What use is an inflatable tank replica in a very real war? A great deal, if the enemy believes it’s a real tank replica. During both World Wars, the Allied forces used replicas of British heavy tanks. These consisted of a wooden frame covered with painted jute fabric.

Since the tracks were not functional, some of them were fitted with concealed wheels on the underside and were pulled from place to place by a team of horses.

It turned out that the Germans had also constructed tank decoys modeled after Allied tanks, even though they only deployed a small number of actual tanks. It is possible that these were used more for training purposes than for military deception.

Tank decoys were used far more frequently during World War II. Military deception maneuvers are as old as war itself, but the idea of ​​the Allied planners represented something new: a mobile, self-contained deception unit that could stage multimedia illusions on demand.

The unit’s 1,100 men were able to simulate two complete divisions – up to 30,000 men – with all the tanks and artillery pieces one would expect from real units.

The illusion could deter the enemy from exploiting a weakness by creating the impression that the location is heavily defended. Or it could lure enemy troops away from a place where real American units were planning an attack.

Founded in January 1944 and deployed after D-Day, the Ghost Army went to war employing three methods of deception to mislead the enemy: visual, auditory, and radio. The 603rd Camouflage Engineering Battalion was responsible for visual deception.

Originally founded to carry out large-scale camouflage operations, the organization was now full of young artists, architects and designers who were channeling their visual talent into a different kind of art.

For this purpose, they were equipped with hundreds of inflatable tanks, cannons, trucks and even airplanes, which could be used to recreate tank formations, vehicle fleets and artillery batteries that looked like real ones from the air.

These decoys were not simply giant balloons, but consisted of a skeleton of inflatable tubes covered with rubberized canvas. This ingenious design ensured that a single piece of shrapnel was not enough to deflate the entire decoy instantly.

During Operation Fortitude, decoy tanks were used before the landings on the beaches of Normandy. They were deployed to confuse German intelligence in two ways: firstly, by creating the impression that the Allies had more tanks than they actually did; and secondly, to conceal and downplay the significance of the locations of their real tanks, thus creating the impression that the invasion would take place in the Pas-de-Calais region rather than Normandy.

However, the dummy vehicles played only a minor role in this deception maneuver, as the Germans were unable to fly reconnaissance aircraft over England at this point in the war, and such efforts would have been in vain.

During Operation Shingle in Anzio, Italy, inflatable Sherman tanks were used while the real tanks were elsewhere. In the Pacific War, the Japanese used tank mock-ups made from wood and available materials, and even fashioned one from volcanic sand from Iwo Jima.