Explanation: A great deal of work was put into disguising the actual target of the D-Day Landings, including ‘fake’ military buildups in Britain to fool the Nazis. These included literal inflatable tanks - not convincing up close, perhaps, but a Nazi scout plane taking pictures at a few thousand feet in the air won’t know the difference!
Meanwhile wasn’t there a story about the Germans building a decoy airfield with wooden airplanes and other things to look convincing and then when they finished the Allies sent a single fighter bomber to drop a single wooden bomb decoy on the runway?
I’ve definitely heard variations of that story! I don’t remember the exact details, but I do remember that the basic idea (that a wooden bomb was dropped to mock wooden Nazi decoys) was backed up by several reliable post-war accounts.
Most of the fake buildups consisted of nothing more but a few dudes (and some dudettes) in a shed, generating an entire invasion army’s worth of fake radio traffic, though, because by that time, German reconnaissance flights were a rare thing, and all German agents in the UK had been captured and turned into double agents.
Back when battlefield deception was still effective and camouflage still worked somewhat.
Okay, Ukraine is still using battlefield decoys, and apparently with some success, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much in the other direction. When you can trivially send a $500 FPV drone to hit something ‘just in case’ and when camera drones are everywhere, let alone SAR satellites… It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever see the likes of this kind of thing again.
Explanation: A great deal of work was put into disguising the actual target of the D-Day Landings, including ‘fake’ military buildups in Britain to fool the Nazis. These included literal inflatable tanks - not convincing up close, perhaps, but a Nazi scout plane taking pictures at a few thousand feet in the air won’t know the difference!
Meanwhile wasn’t there a story about the Germans building a decoy airfield with wooden airplanes and other things to look convincing and then when they finished the Allies sent a single fighter bomber to drop a single wooden bomb decoy on the runway?
I’ve definitely heard variations of that story! I don’t remember the exact details, but I do remember that the basic idea (that a wooden bomb was dropped to mock wooden Nazi decoys) was backed up by several reliable post-war accounts.
Most of the fake buildups consisted of nothing more but a few dudes (and some dudettes) in a shed, generating an entire invasion army’s worth of fake radio traffic, though, because by that time, German reconnaissance flights were a rare thing, and all German agents in the UK had been captured and turned into double agents.
Back when battlefield deception was still effective and camouflage still worked somewhat.
Okay, Ukraine is still using battlefield decoys, and apparently with some success, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be doing much in the other direction. When you can trivially send a $500 FPV drone to hit something ‘just in case’ and when camera drones are everywhere, let alone SAR satellites… It’s hard to imagine that we’ll ever see the likes of this kind of thing again.