Film studio's 'pivotal' role in WW2 deception

A Surrey film studio played an "important but unsung" role in World War Two.

Shepperton Studios, then known as Sound City Film Studios, manufactured props for a wartime programme to create fake bombing targets, according to local historian Nick Pollard.

Film technicians created false aircraft to attract Luftwaffe pilots away from genuine Royal Air Force facilities.

"Shepperton played quite a pivotal role in the decoy programme, which is a thing that still a lot of people don't know about," Mr Pollard said.

"But was vital in protecting our airfields, our cities, and other important installations."

The RAF put out tenders to engineers and movie studios after war broke out to create the fakes, which had to be convincing from a distance and lightweight enough to move around the pretend airstrips.

As well as technical staff manufacturing the dummies, the Sound City team strained the "brave" people who would operate them during bombing raids.

Most of the operators' job was "sitting around getting bored in a concrete bunker", Mr Pollard said, but "ultimately what they were trying to do was persuade people to bomb the sites that they were on".

The decoy programme was later expanded beyond just faking airfields.

Mr Pollard said: "After the bombing of Coventry, they realised that they needed sites to decoy towns and cities, to draw bombers away."

Sound stages in Surrey were used to simulate inadequate blackouts with lighting effects and explosions to mirror successful bomb hits on a town.

The site also made genuine aircraft parts after the nearby Vickers factory was bombed in 1940.

Shepperton Studios is now the second biggest film studio in the world and home to Amazon MGM Studios and Netflix.

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