Just published research
The ‘Blitz’– the WW2 Luftwaffe bombing campaign of United Kingdom cities by Nazi Germany, with attendant physical and psychological effects on the civilian population – remains a topic of great public interest [JP1] even today, as evidenced by director Steve McQueen’s feature film, Blitz, released last year .
Even as the British Government was engaged in the appeasement of Hitler in an attempt to avert war, there was a recognition that if and when war came, British cities would be targets for Nazi bombers. With the civilian population at risk, the Government prepared a strategy of ‘passive defence’ designed to protect all civilians in the UK. In 1937 the Air Raid Precautions Act was passed to build on this strategy. This Act required local councils to organise and train civilian Air Raid Precaution (ARP) volunteers; ARP Wardens who would be at the heart of Britain’s communities in case of air attacks, supporting them in case of gas, incendiary bomb or high explosive attacks from the air in a variety of roles. Given the size of the British population, evacuation of the vulnerable children and the elderly from cities, was accompanied by a policy of ‘sheltering at home’ rather than the construction of deep shelters. Nevertheless, a surprising number and variety of air-raid shelters were constructed.
With passive ARP defences in place, Britain’s home defence forces of provided active defence of the nation in terms of barrage balloons, AA gun defences and searchlights, as well as a range coastal defences. The network of Chain Home (CH) radar systems that provided the crucial altitude, direction and number of enemy raiders that could then be met by RAF fighters during The Battle of Britain in 1940.
While these actions of the British Government are well known, less understood are the innovative schemes to divert enemy bombers away from the cities, the construction of bombing decoy sites designed to trick the Luftwaffe into releasing their bombs on to harmless, otherwise unpopulated areas. ‘Operation Starfish’ was an innovative scheme to do just that.
Bombing Decoy Sites
Whilst there was impressive efforts in the noughties to document the 20th Century British militarised landscape by the Defence of Britain Project, there is a growing body of research which looks at lesser-known, and perhaps more clandestine defence preparations in the UK. These include the recently reported British Resistance network to be used post-German Invasion and, the focus of a just published paper[JP3] , Allied bombing decoy sites that were prepared throughout the UK.
The idea for bombing decoys came from the fertile mind of Colonel John Fisher Turner, a man who had supervised the expansion of RAF airfields from 1937-1939 and who had turned his attention to the construction of bombing decoy sites for airfields. His idea was based on observations that during the First World War, Zeppelin raiders had often unloaded their bombs wherever there were light clusters or burning sites. The likelihood was that this would also happen in a second global conflict, and therefore Nazi bombers could be decoyed to attack such tantalisingly bright – but decoy – targets.
The earliest of these decoys were dummy ‘K Site’ airfields, soon replaced by ‘Q Site’ airfields lit up by dummy landing lights. These were to deflect the bombers from airfields. As visual aim targeting was the most common Luftwaffe bomber target identification in the early phases of WW2, in this first decoy phase, replicas of airfields were created on grass, some 5 miles away from real airfields, and at night, landing lights were reproduced by paraffin or electric lamps, with car headlights being used to mimic aircrafts taxiing. ‘QF’ or ‘Quick Fire’ sites followed, equipped with the capability to recreate typical fires caused by bombing, and of 40 such sites were created in July 1940 (Fig. 1).
But the need to protect airfields alone soon shifted to the protection of Britain’s towns, cities and industrial centres, as the Luftwaffe focussed its attention away from the RAF. The Blitz of September 1940 came as a serious threat to Britain’s security, a real test of the passive and active defence of the homeland. As night time air raids became more frequent and deadly, such as the Coventry Blitz in November 1940, QF decoy sites were expanded in 1941 to protect cities. These represented an even more sophisticated use of fire to attract the bombers away from their intended targets. Such sites were referred to as ‘Special Fire’ or SF sites – soon given the code name Starfish – and from December 1940 new SF sites were added a rate of one a day until June 1941. Concentrating first on the industrial Midlands, these sites used fuel oil to depict a growing conflagration which German bombers would usually add to as evidenced by a number of contemporary accounts. By January the list of civil sites had reached 43, covering most major towns and cities that could be targeted by the German X-Gerät radio direction system.
Forensic Geoscience Research Group 
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