Inn WW2 the Nazis had a wooden airfield in Northern France, the British knew about it. Being British they let them build it and then dropped a wooden bomb on it!

Did you know that inn WW2 the Nazis had a wooden airfield in Northern France, the British knew about it. Being British they let them build it and then dropped a wooden bomb on it!

 

Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.

In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called “Attrappen”. Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like “Wood for Wood”.

 

The French writer, Pierre-Antoine Courouble devoted himself to a structural inquiry to unearth the facts behind this vague legend. His investigations resulted in 137 testimonies from resistants, former employees on German basis, and pilots of the Luftwaffe. His research has been condensed in the book The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs, published at the “Presses du midi” and translated in four languages. He found original sources on this matter in the form of testimonies of servicemen, pilots and veterans’ children. He met a dozen witnesses who had personally seen the famous bombs, two of whom were eye witnesses to their droppings. Today, these wooden bombs can be found on the internet. We bought them.

Peter Haas, the German translator of the book, found a pilot from the Luftwaffe named Wern Thiel, who happened to be stationed in 1943, on the fake airfield nearby Potsdam in Germany. He is the living witness of the dropping of a dozen of wooden bombs, with the mention Wood for Wood! At the end of the filmed interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_tGOxoIhIE) he addresses the allied pilot who had that typically peculiar sense of humour.

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Inn WW2 the Nazis had a wooden airfield in Northern France, the British knew about it. Being British they let them build it and then dropped a wooden bomb on it!