On May 24, 2021, TV Zvezda aired episode №64 of program “Hidden Threats”, which contained a fragment on the use of decoy mock-ups and camouflage during the the Great Patriotic War. Here we present our translation of this fragment. These days, Iran used decoys to fool the American-Zionist aggressors, just like the Soviet Union had been fooling the German-Nazi ones before.

Backup at Rumble.
Presentation of the material at “Beorn And The Shieldmaiden”.

The program was introduced in a dedicated article at TV Zvezda site:

During the Great Patriotic War, the victory of the USSR was forged not only in weapons factories, but also in special factories that massively “stamped” inflatable and plywood tanks and airplanes. They immediately went to the front on a par with real equipment — about a thousand real-sized models “fought” on the Kursk Bulge alone. So the ingenuity of the Soviet people helped in the fight against the Nazi invaders.

In 1942, the 23rd special squad was created, which consisted of more than a thousand artists. Their task was to recreate Soviet military installations, imitated as accurately as possible. Then the dummy armored vehicles were mounted on tractors. For reliability, they were equipped with a soundtrack that mimicked the hum of engines. And branches were attached to the bottom so that the same dust rose after the “tank” as behind real military equipment.

However, it wasn’t limited to technology alone: sometimes mock-ups of soldiers were used to mislead the enemy. For example, when enemy aircraft approached the actual location of the Soviet troops, “equipment” with “military personnel” sitting inside was pushed forward. So, the German pilot fired bullets at it and threw bombs without harming real people.

👉 Original video source at TV Zvezda, and a properly-deinterlaced copy at Odnoklassniki.

Following is a fragment from the memoirs of the head of the engineering troops of the Leningrad Front, Boris Vladimirovich Bychevsky, chapter 4, “The Assault Has Been Repelled”:

I put down the maps and began to show what had been done before the start of the breakthrough at Krasnoe Selo, Krasnogvardeisk and Kolpin, what we have now at the Pulkovo position, what is being done in the city, on the Neva, on the Karelian Isthmus, where miners and pontoons are working.
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