On October 30, 1806, 5300 Prussian soldiers defending the city of Stettin surrendered to only 800 French soldiers commanded by General Lassalle, falling for the ruse that the French force was much larger. We previously used this example of wartime trickery as the start of our article, “Fooled You! Battles Won by Trickery.” Today we continue to explore the use of ruses, false information, decoys, fakes and general trickery in the conduct of warfare. Here are some more such incidents, and like our previous article, concerning World War II (with other tricky battles from other wars to follow in later articles):
Digging Deeper
Another of the many tricky stunts pulled by the Allies in conjunction with the D-Day invasion of Normandy, France on June 6, 1944, was the use of fake paratroopers dropping from the sky to confuse German defenders on the eve of the D-Day landings. While real parachute operations were taking place, the Allies dropped 500 “paradummies,” 3 foot tall fake paratroopers onto areas intended to draw German soldiers away from real drop zones. In order to “sell” the ruse even more, the paradummies were designed to burst into flame upon landing, hopefully destroying the evidence of trickery.
