WWII: How film sets saved Derby at war

(Redirected from WWII: HOW FILM SETS SAVED DERBY AT WAR)

WITHIN months of the outbreak of war, in September 1939, it was clear that England faced mortal danger from German bombs. Hitler’s Luftwaffe threatened devastation through its bombing raids against a country without even the beginnings of adequate defence.

A handful of fighter aircraft struggled to hold the threat of invasion, anti-aircraft guns were scarce and antiquated, and an ineffectual curtain of barrage-balloons was stretched paper-thin.

In these desperate circumstances, some other tactic of defence became a matter of national life and death – something to provide cheap and rapid protection until more conventional armament against bombers became available.

By a priceless leap of lateral thought, one individual provided the answer. Colonel John Turner accepted that countless bombs would inevitably fall on England. His inspired solution was to make as many as possible fall on the wrong place.

With Winston Churchill in enthusiastic support, Colonel Turner was given carte blanche to create an Alice in Wonderland world of deception across England intended to lure German bombs away from airfields, factories and cities into remote places where they could do little harm, while, at the same time, believing they had hit their targets.

Shepperton Film Studios taught the Colonel all they knew – how plywood and cardboard, painting and lights, smoke and mirrors could conjure a fake reality only too real for enemy pilots lost in hostile airspace with searchlights raking the darkened skies.

Airfields had priority. For months, Turner’s men struggled to give protection to these scattered sites, crucial to Britain’s defence, by creating decoys of dummy aircraft, hangars and runways by day and necklaces of moving light and fire by night.

Each scene of cinematic deception had its coded name. Letters like QF, QL, QX and K and enigmatic words like Starfish and Operation Starkey filled wartime secret files. But all shared a common virtue. They were as phony as those saloon-bar doors John Wayne burst through in Hollywood westerns to confront the “baddies”.

Attention turned next to factories and cities, to civilian places crucial in the expanding production of aircraft, ships, munitions, guns and tanks.

Derby was included in the first short list of targets deemed too tempting for the Germans to ignore. As early as autumn 1940, the first Derby decoys were begun.

Unnoticed by the general public, countryside decoys were designed to tempt bombs away from Rolls-Royce, the railway yards, workshops and factories, gearing up for war, to some remote and harmless place where only startled cows might be at risk.

Already German bombing strategy was clear. It was to concentrate on raids at night when detection and defence were primitive and all too often failed. Derby’s decoys responded to this need.

Designed to mislead bombers high up in the dark, featureless skies, they relied on a cocktail of light and fire. Lights were used to replicate the shape and movement of the distant city’s streets, while deliberate fires drew aircraft to drop their loads on what they believed to be blazing factories. already hit.

A skein of five phantom sites was built. Forming a ring across countryside to Derby’s south and east, they straddled the likely route of bombers heading for high profile targets, tempting crews to drop their bombs on unpopulated rural spots.

For the success of the operation, it had to remain top secret so local villagers were kept in ignorance. Generators, wires and lights, trenches, oil and petrol lines controlled from command-posts hidden in hedges and ditches, were all kept under wraps.

It was not until decades after the war that the truth was finally revealed. Today, the changing landscape has obliterated most traces of the decoy operations in Ticknall, Diseworth, Thulston, Ambaston and Swarkestone Bridge.

Ticknall and Diseworth formed the outer decoy line. They were the first false view of Derby bombers saw and the last as they returned from their missions.

Both were Starfish sites. During each raid, huge fires were lit in trenches, baskets and wire-mesh grids using oil, creosote, petrol, coal, wood and rags, which flamed high into the night, simulating bombed and burning factories.

The Ticknall Starfish lay in the rugged, wooded and pathless triangle between Hartshorne and Milton lanes, half a mile north of Foremark Hall Farm. Today the place is rimmed with water. Flooded years ago, the valley beyond is now Foremark reservoir, a tear-shaped lake between Carvers Rocks and Orange Hill.

Diseworth’s Starfish occupied more open land, a mile to the east of the village where country tracks melted into a remote landscape, populated by a few fretting animals from lonely farms.

Today the Ml slices north through the site, bringing the constant throb of traffic to the area. At its edge is the A42 interchange and their combined mayhem obliterates a past which interests few passing drivers.

Thulston met a similar fate. This central site of the inner decoy ring lay half a mile west of the lane joining Aston-on-Trent and Thulston. Again, it was empty pasture with just one house, Astonhill Farm, almost out of sight.

Unlike Starfish, this decoy was a combination of smaller dummy fires and lights in an attempt to contrive a mirrored city where blackout was insecure and the first incendiary bombs had begun to blaze.

Today the Derby A50 bypass covers all.

Uniquely, the Ambaston site remains untouched – a surviving wartime landscape of hedge and field and meandering river. This small decoy of lights aimed to trick approaching bombers into abortive flight paths over empty land. A mile south-east of Ambaston and half way to the Derwent’s snaking course, the countryside remains just as remote 60 years on.

The fifth decoy was a much more sophisticated place. Swarkestone, like Ticknall and Diseworth, was a Starfish site.

Close to Derby’s suburbs, it was built to look like the Qualcast workshops and railway marshalling yards, forming a last bogus line for German bombers before they hit the city.

It was sited north of the road between Swarkestone and Barrow-on-Trent, about a mile beyond the railway and canal in the empty wastes of Swarkestone Lows.

Today, a great swathe of the A50 bypass runs yards south of the old site.

Derby’s decoys were built to save a city and they succeeded. Few knew of their existence and fewer still how many errant bombs they drew away from vital targets. Certainly, local industry was largely spared, but there was a cost.

Shardlow greenhouses were shattered, barns demolished. There were explosions in river beds and, as a child, I recall being taken on walks in the countryside to see the huge craters of misdirected bombs in the forlorn and empty fields.

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