One of the more enduring legends from World War II is the one about the phony wooden airfield constructed as a decoy. According to the legend, the Germans in occupied Holland built the airfield. Detail was meticulous, down to wooden hangars, oil tanks, trucks and faux aircraft.
However, the Germans took so long in building it that the Allies had plenty of time to take reconnaissance photos and determine that the field was a fake and not of strategic importance. Allegedly, the day the wooden airport was completed an Allied aircraft flew over the airport, came in low, circled once and dropped a large wooden bomb.
Interestingly, the Germans tell the same story, except it is the Allies who built the decoy and the Germans who dropped the bomb.
Historians have debated the accuracy of the legend since the war. One of the arguments against the construction of the faux field is that it would have taken considerable manpower to construct, thereby diverting resources from the war effort.
