The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Greater reliance came to be placed on decoy sites, known as Special Fire (SF) or ‘Starfish’, which were constructed during the last few months of 1940 in country areas around key targets. By November, 27 sites had been constructed and 5 more were in preparation. To reassure the rural population there were orders to ensure that no decoy was closer than 500 yards to any inhabited building, or closer than 800 yards to a village, though in reality these distances gave scant protection.¹⁴⁹ Raised tanks filled with a mixture of creosote, diesel oil or paraffin surrounded troughs filled with straw set out in the shape of a star. When the troughs were filled and set alight, the effect replicated the white and yellow blaze from incendiary bombs. Bristol, for example, was surrounded by 12 starfish sites, some almost 20 miles distant. The first became operational on Blackdown, in the Mendip Hills, in late November 1940 and a week later attracted its first bombs. In January over 1,000 incendiaries fell on the site. A decoy airfield laid out in fields near Uphill, on the outskirts of Weston-super-Mare, was attacked heavily the same month after it had been ignited by hand with matches and a bottle of petrol because the electric switch failed in heavy rain. Some 42 high-explosive bombs and 1,500 incendiaries fell during the raid. A nearby farmer found his herd of dairy cattle dead or mutilated, some still struggling to walk with their legs blown off.¹⁵⁰ During the rest of 1941 the Starfish were ignited 70 times, with mixed results; in some cases three-quarters of the bombs were dropped on the decoy site, in others none at all.¹⁵¹

Camouflage was another way of concealing the target, but the Camouflage Advisory Panel set up in 1939 and the Camouflage Policy Committee established in March 1940 both reached conclusions that camouflage was difficult to apply effectively and worked best only for daytime raids. Some effort went into providing steel-covered netting to mask the shadow of large buildings and painting trees and shrubs on hangars and storerooms, but it was concluded that heavy industrial haze, persistent fogs and an effective blackout served much the same purpose as camouflage. Plans to paint sections of railway line dark green to blend with the surrounding fields were rejected on the grounds that pilots would never be fooled by it, while the extensive use of paint on key buildings provoked a sudden scare that German agents would somehow find a way of adding their own patches of special chemically enhanced paint intended to make the targets visible to German infra-red equipment.¹⁵² More attention was given to the idea that light-coloured concrete roads and runways could be covered with tarmac and coloured chippings to mask the glare, but the expense was considerable and the government refused to sanction road camouflage when local councils applied for funding.¹⁵³ In summer 1940 the Camouflage Committee stopped meeting.