Bramerton " Starfish " Bombing decoy. Feb 14.

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Black Shuck

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At the commencement of War World II, in 1939, the Air Ministry formed a secret department to oversee ways to fool the German Luftwaffe bombers by using decoys and other means of deception. Colonel Sir John Turner was placed in charge of British decoy and deception schemes.



John Turner was born in 1881 and had been commissioned into the Corps of Royal Engineers in 1900. In 1931, following a long association with the RAF as a civil engineer, Turner became the Director of Works and Buildings at the Air Ministry in London. His knowledge as a qualified pilot, and of airfield construction and infrastructure made him a good candidate for the role of masterminding the creation of Decoy Sites when it arose. Colonel Turner’s Department, as it was known, had its headquarters at the Sound City Film Studios in Shepperton, Surrey. Owing to the British weather, most pre-war films were made under cover with the film sets being mock-ups and clever lighting made them look like the real thing. Because of their knowledge of “deception”, the film men became the backbone of Col. Turner’s Dept where they produced dummy aircraft and equipment, as well as going out to the selected sites to help set them up with local builders, farmers, and the crews who would man the sites. The crews also went to Shepperton (in most cases) on a two-week course to learn the trade of deception.



The first Decoys seen locally were airfields - “K” Sites - for day use, set out on large fields, heath or warren land, and sometimes on disused WWI aerodromes. Props would include dummy aircraft of similar type to those used by the stations they were protecting. There would be mock bomb dumps and fuel stores, and the surface would be levelled to look like a landing ground. Impressed civilian aircraft, such as D H Moths, were employed on some sites to resemble Tiger Moth military training aircraft. Large sheets of canvas were painted and laid on the ground to represent hangars while, in some cases, old and disused vehicles were set around the site along with gun pits and camouflage nets. These dummy airfields looked very realistic from the air. The crews had their own buildings and trucks. Most “K” Sites were closed down in 1942/43 although a few were still in use in 1944.



Even at ground level they could deceive. A young lad, out for a walk with family and friends in the Summer of 1940, spotted some Wellington bombers dispersed on an aerodrome near Thetford. For three hours they waited for one to start up and take-off. A few days later, his father came home laughing his head off and said “ We might well have waited for those planes to take off last Sunday – they were dummies!” Decoy Sites like this one at Snareshill were amongst the war’s best kept secrets, under cover of “Col. Turner’s Dept”.

Taken from Wartime Deception...
In order to draw the enemy bombers from our towns and cities, dummy towns known as Starfish Sites were set up on open land between one and eight miles from the intended target. In daylight, the equipment resembled chicken sheds, etc., but when ignited at night the boilers and fire baskets looked just like bombs exploding, incendiaries burning and buildings on fire – these effects could be made to last a number of hours. QL lights were added to Starfish Sites but, on their own sites, were designed so that at night they could look like factories, marshalling yards, shipyards, steelworks, etc. QL lights ingeniously included welding flashes, railway signals (red and green), red railway crossing gate lights, tram car electrical flashes, standard lamps. They could also be made to look like open skylights, doors and windows where someone carelessly had not complied with the Blackout regulations.

Diagram showing cut away section through a Starfish decoy

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The pics...
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This what remains of the original door through to the generator room.

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Ops room with escape hatch minus the metal rungs for clambering out.

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Entrance looking out towards blast wall.
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Not much left topside as this particular bunker received three direct hits from bombs in 1942 alone.

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Under here somewhere is the doorway into the bunker. Thanks for looking peeps.:)
 
Agree with oldscrote - good description, very informative. Quite ingenious our for-fathers were! Thanks for posting.
 

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