a day ago
Decoy airfield that fooled the Luftwaffe
As a young boy, Bob More watched the Luftwaffe bomb empty fields on his family farm in the northeast corner of Scotland.
Now 89, the former national serviceman has told the full story of why the Nazis kept attacking his home, even though it was of absolutely no military importance, for the first time.
More is from Sarclet, a little village above the cliffs of eastern Caithness. It was here that the RAF built one of 200 fake bases to confuse the enemy.
The British hoped the Germans would bomb fields at the More farm rather than strategic sites at Wick, Skitten and Castletown. Their ruse worked.
Luftwaffe crews under the command of Hermann Goering hammered Sarclet. There are believed to be 50 unexploded Nazi bombs buried under its fields today.
'The site was declared safe by the MoD about 20 years ago but there are bombs away down around 35 feet in the moss,' More said.
More, who has lived in or around Sarclet nearly all of his life, has written a book, The Dummy Drome, to tell his story.
Caithness was at the centre of wartime action, with German bombers heading from Norway to attack British airfields. There were even fears of a Nazi invasion at Sinclair's Bay, north of Wick.
The fake airfield was so realistic that two British fighters and a bomber landed there by mistake, More said.
The book's publisher is based in Dunbeath, further down the coast in Caithness.
'The Dummy Drome is a well-researched story about an aerodrome that wasn't really there,' Whittles Publishing said. It added that the deceptive site had been 'dreamt up by military strategists and cinema-set designers' specially to attract bombers.
'The Air Ministry cartographers who made it look larger than it really was transposed the design of a real aerodrome onto a blank area on the map of northern Scotland,' the publisher said. 'The planners added standard building designs in the right places.
'This deception was exactly what was needed … For a brief period it was busy, active and vital, full of people and buildings with three broad and very obvious tracks with lights and noise. It was very much on the map, specifically designed to draw attention to itself.
Huge quantities of raw materials were brought to the site and construction workers created runways that a plane could not land on, the publisher said. Artists and craftsmen made planes that could not fly and even painted them onto canvas.
The book tells the story of how it became a part of the lives of the people who built it, worked there or lived nearby. 'These hitherto untold stories reveal the experiences and recollections of the ordinary people who knew it and who were sworn to secrecy,' the publisher said. 'This was only one of over 200 similar decoy sites.'
