Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Thread for clever innovations to deceive battlefield enemies.
One of my favorites (a sort of Civil War scarecrow).. the Quaker gun. Designed in the previous century, but used effectively by Union and Confederate armies. Named after Quakers because it's a weapon a pacifist could use in clean conscience. A log painted to resemble a cannon, to hold, or slow down, pursuers at bay. Seems funny, but effective.
Behind-the-curtain view of a Confederate Quaker gun:
Michelin made a bunch of inflatable tanks and other military vehicles to act as decoys during wwii...fool enemy spotters on the size of a force or from where an attack might happen...from what ive read it was very effective on and after D day
During the siege of Vicksburg one of the Federal gunboats, the Indianola, was captured by the Confederates. Fleet Commander Porter was embarrassed by the loss and came up with a plan to make the rebels destroy the Indianola rather than salvage it and make it part of their own fleet.
Porter had a fake ironclad constructed. They built a flimsy wooden casemate over a 300 foot coal barge, placed painted logs so that they protruded from the fake gunports, used smoke pots to create the illusion that it was under steam power, and even fake coverings to protect the non existent sidewheel paddles.They dubbed it "The Black Terror."
On the night of February 24th, 1863, Porter sent the faux ironclad drifting downriver past Vicksburg. As hoped, the rebels believed that they were being attacked by a monster ironclad. They blew up the Indianola to keep it from being recaptured. The "Black Terror" didn't even have to get that close. It eventually ran aground in the river and the morning sunlight finally revealed to the Confederates that they had been reacting to a sham fighting ship.
A popular tactic would be for a smaller force facing a larger force to march soldiers back and forth just out of sight of the enemy or behind the cavalry screen in order to give the enemy an impression that they are facing a greater force then really exists. The enemy would hear marching and clanking of equipment and think reinforcements were constantly flowing in.
Similiarly, a retreating army may assign troops to keep campfires lit to appear to the enemy that an army is set in place, while in reality the rest of the army would retreat or reposition for a flanking attack.
None of these two are really clever of course, just standard textbook battle tactics.
Ahh here is another one - the details are a bit rough but i recall reading that the allies in WW2 planted fake D-day plans on a dead soldier and dumped his body so it would wash on shore in Nazi territory and be found. It appears to have worked as well. Edit to above, you can read about it here, this was for the invasion of Sicily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mincemeat
Several years ago I was reading something on Rommel (which I couldn't confirm in a recent web search, but..). That during his retreat across North Africa, he was dragging equipment behind their lines to stir up a ton of sandy dust. It was done to deceive his pursuers into thinking his force was much larger, and therefore less vulnerable to being finished off. Anyone know more about this strategy (?)
And as per an earlier post, during the Seven Days battle of the Civil War.. Confederates were being marched in a looping circle to present a seemingly larger force to McClellan. McClellan was routinely overestimating the Confederate numbers.
I suppose most of us are familiar with the dummy paratroopers dropped on D-Day, from the film "The Longest Day."
The faux paratroopers did cause the Germans to send troops to the wrong places, but the Allies greatest weapon turned out to be the botching of the dropping of the real soldiers. They wound up so widely scattered in so many locations that the Germans were overwhelmed by sightings in multiple areas, each of which had to be investigated.
As Described in Brazen Chariots by Robert Crisp The British created something they called 'sunshields' for tanks in North Africa that made them look like trucks (basically metal frames and canvas) It was used to move tanks (Crisp was a commander of an M3 Honey in Operation Crusader) forward then a radio message was sent out to 'drop sunshields' and the covers fell aside allowing normal operation.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned "Operation Fortitude," the Allies' elaborate scheme to fool the German high command into thinking the Normandy invasion was actually targeted on Pas de Calais. They created an entire fictitious Army group (over 40 fake divisions), "based" in Dover (right across the channel from Calais), and "commanded" by George Patton - who the Germans regarded as our best general, and therefore certain to lead the invasion.
They created fake unit patches and uniforms, scattered hundreds of inflatable rubber tanks and fake aircraft all over the area, had soldiers wearing the unit patches driving around all over the place in jeeps and making themselves visible, and set up dozens of radio transmitters to send messages back and forth to one another simulating the presence of an enormous field army. They even had mobile transmitters driving around all over the countryside, all talking to one another, giving the impression of a massive army conducting training exercises - when in fact, there were never more than a couple of thousand men and women assigned to this "Army group;" just enough to drive around all over the place pretending to be 300,000 men.
It worked so well that when we landed at Normandy, the Germans were convinced that that invasion was the deception - that the Normandy landings were a diversion intended to distract them from the real invasion, led by Patton, and which they were led to believe was scheduled a month later, in mid-July. They kept the entire German 15th Army (18 divisions) tied up in Calais, doing basically nothing but sitting around looking out over the Channel and waiting for Patton to pop up over the horizon. They didn't figure it out until August, when Patton and his (very real) Third Army landed in Normandy and spearheaded Operation Cobra, the massive offensive that finally punched through the French hedgerows and set Patton's tanks free to roar all the way across France to the Rhine.
Fortitude was an incredibly complex and meticulously constructed hoax, right down to the last detail. They sent commandoes ashore to take soil samples at Pas de Calais, hoping the Germans would notice (they did; some were captured). Reconnaissance flights over the Pas de Calais region were double the flights over Normandy, and in the days leading up to the invasion, allied bombers flew about twice as many bombing missions over Calais as they did Normandy. On the morning of D-Day, Churchill announced the Normandy invasion and said that it was "only the first," with many larger landings yet to come. The Germans bought it hook, line, and sinker, for two months, as the Allies poured hundreds of thousands of troops into Normandy. That has to go down as the greatest combat deception in the history of warfare.
Last edited by Mr. In-Between; 06-24-2015 at 11:11 PM..
They created fake unit patches and uniforms, scattered hundreds of inflatable rubber tanks and fake aircraft all over the area, had soldiers wearing the unit patches driving around all over the place in jeeps and making themselves visible, and set up dozens of radio transmitters to send messages back and forth to one another simulating the presence of an enormous field army.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
