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Press Releases & Press Packs
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Matter of Fact: The Decoy Men
Tuesday 5 March,
7.30-8.00PM,
BBC TWO (East)
It's one of the great untold stories of the Second World War - a battle
conducted in the shadows of East Anglia that saved thousands of lives.
It was a top secret operation involving both deception and astonishing
bravery but 60 years later those who fought it have largely been forgotten.
They are the ‘Decoy Men’ - perhaps the only servicemen during
the war who were actively trying to get the enemy to bomb them. Their
task was simple - to try to attract enemy bombers to drop their weapons
on them rather than legitimate targets like airfields, aircraft, factories,
towns and cities.
Many of these decoy sites, particularly the dummy airfields, were
located in East Anglia from the Essex coast right up to north Norfolk.
John Kent was a decoy man at the ‘Starfish’ site at Trowse
Marshalling Yards near Norwich: “It was like a cat and mouse
game, we were trying to tease Jerry into bombing us. If you got a
hit it meant you weren't suspected of being a decoy and that made
you happy - you were good.”
Stan Smith, a Decoy Man at Crostwick, says: “You had to keep
it very secret, you weren't allowed to tell anyone what you've done
even when you went on leave. You'd just say I'm in the airforce and
I'm doing a job and that's it.”
Two main types of decoys were used, ‘K sites’- daytime airfields
equipped with dummy aircraft; and Q sites - which worked at night
and tried to lure the enemy with sets of lights arranged to look like
a real operational airfield.
“Some decoys were more worth the effort than others, and certainly
‘Q sites’ were magnificent,” says Colin Dobinson of
English Heritage, “they drew something like 440 attacks - just
on Q sites alone which is an enormous amount of wasted effort on behalf
of the Germans - it's surprising how few people really know about
this. Overall, decoys probably deflected over 2,000 tons of bombs.
It worked out into several thousand lives saved during the course
of the war.”
As the war progressed the decoy men moved on from using mock aircraft
and lights to lighting huge fires outside key cities and towns once
a bombing raid was underway . These ‘Starfish’ sites were
designed to be 'fired-up' once a real attack had begun on a city making
subsequent bombers think they were the main target.
The decoy programme was run by Colonel John Turner who based himself
at the Sound City Studios at Shepperton. The whole operation became
known as ‘Col Turner's Department’. It was at Shepperton
and other film studios that the dummy aircrafts were made - actual
replicas of real aeroplanes made of wood and then later, canvas which
could be inflated.
Everything about the work they did was secret - the decoy men were
not even allowed to tell other members of the services what they were
working on. For many years after the war the decoy operation remained
top secret and only in recent years have the extraordinary stories
of these men's lives been told.
Today the remnants of the decoy programme lie scattered across the
countryside - with their war-time bunkers buried in hedgerows or tucked
into the corners of farmer's fields - but few people know what these
sites were for.
Find out more about Matter of Fact documentaries by visiting the website:
www.bbc.co.uk/matteroffact.
Notes to Editors
Producer:
Paul Dunt
The programme
includes filming in the following counties:
Norfolk
Re-enactment
of life working at a night-time decoy filmed in a bunker near Wormegay.
Interviews with three surviving Norfolk Decoy Men.
Filming with Norfolk historian Tony Vine, who travels the countryside
searching for abandoned decoy sites.
Cambridgeshire
Reconstruction
of a war-time 'dummy Hurricane' filmed at The Imperial War Museum
at Duxford, involving teams from Amateur Dramatic productions and
model makers from Cambridgeshire and Essex.
Essex
Interview
and filming of a Wildfowler from Essex who uses decoy ducks
Interview with a film historian from Essex at Shepperton.
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