation of an imaginative
sort from among the white silk scarf/open cabriolet school of daring
aviators, or a tale invented for media consumption (and to monitor vectors
and the speed of transmission, both part of the tasking) over at the
Ministry of Information.
Obviously, if you build a wooden airfield, I'm certainly not going to
proclaim to you that I know it's wooden. In fact, I might actually attack
it to convince you that you've successfully convinced me it's raining by
pissing down my leg. Short of that, I'll be mouse-quiet, hoping that
you'll believe that your deception has and continues to work, absolving you
of any need for more deceptive installations.
TM "Chief, Department of Riverbend Relocation" Oliver
Burroughs Guy
> The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban housing
> tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really very
> convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
Not wasted at all. Through the entire war, not one Kraut/Jap bomb was
dropped on the Lockheed plant, including the airfield now known as
Burbank Airport.
--
Burroughs Guy
Lee Ayrton
> On 4 Dec 2003 14:52:17 -0800, jsst...@usa.net (John Stevens) wrote:
>
> > I have seen (and I can't remember which of my books on WWII air war
> > it's in, darnit!) pictures of a British decoy base. It had hedges and
> > fake buildings and silouette A/C, etc. I wish I had a better cite, and
> > I will try to look it up. The caption was to the effect of they were
> > abandoned because they took so much effort to maintain.
>
> The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban housing
> tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really very
> convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
Bradley International Airport at Windosr Locks, Connecticut, was
constructed in 1941 as the Windsor Locks Air Base. According to a book
published by the New England Air Museum, the air base was unique in
state-side air bases in that it "was designed from the start to be
camouflaged from the air." The air base was landscaped to blend in with
the surrounding farmland and hard surfaces were painted to match. An
aerial photo reproduced on the book shows that the runways do indeed blend
in with the surroundings. The cluster of base buildings and repair
facilities simply looks like an industrial area.
Lee Ayrton
> In a previous article, sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) said:
> >I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
> >Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
>
> There isn't any - just wooden guns.
I can't lay my hands on a cite but I know that I've read at least one
claim that, due to a war-time shortage of guns, a few Liberty ships put to
sea with a gray-painted section of utility pole mounted in the aft gun
tub.
Lee "Wonder if they got the idea from _Beau Geste_" Ayrton
Anthony McCafferty
<ol...@LOSETHIScalpha.com> writes:
>Obviously, if you build a wooden airfield, I'm certainly not going to
>proclaim to you that I know it's wooden.
Well, yeah, you might...or, rather, I might. YMMV, and all. Giving the
enemy notice that his deception hasn't worked may force him to start over
somewhere else, with slightly less resources than before. If the real
positions nearby are hidden rather than hardened, putting him on notice that
yoyu know which are which may even make real bases untenable. Also, messing
with your opponent's self-esteem has a long military history; nose thumbing is
done not just as rude bravado, but to convinvce the other guy he hasn't a
chance.
Anthony "Cassius Clay could tell you all about it" McCafferty
Lon Stowell
> In a previous article, sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) said:
>>I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
>>Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
>
> There isn't any - just wooden guns.
>
> Remember, the attacking planes are flying very fast and don't have
> extremely accurate navigation. Your decoy only has to be good enough to
> fool a few bombers to have done some good. If you fool the Pathfinders,
> you've done a lot of good. If you fool the war planners into mounting a
> whole raid on your decoy, you've done more than good.
>
And if the bombers are observed to release millions of termites
with little bitty parachutes, you need to hire a new art director.
--
Fan of the dumbest team in America.
Burroughs Guy
You beat me to it.
Bob Ward
<BurroughsG...@aol.com> wrote:
>Mary Shafer wrote:
>
>> The Lockheed plant in Burbank was camouflaged as a suburban housing
>> tract during WW II. I've seen the photos and it's really very
>> convincing. Kind of a wasted effort, but a good one.
>
>Not wasted at all. Through the entire war, not one Kraut/Jap bomb was
>dropped on the Lockheed plant, including the airfield now known as
>Burbank Airport.
And, of course, all the uncamoflaged locations were blown to
smithereens.
Paul Tomblin
>Roughly 12/8/03 19:48, Paul Tomblin's monkeys randomly typed:
>> fool a few bombers to have done some good. If you fool the Pathfinders,
>> you've done a lot of good. If you fool the war planners into mounting a
>> whole raid on your decoy, you've done more than good.
> And if the bombers are observed to release millions of termites
> with little bitty parachutes, you need to hire a new art director.
Or at least switch to inflatable planes.
http://www.paraarchives.com/data/gm/archives/00000021.htm
>Fan of the dumbest team in America.
Bush/Cheney?
