#120 1940 · UK Air Ministry — Colonel John Fisher Turner's decoy programme (Starfish / SF sites) · Military logisticsrisk-transfer
After Coventry burned, Britain built fake burning cities out of bonfires and light arrays in the empty countryside next door, so German bombers unloaded on grass instead of factories
the problem
A visible, unhideable target keeps drawing attacks you cannot fully harden
background
Colonel John Turner had run a decoy programme for RAF airfields and factories since 1939 ('Q' sites), using dummy structures and controlled lighting to draw night bombers away from real installations. It worked on isolated military targets, but whole cities were a different problem: a city cannot be hidden, disguised, or moved, and its blackout discipline was only ever partial — a single lit window or an accidental fire was enough to give a bomber's crew a usable aiming point in the dark.
The November 1940 Coventry raid made the gap urgent: incendiaries dropped first, and once the city was burning, the fires became a beacon that later waves of bombers simply flew toward, regardless of blackout discipline elsewhere. Turner was tasked with extending his decoy logic to major cities: not concealment, but competition — give the bombers a more convincing fire to aim at than the real one.
the move
Starfish (SF) sites were built a few miles from real cities and factories in open countryside, using controlled bonfires timed to build and flare like incendiary damage, electrically powered 'glow boxes' simulating lit streets and rail yards, and staged light patterns mimicking blackout failures — all triggered from a control bunker once real bombing began nearby, so a decoy 'ignited' in sync with the actual raid and looked, from altitude at night, like the fire already taking hold in the real target. By the end of the war 237 Starfish and related decoy sites protected 81 towns and cities.
the payoff
Historian Colin Dobinson, in Fields of Deception (English Heritage, 2000), collated Turner's own wartime estimates and concluded Starfish decoys diverted roughly 968 tons of German bombs onto empty countryside — a figure that is Turner's own contemporaneous assessment rather than an independently audited count, and effectiveness varied by site: a 1992 archaeological survey of the original Black Down (Bristol) site found no bomb-crater evidence there specifically, and at least one Birmingham cluster had limited success because the sites sat too far from their real targets to catch bombers already committed to a run.
what came after
Starfish sites are a standard case study in WWII decoy and camouflage doctrine, cited alongside Q-sites and Meacon as proof that a fake but competitively attractive version of a target can outbid the real one for an attacker's attention — the same logic now underlies cybersecurity honeypots built to draw attackers away from production systems.
filed under
references
- [1]Starfish siteWikipedia, 2026en.wikipedia.org
- [2]Starfish Decoy Site, Guisborough MoorCo-Curate North East / Newcastle University, 2020co-curate.ncl.ac.uk