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Wartime Fake Sheffield, decoys and starfish

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Indirectly I came across an old fellow,who has since passed away.He spoke of a Wartime "Fake Sheffield" that was built on the roadside moors close to the Flouch pub/restaurant,just up from Stocksbridge.

This was a timber construction used as a decoy for German bombers.Does anybody know anything more.

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Nothing specific although I had heard that this was a common ploy in cities that were mainly bombed by visual sighting of the target.

 

Here's a link from another local site about a similar operation to the West of town.

 

http://www.dorevillage.co.uk/doretodoorspr01/localhistoryspr01.htm

 

Some cities - Berlin, London, etc. were either too big or had large bodies of water or were on the coast - this made them easy to pick out on bombing radars. But smaller places often had to be picked up by sight after the guidance systems like the German Knicebein had got the bombers pretty close. A wood and canvas dummy might help in conditions of bad visibility, although given that Stocksbridge is to the North West I would have thought that it would be of limited use against aircraft coming in from the South...maybe the planes did a turn or something and bombed on the return loop.

 

Hope this helps a little.

 

Joe

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the incident that my grandparents referred too when a whole stretch of woodland was bombed was apparently caused by lighting candles in the woodland to allow just a few glimers of light to escape during a nighting bombing raid.

How accurate my grandparents stories are I can't say.

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These sites were codenamed "Starfish Sites". According to a book I've got about the blitz, decoy sites for Sheffield were set up somewhere between Strines and Fox House, and in Eckington Woods. The sites had large tanks of oil, tinfoil, lighting and equipment to mimic the sparks from the overhead power lines used my the trams. The site would be lit up when a raid was expected, and the lights gradually put out to resemble the city being blacked out after an air raid warning. The oil tanks would then be lit to look like fires from the bombing. In Sheffield's case they weren't effective because at the time of the blitz they weren't complete, but they were used with some success around other cities.

At the Fox House end of the old road to Ringinglow there are some concrete bases. These weren't a Starfish site but are the remains of an experimental 'radio unit', probably early radar.

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My dad was an Miner / Fireman (AFS) during the war. He told me that the marsh meadows at Killamarsh (Now Rother Valley Country ParK) had decoy lights on to attract the bombers away from the steel works in Sheffield or maybe it was Brookhouse Colliery.

 

During the opencast mining of the marshes in the early 1970's a huge UXB bomb was dicovered there and detonated by the bomb squad. I lived opposite the site at the time, but was at work on St Marys Road in the city and I heard the explosion. from there.

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it would be eckington woods that my grandparents were talking about as they live in eckingtong.

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Originally posted by Lostrider

My dad was an Miner / Fireman (AFS) during the war. He told me that the marsh meadows at Killamarsh (Now Rother Valley Country ParK) had decoy lights on to attract the bombers away from the steel works in Sheffield or maybe it was Brookhouse Colliery.

 

I think you might find that it was the coking plant at Beighton that the bombers were after (the Germans built it). They followed the river, but thankfully they dropped their bombs too early and did relatively little damage to any of the surrounding villages.

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Indirectly I came across an old fellow,who has since passed away.He spoke of a Wartime "Fake Sheffield" that was built on the roadside moors close to the Flouch pub/restaurant,just up from Stocksbridge.

 

Newton Chambers who were producing Churchill tanks at the time, and were based in Chapeltown, was the intended target for the bombers.

I heard the same story about fake towns off my mom, makes sense.

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ive read about this before on the internet and also seen it on tv.the government hired a famouse film producer from pine wood studios to make the illusion that a city was out there in the middle of nowhere,started off i think in southhampton then spread outwards to include all major cities,they also used captured spy codes to deceive germany by reporting bomb damage to intended targets,later an army unit was formed to create the illusion of cities in the middle of nowhere,not sure but i think the film directors name was selsneck he made a lot of propoganda war films at pinewood studios,the same thing happened in the dessert and at dover where cardboard trucks and tanks were created to form the illusion that england had thousands of tons of mobile equipment ready for the invasion

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Does anyone have information on where the wartime installation was which was erected to divert enemy aircraft from the city?

 

Think it might have been on Houndkirk Moor and would only have been active during hours of darkness, when some lights and fires could have been illuminated to give an impression of a built up area from up above in a plane. Does anything still exist and does anyone have a grid ref.or any other means of locating it?

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Interesting post cartav. I too would like to know more about this. Anyone know anything?

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Also, on a similar wartime subject...

 

Someone once posted on here about an area of moorland near the back of the Fox House Inn, where wartime training for D day had occurred. Apparently US troops trained there with live ammo and grenades, and scars can be seen on the rocks where they went off.

 

Does anyone have a map grid reference for this area at all too ?

 

Thanks

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