INFLATABLE TANKS

“Soldiers lift up an inflatable rubber dummy tank in England. 1939.”

LEGENDS of the OSS : PATTON’s GHOST ARMY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dummy_tank
http://americainwwii.com/articles/pattons-ghost-army/
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/inflatable dummy tanks, 1918-1945

“What use is an inflatable dummy tank in a very real war? A lot, if the enemy believes that it’s real. During World War I, Allied forces made use of dummy versions of the British heavy tanks. These were constructed from a wooden framework and covered with painted Hessian cloth. The tracks were non-functional so some were fitted with concealed wheels underneath and were towed from place to place by a pair of horses. Dummy tanks, representing Allied models, were also found to have been constructed by the Germans, even though they deployed only a small number of real tanks.

It is possible they were used in training, rather than for military deception.Dummy tanks saw significantly more use during World War II. Military deception is as old as war itself, but the idea the Allied planners came up with represented something new: a mobile, self-contained deception unit capable of staging multimedia illusions on demand. The 1,100 men in the unit were capable of simulating two full divisions—up to 30,000 men—with all the tanks and artillery that the real units might be expected to have. The illusion might discourage the enemy from exploiting a weak spot by making the site seem as if it was heavily defended, or could draw enemy troops away from where real American units were planning an attack.

“Inflatable dummy tanks and trucks set up near the Rhine River in Germany. Attention to detail was critical. Bulldozers were used to make tank tracks leading up to where the 93 lb (42 kg) inflatable dummies stood. Real artillery shells were tossed around fake guns.”

Formed in January of 1944, and sent into action after D-Day, the Ghost Army went to war armed with three types of deception to fool the enemy: visual, sonic and radio. Visual deception was handled by the 603rd Camouflage Engineering Battalion. Originally formed to carry out large-scale camouflage, it was loaded with young artists, architects and designers who now turned their visual talents to a different kind of art.

“A Ghost Army trooper paints an inflatable rubber tank modelled on an M-4 Sherman. The 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, an elite force whose speciality was tactical deception, was a matter of military secrecy until its declassification in 1996.”

To this purpose, they were equipped with hundreds of inflatable tanks, cannons, trucks, and even aeroplanes that could be used to create dummy tank formations, motor pools, and artillery batteries that looked like the real thing from the air. These decoys were not simply giant balloons, but consisted of a skeleton of inflatable tubes covered with rubberised canvas, an ingenious design which ensured that a single piece of shrapnel could not instantly deflate the entire dummy.

Dummy tanks were used in Operation Fortitude prior to the landings at the Normandy Beaches. During this operation, they were used to confuse German intelligence in two ways: first, by making it seem that the Allies had more tanks than they did; and second, to hide and downplay the importance of the location of their real tanks in order to make it seem that the invasion would occur at the Pas-de-Calais rather than at Normandy.

“A dummy aircraft, modelled after the Douglas A-20 Havoc, October 1943″

However, dummy vehicles played only a small part of the overall deception plan as, at that stage of the war, the Germans were unable to fly reconnaissance planes over England and such effort would have been wasted. During Operation Shingle at Anzio, Italy, inflatable Sherman tanks were deployed when the real tanks were elsewhere. In the Pacific Theater, the Japanese made use of dummy tanks, crafting them out of wood and available materials, even sculpting one out of Iwo Jima’s volcanic sands.”

“To complete the experience, the Ghost Army also used sonic deception, helped by engineers from Bell Labs. The team recorded sounds of various units onto a series of sound-effects records, each up to 30 minutes long. The sounds were recorded on state-of-the-art equipment, and then played back with powerful amplifiers and speakers that could be heard 15 miles (24 km) away.”

“The 1,100-strong Ghost Army would usually impersonate a specific, much larger division, such as the 6th Armored Division, which had 15,000–20,000 soldiers. This photo shows a mock-up of an artillery piece typically used to support large divisions.”

“An inflated rubber L-5 reconnaissance plane used by the Ghost Army at one of the last operations on the western border of Germany. Their last performance, Operation Viersen, successfully fooled German forces into converging to defend a point on the Rhine miles away from the actual attack.”

“A German dummy tank made of reeds. 1918.”

