Wooden bomb

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As wood bombs are bombs - dummies of wood referred that during World War II by the Allies on German bill airfields were dropped.

construction

Wooden practice bombs, wooden floating smoke and signal bombs of the type Mk4 as well as various simple bomb-shaped wooden replicas, some with tin tail units, were used.

use

The dummy bombs were mainly dropped on German mock airfields and hangar dummies. There is no evidence of official orders, mission reports, or strategies for dropping dummy bombs. However, there is evidence of the use of wooden bombs in the form of image and video material, statements by pilots, several finds in France and exhibits in the Dead Man's Corner Airborne Museum in Sainte-Mère-Église . For example, conscripted French people described the use of British wooden bombs in Salon-de-Provence in the occupied territories in 1944. Members of the British Royal Air Force gave as the reason for the dropping, for example, the joking mockery of the enemy. There are indications that the Special Operations Executive hoped that the use of the dummies would weaken the enemy morally and strengthen the population in the occupied territories. For his first book on the subject, the writer Pierre-Antoine Courouble interviewed various individuals, state institutions and the military. In the course of this research, more than 200 former soldiers were found who were involved in drops or eyewitnesses who observed an operation.

literature

  • Pierre-Antoine Courouble: The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs , Presses du Midi, Toulon 2010, ISBN 978-2812701566
  • Le Soir Illustré, 23 December 1939 edition

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Directory of witnesses and testimonies on the subject of dropping wooden bombs