This is great

[LyleW]

[BlackSheep214]

I've heard of the Germans displaying fake aircrafts, vehicles, hangars and such to trick the Allies.


Never knew about the fake bombs by the RAF during WW2. Interesting...

[keavdog]

I had heard this story. British sense of humor
We would have dropped incendiaries and turned them into a bonfire.

[Stuart]

I've heard that this story isn't actually true but... I'd like to think it's the sort of thing we would have done

[LyleW]

Well, it WAS on the internet!

[Stikpusher]

Well if it is on the internet, it must be true…

[BlackSheep214]

And some folks say don't believe everything you read on the internet.

[Stikpusher]

Pardon my French here….

[Medicman71]

Why do y'all gotta ruin a good story.

[scorpiomikey]

Found this on Reddit.

u/Bigglesworth_

It's a difficult one to pin down. There are any number of versions of the story, in print from at least 1942 in William L. Shirer's Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941:

"X says the Germans recently completed a very large [aerodrome] 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."

It certainly has the air of an urban legend; Snopes put up an article about it in 2005 that came to the attention of aviation historian Brett Holman who covered it on his Airminded blog, Levity through airpower, finding a few other versions of the story (including the Italian Air Force dropping wooden bombs on a British decoy site in North Africa) concluding that something along those lines may have plausibly happened to be the source of the adapted and re-told stories, but finding no firm evidence.

French author Pierre-Antoine Courouble was also fascinated by the rumours and extensively researched them, publishing The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs in 2009 including eyewitness testimonies. Unfortunately I haven't managed to get hold of a copy myself, but it persuaded Holman, and Dave O'Malley of Vintage Wings of Canada was firmly convinced, publishing a piece on the book with further photographs of dummy aircraft and airfields.

The subject kept popping up around the internet; a 2016 tweet sparked another Airminded article that linked to a PsyWar.org article (archive version, site currently unavailable) that located the story as a 'sib', an 'official' rumour considered (though in that specific case rejected) for dissemination by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE). As Holman points out it's not impossible that what started out as a rumour may actually have been enacted later on.

Courouble and his team continued working on the subject, releasing a web documentary in 2020. The site has further information including a list of testimonies and the film is on YouTube, but only in French as far as I can see. An interview with Luftwaffe veteran Werner Thiel is available with subtitles and is certainly compelling. It seems likely that one or more incidents occurred in the war, potentially inspired by earlier rumours, though without further reliable primary sources (that are unlikely to exist, Courouble gives plausible reasons for a lack of official documentation) it's not really possible to be completely definitive.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/ ... uring_ww2/

So the official answer to did this actually happen is "We dont know but maybe or maybe not?"