“German soldiers push a pair of dummy tanks. 1925.”

“Cardboard German dummy tanks on maneuvers. 1928.”

“German dummy tanks. 1926.”

“A German soldier pushes a dummy tank. 1931.”

“German soldiers carry the shell of a dummy tank to be attached to a car. 1931”

“German dummy tanks. 1931”

“Germans conduct military exercises with dummy tanks. 1932”

“German troops ferry a dummy tank across the river Oder during military exercises. 1932.”

“A German dummy tank in front of the Reichstag. 1932.”

“British troops inflate a rubber dummy tank. 1940”

“Americans inspect a wooden German dummy tank built over a truck in France. 1944”

“An American soldier inspects a German dummy tank in Metz, France. 1944”

“A U.S. Marine rips a wooden slat off a Japanese dummy tank on Okinawa. 1945.”

“American soldier peers inside a German dummy tank on the outskirts of Cologne. 1945.”

“British soldiers run inflatable dummy tank exercises on Salisbury Plain (after war ended).”

FICTIONAL ARMIES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude
https://iwm.org.uk/history/d-days-parachuting-dummies-and-inflatable-tanks
https://scotsman.com/fortitude-north-fictional-scottish-army-tricked-nazis-d-day
Fortitude North: the fictional Scottish army that tricked the Nazis before D-Day
by Rhona Shennan / 3rd June 2019

“Deceiving the army responsible for one of the darkest periods in human history is no easy feat. But Fortitude North is the story of how one fictional Scottish army played a major role in doing just that. An attack the scale of D-Day does not get planned overnight: planning for D-Day began a year earlier, in 1943 and in the months preceding the invasion, a plan was formulated called Operation Bodyguard. Operation Bodyguard was the codename for the large scale deception conducted by the Allied Nations prior to D-Day.

The aim of Operation Bodyguard was to mislead the German forces regarding the time and place of the invasion. At its core, it was to make Germany believe that the invasion would occur in Pas de Calais, rather than Normandy. This would be logical as Pas de Calais is the closest part of France to England. The plan was to delay German reinforcements from reaching Normandy – where the actual invasion was to take place – and instead force them to deploy more soldiers in Pas de Calais. But Operation Bodyguard also pulled together other plans to fool the Nazis.

Operation Bodyguard created a sub-operation called Fortitude, which was split into two factions – Fortitude North and Fortitude South. Both of the Fortitude plans created fictional field armies which were based in Edinburgh and the South of England, respectively. Where Fortitude South’s fictional army targeted Pas de Calais, Fortitude North was designed to make the Nazi command believe an invasion of Nazi-occupied Norway was coming.

“A paradummy, of the sort dropped into Normandy during Operation Titanic”

The Fortitude misinformation campaign also tried to convince the Germans, post-D-Day, that the Normandy landings were a diversion and that more attacks in other locations were imminent, therefore forcing the Axis armies to hold off deploying reinforcements to Normandy. Using a variety of techniques, one of the bigger undertakings required of the operations was to make the Allied forces in Britain appear much larger than they were, allowing them to realistically threaten invasions of multiple locations at the same time. Fortitude North, specifically, was designed to make the Germans think that an invasion of Norway was in the works. By taking aim at the weakened Norwegian defences, the Allies hoped that this would delay reinforcements being placed in France. Fortitude North sought to convince the Germans that a fictional army was taking up base at Edinburgh Castle. This was coupled with double agents reporting the arrival of troops to German intelligence. The British media was also brought in on the action, with the BBC broadcasting false information, such as football scores and wedding announcements for troops based in an Edinburgh headquarters that didn’t exist.

“Metallised strips of paper known as ‘Window’ confused German radar”

British diplomats undertook negotiations with the neutral Sweden, which, if a Norway invasion was actually happening, would have been beneficial for the Allies. This all added to the illusion that an attack on German forces in Norway was coming in the near future. Furthering the realism of the fictional Norway attack, British forces even carried out missions in 1944 that would have occurred leading up to a real invasion in the country, which included destroying military transport and power infrastructures in Norway. While diplomats and the British media were in on the deception, the top-secret nature of the operation meant that many ordinary enlisted men and women involved in the operation were not.