--
Paul Tomblin <ptom...@xcski.com> http://xcski.com/blogs/pt/
We are not gentle tolerant people. We like drastically effective solutions.
-- Steve VanDevender
Marc Reeve
Nah, they got the idea from the Quakers. Not uncommon for Quaker-owned
vessels, in the days of wooden ships and iron men, to travel with
black-painted "guns" made of wood. Said fakes were known universally as
"Quaker cannon." Said term later became generic to any ruse used to
suggest armaments where there were none.
Marc "does this mean that 'Quaker oats' aren't real oats?" Reeve
Ben Zimmer
>
> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Paul Tomblin wrote:
>
> > In a previous article, sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) said:
> > >I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
> > >Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
> >
> > There isn't any - just wooden guns.
>
> I can't lay my hands on a cite but I know that I've read at least one
> claim that, due to a war-time shortage of guns, a few Liberty ships put to
> sea with a gray-painted section of utility pole mounted in the aft gun
> tub.
Looking for a cite, I found the following in a Washington Post article
commemorating the 50th anniversary of Pearl Harbor ("America Gamely
Stumbled Off to War", Dec. 7, 2001):
http://www.lafn.org/~cymbala/pc0_911.html
In Washington, the Army was ordered to set up
antiaircraft batteries on government buildings.
Unfortunately, there were more buildings than
batteries, so some ended up defended by ersatz
cannons made of wood.
And here's some thread synchronicity in the preceding paragraph:
The prospect of air raids terrified Americans.
The city of Gary, Ind., tested a plan to shield
its steel mills from enemy planes by shrouding
the city in a cloud of dense smoke. In Boston,
the gilded dome of the Massachusetts State House
was covered with dull gray paint to make it less
conspicuous.
Hmm, so maybe all those Buffalonians who painted their houses gray (see
<http://groups.google.com/groups?th=ec42a28b915fd3bd>) were just trying
to stay camouflaged...
Deborah Stevenson
>
>And here's some thread synchronicity in the preceding paragraph:
> The prospect of air raids terrified Americans.
> The city of Gary, Ind., tested a plan to shield
> its steel mills from enemy planes by shrouding
> the city in a cloud of dense smoke.
That explains a lot about Gary. Evidently nobody ever thought to conclude
the test.
--
Deborah Stevenson
dste...@OBSTACLESuiuc.edu
[eliminate OBSTACLES to email me]
danny burstein
>> Lee "Wonder if they got the idea from _Beau Geste_" Ayrton
>Nah, they got the idea from the Quakers. Not uncommon for Quaker-owned
>vessels, in the days of wooden ships and iron men, to travel with
>black-painted "guns" made of wood. Said fakes were known universally as
>"Quaker cannon." Said term later became generic to any ruse used to
>suggest armaments where there were none.
I thought that concept was introduced by a little old lady from a suburb
of Leningrad, namely Potemkin.
--
_____________________________________________________
Knowledge may be power, but communications is the key
dan...@panix.com
[to foil spammers, my address has been double rot-13 encoded]
Lee Rudolph
>Roughly 12/8/03 19:48, Paul Tomblin's monkeys randomly typed:
>
>> Remember, the attacking planes are flying very fast and don't have
>> extremely accurate navigation. Your decoy only has to be good enough to
>> fool a few bombers to have done some good. If you fool the Pathfinders,
>> you've done a lot of good. If you fool the war planners into mounting a
>> whole raid on your decoy, you've done more than good.
>
> And if the bombers are observed to release millions of termites
> with little bitty parachutes, you need to hire a new art director.
The "dance like a butterfly, chew like a termite" part of this thread
is just upstream.
Lee "do decoys' quacks echo?" Rudolph
Monte Davis
>> And if the bombers are observed to release millions of termites
>> with little bitty parachutes, you need to hire a new art director.
>
>The "dance like a butterfly, chew like a termite" part of this thread
>is just upstream.
And the "terminal velocity for a termite without parachute" thread is
currently even with the 84th floor of the ESB.
-Monte "there go Charlotte's babies" Davis
Olivers
> Lee Ayrton <lay...@panix.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, 9 Dec 2003, Paul Tomblin wrote:
>> > In a previous article, sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon
>> > Slavin) said:
>> > >I dry ran this in my head and noticed a problem: where's the
>> > >Anti-Aircraft fire ? I mean, if you spend a large amount of
>> >
>> > There isn't any - just wooden guns.
>>
>> I can't lay my hands on a cite but I know that I've read at least one
>> claim that, due to a war-time shortage of guns, a few Liberty ships
>> put to sea with a gray-painted section of utility pole mounted in the
>> aft gun tub.
