No fight without a feint, no war without a stratagem, just think of the most famous one, Odysseus and his giant wooden horse, in whose belly the Greeks hid and after ten years finally reached Troy, which had been besieged in vain until then. The gullible Trojans themselves pulled the horse into their hitherto impregnable city, which was now at the mercy of the Greeks. Even better, you can make yourself invisible, that’s what the ancient myths talk about when talking about the magic cloak. In the ancient Greeks, Hades, the god of the underworld, used an invisible helmet in his fight against Zeus. Perseus needs a cloak of invisibility when moving against Medusa. In the Song of the Nibelungs, Siegfried comes into possession of the magic cloak, which by the way is not a helmet here, but a cloak.
During World War I, the French wanted to protect themselves against German bombs by using dummies and camouflage to mislead enemy planes. The most ambitious plan was for a mock Paris at a point on the Seine that resembled the course of the river through the French capital from above. The famous electrical engineer Fernand Jacopozzi, who had made a name for himself with his light installations on the Eiffel Tower, was appointed. In 1918, he built a false Gare de l’Est made of wooden houses with painted canvases and an elaborate light installation over an area of around 2000 meters in length, which was intended to attract the airmen. Even stationary and moving trains on tracks were planned. But whether the idea would have worked could no longer be checked, the war ended before the fake Paris was completed. Only a few photographs are reminiscent of this large-scale deception.
The British acted differently in World War II. Arne is a small town on the peninsula of the same name on the English Channel coast in the county of Dorset. The village was first mentioned in 1285, but is probably even older. Today more than 1300 inhabitants live there. The region is attractive to tourists, especially for bird lovers, who can observe rare chirping birds such as the Dartford warbler here undisturbed. The area was declared an Arne RSPB Reserve (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) in 1966. The small church of St. Nicolas of Myra, more than 900 years old, is considered important in terms of art history. The landscape is perceived as pure nature in its romantic wildness and overgrowth. So far so peaceful, well and good.
But Arne has a completely different past, which today is almost nothing to remember. The geographer Alastair Bonnett talks about this in his book “The Strangest Places on Earth”. Beneath today’s friendly bushes and tendrils lies a former war zone: “The military landscape may have been swallowed up, but it’s still far from being digested.” In 1940, the German Luftwaffe thoroughly bombed the industrial and cathedral city of Coventry in central England. Over 4000 houses were destroyed, 580 people died and 850 were seriously injured. Nazi propaganda minister Goebbels sneered at “Coventreing”. The English responded with a stratagem they called “Starfish”. They began constructing such Starfish structures everywhere beyond the major cities, intended to mislead enemy bombers into believing they were flying over a burning city. By 1943 more than 200 such “starfish” had been erected, initially thrown together from all sorts of combustible material. As the war progressed, the dummies became increasingly sophisticated in terms of pyrotechnics. Steel tanks, tubs and pipes were installed and regularly filled with gasoline, sprayed or dripped and then ignited from a control bunker. Clouds of steam rose and exploding jets of flame were produced meters high by directing water into the burning oil and petrol pans. Such Starfish installations consumed 25 tons of fuel every four hours.
A few miles from Arne at Holton Heath was the Royal Naval Cordite Factory, an important munitions factory. It was to be protected by a Starfish facility, which was built so close to Arne that the village had to be evacuated in 1942. Tar barrels and pipes were set up, mounted and flushed with kerosene in such a way that the plant, set on fire, gave the impression of burning houses when viewed from above. The diversion worked, the Germans apparently dropped countless bombs on the Starfish instead of destroying the factory in Holton Heath. The mock installations were also a success in other respects, by June 1944 the “Seesterne” had been attacked 730 times instead of laying the real towns in rubble and ashes. Ultimately, this pyrotechnic stratagem saved thousands of lives.
Today there are at most a few dilapidated control bunkers of these devices to see, otherwise the traces of the starfish have disappeared in the area. Former bomb craters near Arne have become overgrown depressions in the ground and former gun emplacements have sunk into the undergrowth. After 1945 the village was abandoned and the houses fell into disrepair until 1966 when the royal bird conservationists took over the site and renovated the church, the former school and other buildings. However, the time of the Starfish systems ended when, in 1943, the bomber pilots were no longer dependent on visual flight due to radar systems.