One such serviceman, Sapper Bob Crompton of the Royal Engineers, told the BBC WW2 People’s War project of an exercise that he later discovered was part of Fortitude North. “One incident in 1944 was an order to pack up all our tools & equipment, load the Bailey Bridges onto trucks and head up to Scotland. “We travelled through all the major towns from Kent in the South East through to the Midlands to Yorkshire and onto the North East. We were photographed by German aircraft on our way up to Scotland. “During the night fresh drivers drove us down the lonely coastal routes and avoiding the towns and build up areas taking all the bridging equipment back to Kent, where we started! We were not observed by any German aircraft on our return journey. We repeated the same journey a few days later, attracting a lot of attention and returned back the same way!” By late spring of 1944, Hitler had 13 army divisions in Norway.

As an entire operation, Operation Bodyguard succeeded in creating an environment in which the Normandy Landings could take the Germans by surprise. Combining the idea that the attacks were going to occur elsewhere with the notion that the Normandy Landings themselves were merely a diversion, meant that Axis defence was spread thin in Western Europe and that commanders held off sending reinforcements once the Normandy Landings got underway.”

DAZZLE TECH
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/dazzleprints
https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_camoufleurs
https://thevintageshowroom.com/penrose-camo
by Douglas Gunn / May 16, 2012

“When the ‘Home Guard Manual of Camouflage’ by Roland Penrose, a lecturer to the War Office for Instructors to the Home Guard, was first published in October 1941 the prospect of a German invasion on mainland Britain was seen as a very real and probable threat. As a Quaker and staunch pacifist his influence in the development of camouflage techniques during WWII is fascinating, though in his own words “The author makes no claim to their originality, many of them are as old as warfare itself”.

The War Office set up a Camouflage Development and Training Centre (CDTC) at Farnham Castle. Painters, designers and architects even zoologists, (many of the ideas on disguise and concealment came from the study of animals and their habits) trained with regular officers before being posted as staff officers, usually to the Royal Engineers to use their skills with camouflage. The creative community included painters such as Roland Penrose, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Edward Seago, Frederick Gore and Julian Trevelyan. They helped develop new methods of concealment and deception, training troops in visual awareness and how to merge into their surroundings.

In 1940, as an ill-equipped Britain faced invasion by Germany there was a desperate need for concealment and deception, but ‘there was no one to preach the gospel’. This book set out to change that. It was designed to train the Home Guard, operational from 1940-1944 and comprising of 1.5 million local volunteers. Forget Dad’s Army in the event of invasion these would have been an important and crucial secondary defence force.

The purpose of the book was to instruct the Home Guard in the arts of concealment and camouflage, to use the natural surroundings of the countryside for “Deception, Misdirection and Bluff” to give the advantage to a smaller force against a larger invading force. Though the concept of concealment was unsavoury to many of the retired soldiers serving in the Home Guard.

“To an old soldier, the idea of hiding from your enemy and the use of deception may possibly be repulsive. He may feel that it is not brave and not cricket. But that matters very little to our enemies, who are ruthlessly exploiting every means of deception at the present time to gain spectacular victories. They can only be stopped by new methods, however revolutionary these may appear to those who believe only in ancient traditions.”

“It is useless in warfare to be merely brave, if bravery means presenting oneself as a useless target to the enemy. It is far better to employ intelligence and concealment, so as to induce him to present a target. A man who is well concealed can bide his time, watch for the enemy to expose himself and hold his fire until his target is sufficiently close to make sure of it. In this way the Home Guard may be able to destroy the invader without even allowing him the chance to hit back. By good concealment it will greatly augment its value as a fighting force. Camouflage is no mystery and no joke. It is a matter of life and death-of victory or defeat.” – Roland Penrose, 1940

This post focused on the art of camouflage and the Home Guard Manual that sought to teach it, though in no way means to portray Roland Penrose simply as a military lecturer. The life of the English Surrealist painter and poet is a fascinating subject, of which this is but a small chapter. For information on his life and works visit http://rolandpenrose.co.uk/. Friend and biographer of Picasso, Penrose was instrumental in bringing his work ‘Guernica’ to London in 1937, giving East London a vision of the chaos and destruction that it would all too soon receive at the hands of the Luftwaffe.”

PREVIOUSLY