>>
>> Lee "Wonder if they got the idea from _Beau Geste_" Ayrton
>
> Nah, they got the idea from the Quakers. Not uncommon for Quaker-owned
> vessels, in the days of wooden ships and iron men, to travel with
> black-painted "guns" made of wood. Said fakes were known universally
> as "Quaker cannon." Said term later became generic to any ruse used to
> suggest armaments where there were none.
>
Quaker cannon were equally popular in land and coastal fortifications as
late as the WBTS.
Quaker cannon always brings to mind tales of Quaker-owned vessels engaged
in the slave trade (apparently under the moral justification that the
slaves lives were being bettered by exposure to Western civilization).
Certainly, many of the early colonialists perceived that both black slaves
and indigenes converted from their pagan tribal ways were "liberated". Of
course, the BoR prohibits mentioning step 2 in the process.
TM "Un-et, my cabrito becomes your milk goat." Oliver
John Schmitt
sla...@hearsay.demon.co.uk@localhost (Simon Slavin) writes:
>So let's assume that those nasty Nazis have put AA guns all
>around the dummy airfield. Then the brave Brits send enough
>bombers over to 'let loose with a lot of bombs' and those
>bombers get cut to shreads. It doesn't matter whether the
>airfield is genuine or fake: the bombers are still down.
The answer seems obvious from here. The AA guns are also wooden.
Incidentally, somewhere I remember reading about the Doolittle
raid on Tokyo, where the rear gunners were shed to reduce weight
and increase range, and wooden tail guns were installed to deter
Japanese fighter aircraft. In the event, the Japanese appear to
have been caught about as flat-footed as the US was at Pearl
Harbor.
John "always expect the unexpected" Schmitt
--
If you have nothing to say, or rather, something extremely stupid
and obvious, say it, but in a 'plonking' tone of voice - i.e.
roundly, but hollowly and dogmatically. - Stephen Potter
John Schmitt
Olivers <ol...@LOSETHIScalpha.com> writes:
>Deception was continously attempted by both sides suring the war in Europe.
One of the more successful ruses was the misreporting of V1
strikes in the newspapers. The strikes were reported as being
several miles to the North of where they came down. The Germans,
although confident in their guidance technology (gyro compass)
became convinced that there was some sort of defect in the
missile and started aiming farther to the South, with the result
that many V1s landed in Surrey farmland.
John "fog of war" Schmitt
Nick Spalding
> In article <Xns944C50F...@216.196.97.132>,
> Olivers <ol...@LOSETHIScalpha.com> writes:
>
> >Deception was continously attempted by both sides suring the war in Europe.
>
> One of the more successful ruses was the misreporting of V1
> strikes in the newspapers. The strikes were reported as being
> several miles to the North of where they came down. The Germans,
> although confident in their guidance technology (gyro compass)
> became convinced that there was some sort of defect in the
> missile and started aiming farther to the South, with the result
> that many V1s landed in Surrey farmland.
It was slightly more sophisticated than that. From "Most Secret War" by
R.V. Jones:
"I had noticed that in the Peenemünde trials the bombs tended to fall
short of the target, and now knew from the plot of bombs for the first
24 hours ... that the operational bombs were also tending to fall short,
the centre of gravity being in south-east London, near Dulwich. In a
flash I saw that we might be able to keep the bombs falling short, which
would mean fewer casualties in London as a whole, and at the same time
avoid arousing any suspicions of the genuineness of the agents(1).
We could give correct points of impact for bombs that tended to have a
longer range than usual, but couple these with times of bombs which in
fact had fallen short. Thus, if the Germans attempted any correlation,
they might be led think that even the bombs which they had reason to
believe might have fallen short were instead tending to all in
north-west London. Therefore, if they made any correction at all, it
would be to reduce the average range."
(1) These were genuine German agents who had been 'turned' early in the
war and were completely under British control. They were still trusted
by the Germans to provide reliable information.
--
Nick Spalding
John Schmitt
Ben Zimmer <bgzi...@midway.uchicago.edu> writes:
> The prospect of air raids terrified Americans.
> The city of Gary, Ind., tested a plan to shield
> its steel mills from enemy planes by shrouding
> the city in a cloud of dense smoke. In Boston,
> the gilded dome of the Massachusetts State House
> was covered with dull gray paint to make it less
> conspicuous.
The Prince Albert Memorial was painted black during WWII,
depending on whose point of view you accept, either to prevent it
being targeted, or to not act as a navigational fix. Considering
that on clear nights Old Father Thames acted as a landmark that
made finding London a navigational piece of cake, I'd say it was
just a morale-booster like so many others. A few years back (L),
it was restored and the gilding re-instated.
John "worth visiting now" Schmitt