Unassuming decoys that foiled Germany's airforce

A SMALL, stinky brick hut standing in the middle of nowhere on the outskirts of Darlington has officially been declared an ancient monument.

It has a muddy floor and a huge hole in its roof, and it contains only the broken frame of an old metal chair and a putrid smell.

But this is history. This is our heritage. This was a Second World War bombing decoy control shelter.

Once Britain was littered with such ugly brick-and-concrete objects, but after the war, when they had outlived their usefulness, no one saw them as historical relics and nearly all of them were dismantled.

Darlington had two such sites, but nothing survives of the hut at Eryholme. Just the one in a field near Great Burdon remains to provide a hint about the great lengths to which the British went to protect their towns and cities.

The idea was to entice the German bombers away from industrial, military or residential areas and to trick them into dropping their bombs harmlessly on to a field.

The idea began to take shape when a Ministry of Defence (MoD) department was set up under Colonel JF Turner, and in January 1940 he began laying out dummy aerodromes. Shepperton film studios even built ten pretend aircraft for each pretend aerodrome, but the German pilots quickly saw through the ruse. It is said that they even dropped pretend wooden bombs on the pretend aerodromes to show their disdain.

Undeterred, the MoD moved on to build dummies that looked like aerodromes at night. These sites were a collection of runway-shaped lights, some of them moving, and the art of the obfuscation was to turn all the lights off just as the German pilot was catching first sight of them out of the corner of his eye. Assuming that a black-out had been enforced, the pilot was supposed to deviate from his course to bomb the imaginary airfield. And he did. The 171 dummy night-time aerodromes - or "Q" sites - attracted about half of all German raids on British airfields.

The devious ministry men then turned their attention to "QL" sites, which meant rigging up lights that in the dark and from the air would look like factories.

A machine was designed to emit orange sparks to imitate the flashes of a moving tram; orange lights were beamed down onto sand to replicate the underglow from a large furnace; red and green lights were fitted up as pretend railway signals.

These QL sites were proving successful when, in the autumn of 1940, the Germans began carpet bombing cities such as Coventry.

The Luftwaffe was being directed to its target by X-Ger\'e4te (or X-Apparatus). Five beams of radio waves ushered in the first wave of planes which dropped incendiary bombs. The fires on the ground then illuminated the target for subsequent waves of bombers with heavy explosives.

A new design of decoy was required. Mere tomfoolery with flashing lights was not enough. Real fires in fake locations were needed. These were called "QF" sites, and the idea was that they would be lit as soon as the incendiary bombs had fallen on the real target. The fires at the target would be quickly extinguished so that when the second wave of bombers arrived they were drawn to the decoy.

The designers soon realised that these diversionary fires could not just be a bonfire: they had to look more real than a real fire. There had to be different types of fire, different colours of fire. There had to be different durations of burning and different speeds of ignition.

And so they developed "SF" sites - "special fire" sites, known as "Starfish" sites, with all manner of clever conflagratory devices.

The brick hut on the outskirts of Darlington was the control centre for a Starfish site. It is first mentioned in operational documents on August 1, 1941.

It was sited on the edge of Great Burdon because, like its lost colleague at Eryholme, it was on the most likely flightpath for a bomber which was heading inland after destroying Middlesbrough and Stockton.

The Starfish site was known as Darlington 48A, Great Burdon, and was maintained by the Royal Air Force of Middleton St George.

If the Darlington site was anything like typical, it would have taken 14 people to look after it: one sergeant, two corporals and 11 airmen. They were billeted in a house nearby (but no one can remember where), and they worked from a Nissen hut which was beside their control shelter - the surviving concrete base for the Nissen hut, on which a trough full of green and smelly water now stands, has been listed as part of the ancient monument.

From here, the airmen built their clever decoys, many of which had been designed by the special effects unit at the film studios, to confuse the enemy. They used steel tanks, pipes, troughs and grids which made their fuel - oil, paraffin or creosote - pour, trickle or spray upon a source of ignition at timed intervals.

For example, the Boiler Fire, of which there were 14 on a typical Starfish site. Oil was periodically released from a storage tank on to a steel tray which was heated by a coal fire so that the oil vaporised. At sporadic intervals, water was dropped on the tray creating huge flashes of white flame that leapt 40ft into the air.

Then there was the Grid Fire which sprinkled paraffin on to a hot metal grid covered with metal shavings. It burned with a steady yellow flame.

Coal Fires also looked pretty from the air. They were 20ft long and packed with creosoted firewood and lump coal. A warming deep red glow could be seen from miles around when they were lit - and for variety a sprinkler pipe would feed diesel oil on to the coals.

Most of the flames on a Starfish site were from 24 Basket Fires. They were inflammable materials packed into baskets and soaked with creosote.

An average Starfish site consumed more than five tons of fuel for every hour it was alight.

All of these fiery effects were ignited electronically from the control shelter - the brick hut which has just become an ancient monument. The shelter was in touch by telephone with its command headquarters which told it when to ignite.

"Remains of the ducts which ventilated the shelter and the ignition cables will survive within it," says English Heritage's report on the Great Burdon shelter.

The control shelter was usually 600 yards away from the fires.

Even though it was built of thick concrete and brick, banked over with soil (which has slid off the Darlington site) and its entrance was protected by a blast wall (which has fallen down), you still would not want to be inside a shelter when German bombers were blowing diversionary fires to bits only 600 yards away.

In fact, the men inside the shelter were probably praying that the Germans were very good shots.

They must also have hoped that the firebreak trenches which surrounded their conflagrations were not breached by the flames.

In all, 839 decoys were built around Britain, 228 of which were Starfish sites. They represented a considerable investment of money, men and combustibles, but they gave a good return. In June 1944, it was recorded that the decoys had been attacked 730 times - either by a lone bomber jettisoning its payload or by a raid of waves of planes.

One night in April 1941, the decoy for Portsmouth was hit by more than 200 bombs, undoubtedly saving lives - and naval equipment - within the town.

But the Darlington one... We don't know where the decoy fires actually were and we don't even know, given that Darlington was not often attacked from the sky, if they were ever lit in anger. Perhaps you do.

The last mention of Darlington 48A in operational documents is on April 8, 1943. Since then it has been forgotten.

Its outline can be spotted from the A66 through the still-bare hedge, but its basic brickwork does not look as if it requires protection under Section 1 of the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act. The smell inside it is definitely not worth preserving.

It does, though, form a fascinating part of our more recent history.

"Very little now survives of any of these decoy sites as most of them were cleared after the war," says the English Heritage report.

"The control centre at Great Burdon survives well and significant information about the function and technology of the Starfish site and its role in the wider decoy system in the North-East will be preserved."

If you have any information about any bombing decoy shelter, especially the Great Burdon one, please write to: Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, or email chris.lloydnne.co.uk or phone (01325) 505062.

Thanks to Brendan Boyle for his help with this article.

Apologies for Echo Memories' non-appearance last week. It was because my daughter brought a virulent bug home with her from school. It has meant that memories of the Lyric in Middleton St George and of the formidable Nora Fenby will have to wait for another week.

The shelter is on private property.

Published: 09/04/2003

Echo Memories, The Northern Echo, Priestgate, Darlington DL1 1NF, e-mail chris.lloyd@nne.co.uk or telephone (01325) 505062.