Fake war machines to trick the enemy
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Title (Dublin Core)
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Fake war machines to trick the enemy
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Article Title and/or Image Caption (Dublin Core)
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Title: Decoys trick enemy into wasting fire
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extracted text (Extract Text)
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THESE jerry-built replicas of Amer
ican war machines, made of wood
and burlap and poorly camouflaged,
attract the fire of enemy batteries and
dive bombers, while the real and
adroitly concealed wallopers do their
work. Faked antiaircraft guns, mean-
looking antitank guns, and 155-mm.
rifles like the one shown here are fac-
tory-made at the Engineer School,
Fort Belvoir, Va. But Army camou-
flage experts, on short notice, can
throw together decoy tanks and planes
made of burlap, or field guns hewn
from tree trunks, that fool air ob-
servers from as close as 500 feet. Such
tactics are probably as old as war it-
self—but they still work. Ome of
China’s most successful ruses is a fake
landing field on which a dozen or so
planes appear ready to take off.
Actually the planes are nothing but
silhouettes, cleverly painted on the
ground with tar. Yet Jap raiders have
been known to make repeated bomb-
ings on such a field, which, in between
raids, is daubed with fresh tar by the
chuckling Chinese. American engi-
neers have adopted the trick, but
have improved the “bait” by making
the planes out of burlap, which is
stretched on wood and wire frames
as shown in the photograph.
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Language (Dublin Core)
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eng
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Date Issued (Dublin Core)
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1943-08
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pages (Bibliographic Ontology)
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102-103
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Rights (Dublin Core)
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Public Domain (Google Digitized)
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Archived by (Dublin Core)
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Matteo Ridolfi
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Marco Bortolami (editor)
Popular Science Monthly, v. 143, n. 2, 1943
