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Field Ethos
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By Scott Longman
The first time any of us hear this story, we might be forgiven if we immediately think that its origin must have been a bunch of RAF Lancaster crews in a North Yorkshire pub, sometime after they’d exhausted both its entire supply of Guinness and their imaginations. And indeed, a few misguided internet souls still think so. But a military historian named Pierre-Antoine Courouble spent months doing the deep dig, conducting more than 300 interviews and, ultimately, published a book about it (which is on Amazon, if you speak French). His conclusion was that the story was absolutely legit.
And it’s just hilarious.
World War II was, of course, a brutal fight for global control, and both sides took advantage of every trick possible. One of those tricks was creating fake military installations, both in the hopes of deceiving the enemy as to strength and location of force, and further in the hopes the enemy would misdirect time and assets attacking them.
Among the deceptions, the Germans built entire fake airfields. There are plenty of on-the-ground close-up pics of what they did, and anybody viewing those close shots can immediately discern that that particular plywood-and-paper-mache “Me109,” to quote Bob Dylan, “ain’t going nowhere.” But consider that RAF bombers of the era were typically operating at 20,000 feet or more. To make that altitude understandable to what Pink Floyd once called us “earth-bound misfits:” that’s about 3.7 vertical miles. Anybody who has ever glassed a long valley through even a high-power spotting scope can tell you that’s a long, long damn way. Now envision doing that, vertically, through 1940s optics, while traveling maybe 250 knots. Determining that an airfield was fake was damned hard.
Well, the RAF was very much on that issue. While the historic record does not appear to reveal just how they figured out that this particular kraut airfield was ersatz, they certainly did. One likelihood of the way they did it: their reconnaissance units had a specialty of doing low-altitude blastovers, rendering near-scent-and-texture pics. Take a look at Operation Biting for a famous example.
Well, they’d apparently spotted this German airfield fakery early in the game, but somebody up the command chain decided—wonderfully—to simply the let the Germans continue building it. And why not? Every man-hour spent making fake planes was a man-hour not spent pouring concrete for a bunker.
So the Germans just kept going, mostly with wooden frameworks and canvas over the top. Had there been digital programming, they would have had The Wood Channel: “ All Wood, All the Time:” wood planes, wood fueling facilities, wood hangars, wood ordnance, wood depots.
So: If you are the RAF, what do you do?
Of course, there are really good strategic reasons to simply let the enemy just think you’ve bought off on their deception. Besides those bigger issues, other reasons also include not burning the fuel, nor putting the wear on a bomber, nor, most importantly, putting the crew at risk. But … what if you’d decided, against the bigger strategic picture, that it wouldn’t matter if you let them know, and you wanted to crush their morale and give your own boys some comic relief? So the RAF went and did it. The Brits have a term for what they did to the Germans: It’s “Taking the piss out of them.”
They waited until the fake wooden airfield was finally finished, then they flew over.
And dropped a single, inert, wooden bomb.
Perfect.
The post The RAF Takes the Piss Out of the Germans appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
The first time any of us hear this story, we might be forgiven if we immediately think that its origin must have been a bunch of RAF Lancaster crews in a North Yorkshire pub, sometime after they’d exhausted both its entire supply of Guinness and their imaginations. And indeed, a few misguided internet souls still think so. But a military historian named Pierre-Antoine Courouble spent months doing the deep dig, conducting more than 300 interviews and, ultimately, published a book about it (which is on Amazon, if you speak French). His conclusion was that the story was absolutely legit.
And it’s just hilarious.
World War II was, of course, a brutal fight for global control, and both sides took advantage of every trick possible. One of those tricks was creating fake military installations, both in the hopes of deceiving the enemy as to strength and location of force, and further in the hopes the enemy would misdirect time and assets attacking them.
Among the deceptions, the Germans built entire fake airfields. There are plenty of on-the-ground close-up pics of what they did, and anybody viewing those close shots can immediately discern that that particular plywood-and-paper-mache “Me109,” to quote Bob Dylan, “ain’t going nowhere.” But consider that RAF bombers of the era were typically operating at 20,000 feet or more. To make that altitude understandable to what Pink Floyd once called us “earth-bound misfits:” that’s about 3.7 vertical miles. Anybody who has ever glassed a long valley through even a high-power spotting scope can tell you that’s a long, long damn way. Now envision doing that, vertically, through 1940s optics, while traveling maybe 250 knots. Determining that an airfield was fake was damned hard.
Recon & Ruse
Well, the RAF was very much on that issue. While the historic record does not appear to reveal just how they figured out that this particular kraut airfield was ersatz, they certainly did. One likelihood of the way they did it: their reconnaissance units had a specialty of doing low-altitude blastovers, rendering near-scent-and-texture pics. Take a look at Operation Biting for a famous example.
Well, they’d apparently spotted this German airfield fakery early in the game, but somebody up the command chain decided—wonderfully—to simply the let the Germans continue building it. And why not? Every man-hour spent making fake planes was a man-hour not spent pouring concrete for a bunker.
So the Germans just kept going, mostly with wooden frameworks and canvas over the top. Had there been digital programming, they would have had The Wood Channel: “ All Wood, All the Time:” wood planes, wood fueling facilities, wood hangars, wood ordnance, wood depots.
Bomb Away
So: If you are the RAF, what do you do?
Of course, there are really good strategic reasons to simply let the enemy just think you’ve bought off on their deception. Besides those bigger issues, other reasons also include not burning the fuel, nor putting the wear on a bomber, nor, most importantly, putting the crew at risk. But … what if you’d decided, against the bigger strategic picture, that it wouldn’t matter if you let them know, and you wanted to crush their morale and give your own boys some comic relief? So the RAF went and did it. The Brits have a term for what they did to the Germans: It’s “Taking the piss out of them.”
They waited until the fake wooden airfield was finally finished, then they flew over.
And dropped a single, inert, wooden bomb.
Perfect.
The post The RAF Takes the Piss Out of the Germans appeared first on Field Ethos.
Continue reading...
