Silver foil question

This is an interesting article on the subject:
http://www.sweffling.freeserve.co.uk/cavendish.htm

For all those who doubt it, I can confirm that the German Air Force did indeed drop duppel on operational missions over Britain. I’d need to do some digging in my files to get exact dates, but certainly in 1944.

I haven’t a clue now where to check for references but I’ve always understood that the Germans came up with the idea for Duppel at around the same time we came up with Window. Neither side used it until the Hamburg raid for fear of alerting the opposition. I’ve never consciously read that the Luftwaffe used it operationally but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.

However, 8″ square pieces (I can measure but not think in foreign) is entirely different. It sounds unlikely to me for two reasons. Shining a powerful light from a bomber to the ground seems an excellent invitation to be shot down and, pieces of foil that size could land absolutely anywhere. Hardly conducive to accuracy.

Window details

Each window strip was just under a thousandth of an inch thick and a sixteenth to a quarter inch wide, such strips taking two hours to fall from 3,000 feet to the ground. A six ounce bundle of 6,000 strips looked on radar as if it was 3 heavy bombers.
The first trial operationally was over Hamburg on 24 July 1943.
Over 20 million pounds of window was eventually dropped over Europe alone. The Germans offered a tax-free prize of 700,000 Reichsmarks in a public contest for ideas to counteract window.
(Extracts from “3 steps to victory” by Sir Robert Watson-Watt)
I remember myself as a very young boy seeing the effect on the ground at RAF Waddington when (perhaps accidentally) a lot of window was dropped, and simply smothered the ground in silver, like snow! For us youngsters it was a minor miracle!

At a small engineering works in Wembley duing WWII My father was the charge hand onthe rolling mill night shift. He related to me the rolling of “window”. Aluminium was rolled to todays baking foil thickness & the cut into small squares & then dropped by a Lanc or other heavy. The purpose of this was purely to confuse the German radar opperators (rember that the displays were not as we know them today but required interpretation) into thinking that a lot of aircraft were attacking a target when the real raid would be on a different course. Purely a tool of the dirty tricks dept.
Not employed by the Germans as far as I know.

(~Ignores foolish people trying to drag thread off course~)
I have been wondering if it might have been a cover story given so as not to betray the secrets of RADAR; a bit like carrots…
Anyway, no dates were given so it would all be approximate anyway, but I should imagine that it was probably around the time of the Steinbock operations in early 1944, when duppel was extensively used (I am lead to believe).

Flood

“Curses – foiled again!” – D!ck Dastardly

Away with you, woman! :p

I think the important part of this story is that “as a child I remember my parents telling me …”

Almost always real incidents become distored in the memory, and in a secon generation the likelihood of error is much greater. This is an interesting account which I have no reason to doubt relates to a genuine incidence where the Germans used duppel (or perhaps a British training exercise where Window was dropped) and would therefore date to probably 1944. However, the use of duppel was, as has been mentioned before, purely for radar jamming purposes and had no role whatsoever in target illumination. I suspect what has happened is that British searchlights have reflected off the dropping duppel, creating the impression to a civilian that this was deliberate use of light for bombing purposes.

“Curses – foiled again!” – D!ck Dastardly

Not much reference material in print, but yes, 20 x 20 cm strips of very thin aluminum sheet (foil) were employed by some of the more clandestine Luftwaffe units for pathfinding use.

It’s interesting to note that the old timers would remember these episodes as this system was only used 2-3 times operationally. I believe the end of its use was the direct result of mass protests by hordes of German Hausfrauen, who appealed directly to Goering about having to find substitute material to wrap up their leftover Apfelkuchen.

From a letter in The News, Portsmouth:

Anyone heard of this? We should all know of foil being dropped as ‘Window’ (before Bill Gates got his hands on the name) but was it used as a recognition feature – by either side?
Personally I doubt it in this case; Portsmouth is on the coast and, foil not being well known for its ability to float, the enemy bombers would have had to come in from over land to gain any advantage. I’ve not heard of silver foil being used for anything except as RADAR suppression.
Have you?

Flood

I wouldn’t have thought they’d need some kind of artificial recognition feature – but the Germans had some sort of radio beam-type navigation aid later on in the BofB, didn’t they?

From a letter in The News, Portsmouth:

Anyone heard of this? We should all know of foil being dropped as ‘Window’ (before Bill Gates got his hands on the name) but was it used as a recognition feature – by either side?
Personally I doubt it in this case; Portsmouth is on the coast and, foil not being well known for its ability to float, the enemy bombers would have had to come in from over land to gain any advantage. I’ve not heard of silver foil being used for anything except as RADAR suppression.
Have you?

Flood

Nope but April 1st is approaching!