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Welcome to Black Down, the tallest point of the Mendip Hills at 325 metres above sea level. The presence of a decent view and some bronze age tumuli aren't remotely surprising, but what if I told you that about 80 years ago, this expansive hilltop – really almost more of a plateau – played host to a beyond-top-secret, life-size replica of Bristol made primarily out of light and fire?
You'd quite possibly think that was a pretty exciting story which will make for a pretty exciting video. That's what I thought too, but unfortunately, well, the reality of my existence often falls short of my aspirations, and this video is just another example. See, the trouble with beyond-top-secret wartime subterfuge is that you don't go and take a bunch of archive footage and photos of it, and the trouble with things made out of light and fire is that they don't last 80 years, so there really isn't anything left to film.
You'll just have to settle for some generically pleasant Mendip scenery as I briefly explain. The real Bristol lies about 12 miles or 19 km to the northeast of Black Down. I've mentioned in various other videos the damage that Bristol suffered in the Blitz during the second world war. But of course the risk of aerial bombardment had been long foreseen. So widespread was the fear of the threat from the skies that 1930s Britain has been described as living in the 'shadow of the bomber'.
From 1938 onwards, the RAF, Air Ministry and Home Office all had departments who dabbled in designs to divert or defend against this with decoys or other dastardly deceptions and diversions, but there was little to no coordination or even knowledge of each other's efforts. As I've only got five minutes of generically pleasant Mendip scenery footage to work with, I'll skip all this politics, wrong turns and infighting and pick up the story of Colonel John Turner.
Turner had been born in 1881 and served in the RAF, retired, and then joined the Air Ministry as a civil servant, overseeing RAF expansion in the 1930s. Retiring once again in 1939, the outbreak of war forced a second un-retirement. I would like to report that on 22 September he was appointed as the Director of Whatever, Department of Such and Such, but so secret was his brief, he had no title, and his staff were simply known as Col Turner's Department.
This brief was to produce decoys to draw German bombers away from their prime military targets: airfields and factories. Accordingly Turner first concentrated on developing decoy airfields, codenamed 'Q' sites, and factories, codenamed 'K' sites.
Simulating an airfield at night is actually quite easy if you think about it, just rows of lights on poles akin to runway and taxiway lights and you're pretty much there. Daytime Q sites required a bit more substance, with dummy planes and buildings. In this he was aided by the special effects technicians, set designers, carpenters, prop-makers and so on from Shepperton Studios.
When Germans began using incendiary bombs, Turner developed a variant: the QF site, F for fire. Here, the first wave of aircraft overhead would prompt various fires to be lit, such that following bombers might believe that this is where the first wave's bombs were dropped, and was therefore where the bombs were supposed to be dropped.
In autumn 1940 the German bombers turned their attention to cities, with Coventry being so coventrated by the night time bombing that a new verb was born. In response, authorities asked Turner to create night-time decoy cities.
Clearly, creating a believable, full-scale replica of a major city could never be possible in the same way as a few rows of runway lights could be whipped up on farmland to mimic an airfield. Not with so many streets and houses to mock up.... except, here Turner was aided by the ironic fact that under the blackout, the real cities were supposed to be almost pitch black anyway.
He therefore only needed to mock up a few select features such as railway yards which might believably be impossible to fully blackout while operational, and too important to stop operating. Or the flickering of a handful of windows who were 'accidentally' breaching the blackout order. Then, taking a cue from his QF sites, an extensive system for lighting fires to simulate a prior wave of incendiary bombing, provided actually perhaps the main part of the decoy.
He called these SF sites, for 'Special Fires', and Black Down was one of the first such sites. Based on the initials, it was named Starfish, but this soon ended up the code name for all of these sites rather than just Black Down specifically.
His fake Bristol was focused on the railway yards, and if we overlay the yards of Temple Meads, Canon's Marsh and so forth on a map of Black Down you can see the decoy site would have been extremely extensive. Sadly for a youtuber like me, the only clearly visible remains are a couple of pillbox style bunkers from which operatives could control all the lighting and fires from relative safety. And unfortunately, the day we went up it was a bit of a quagmire, so this is as close as I could get to a bunker. Here's a photo of it from Wikipedia.
By the end of the war there were hundreds of Starfish sites protecting 81 different locations. The obvious question is - did they work? Well, a 1992 survey of Black Down found not a trace of a single bomb crater to suggest that the decoy site had successfully lured even a single bomb. And I read the suggestion that Luftwaffe raids on Bristol tended to come in via the Bristol Channel and then follow the River Avon, easily visible on a moonlit night, rather than come in from the south, anyway, meaning a decoy on the Mendips was never going to be that much use.
On the other hand, less pessimistically, Turner himself compiled conservative estimates that his decoy sites were attacked 728 times, drawing over 2000 tons of bombs. Of these, admittedly, the Q sites were by far the most successful, drawing 441 attacks, while Starfish sites saw only 101, but that still equates to hundreds of tons of bombs. From an overall total of tens or even hundreds of thousands of tons dropped on Britain during the Blitz, that still feels like a dismally small contribution. But it's been estimated that the decoy programme could have saved about two-and-a-half thousand lives, and when you think of it that way, there really isn't such thing as a small contribution.
Anyway that's all for this video. Like and subscribe and all that jazz,if you want, or don't, if you don't. And if you hope to see another video any time soon, then please cross your fingers the weather improves cos, at the time of recording, I'm not going out in this. Cheers.
