Hell Razor5543 wrote:
During the Battle of Britain there were 500 dummy decoy targets (airfields and industrial sites) scattered throughout England. During this time there were around 430 enemy raids against real airfields, and about 440 raids against dummy fields ("Q" fields, which were night time sites, with lighting to mimic an airfield, and "K" fields, which were 24 hour decoys), thereby causing the Luftwaffe to waste thousands of tonnes of bombs on empty fields, and taking some of the strain off the RAF.
Whoever thought up that scheme was a genius
Mind you, deception in all areas was critical to winning the war... A very successful one was a massively well-planned deception to lead the Germans to believe the D-Day invasion would be along the Pas de Calais and not Normandy...
It worked too. It even used dummy radio traffic and a dummy invasion force. Much deception was fed to the German high command via double-agents - another great success of the war...
And, it goes without saying that al lot of this was only possible due to Ultra intelligence courtesy of Bletchley Park in the form of decrypted German communications...
In the Afria campaign and in other areas too, use was made of dummy tanks to deceive the enemy...
It is a fascinating subject