Decoy Warfare: Lessons and Implication from the War in Ukraine. By Master Sergeant Jorge L. Rivero, U.S. Marine Corps | April 2024 Proceedings Vol. 150/4/1,454.
A dummy tank found on Iwo Jima in May 1945. The utility of decoys on modern battlefield has not been lost on most modern militaries.
Soviet Use of Decoys During World War II
In the Soviet and later Russian military, suddenness and surprise were core tenets to battlefield success. To achieve surprise, Soviet forces extensively used camouflage, commonly known as maskirovka. The term held profound significance within Soviet military doctrine, capturing a range of measures devised to deceive adversaries in times of peace and during combat. Further, Soviet force’s use of decoys was mandatory practice before any major operation on the Eastern Front during World War II.1 This became apparent when, on 5 September 1941, a directive from the Chief of the General Staff outlined detailed instructions on deploying decoys to mislead advancing German forces nearing Moscow. Under the command of General K. D. Golubev, the 43rd Army executed a deception plan, integrating mockup artillery batteries, fake tank concentrations, troop assembly areas, and false forward trenches of the battlefield, using dummy machine gun positions and mannequins. This intricate deception aimed to redirect German forces toward these false positions during artillery preparations before an impending attack.
The use of decoys was equally critical to Soviet operational aims as the Red Army went on the offensive. For instance, in February 1942, the 20th Army began preparations for an offensive northwest of Moscow. Hundreds of mockup tanks, self-propelled guns, vehicles, and aircraft were deployed along a false axis of advance to confuse the Germans as to the actual location of the main Soviet drive. To make the decoys more believable, Soviet engineers used small TNT charges to simulate artillery and tank fire and used loudspeakers to amplify tank engines. German forces reportedly conducted more than 1,000 reconnaissance flights, dropped 60 bombs on these sites, and subjected them to machine-gun fire. During Stalingrad, Major General of Engineer Troops Alexei Proshlyakov, approved a deception plan that made the 104th Engineer and Mine Battalion and the 25th Detachment Camouflage Company build false concentration areas for five artillery regiments and tank corps. After the war, General Alfred Jodl, the former Chief of the Operational Staff of the German Army, said, “We had absolutely no idea about the strength of the Russian troops [around Stalingrad]. There had been nothing here earlier, and suddenly, an attack of great force was made.” Soviet forces often used fake airfields to force German forces to spend significant munitions and used extensive decoys to cross water barriers as they attacked West into Central Europe. By the second period of war, Soviet forces even included two decoy artillery batteries per genuine battery along the most crucial axis of advance.