THE HISTORIC SITE
Designated by its code name SH1, just west of Seasalter, Sheerness Decoy Site was designed to fool German bombers into dropping their bombs over a largely uninhabited marsh known as Graveney Marsh. This was done by laying out a mock network of streets and houses, mainly camouflaged with hessian, also by use of lighting, small fires, and explosives which, although practically invisible by day, looked like a full scale town being attacked by night.
There was a sister site known as SH2 on the Isle of Harty, which was meant to represent the vital Medway Oil Storage depot, which stored Oil for the Navy. The Swale could easily be mistaken for the Medway if Bombers could be persuaded that Graveney Marsh was Sheerness. The topography of the two sites matched almost exactly in cloudy conditions. SH1 and SH2, certainly saved Grain and Sheerness from numerous bombing raids. This little known aspect of the defence of Britain in World War 2 was told to Ron Crowdy.
Arriving on the Isle of Sheppey
Percy joined the Royal Navy on 26th August 1927 No X96765 and served with the Royal Fleet Reserve during WWIl. SH1 Decoy Station was manned by the RN Chatham Division, mostly Pensioners and Royal Fleet Reservists who, after a medical had been declared ‘Category C’ i.e. - unfit for sea duties.
The two officers left but I had a chance to speak to S/Lt Paverley who I was surprised to see in an officer’s uniform as he had been an old shipmate of mine.
He had been a Seaman Torpedo Man on HMS Volunteer and we used to swap books. The last I had seen of him was when I was being lowered over the side en route to hospital, which resulted in my being classified Category C. He would not say what we were going to do, or where we were going to do it. All he said was “Go and draw rifles and full equipment and be back here as soon as possible” When we had done this, we clambered on board a lorry and were joined by another laden with food, supplies and equipment. He added “don’t worry, I’m coming with you” He looked at me straight in the eye and said “and you can take that look off your face.” My thoughts at that time cannot be put into words, but he was a good friend and I realised that he had to put on a show for the sake of David who had returned.
We proceeded from the dockyard and arrived later at the remote Harty Ferry Inn on the Isle of Sheppey (still there). Young Paverley said “this place is ours, get a sentry posted. No one is to enter”. Everything was unloaded, the small bar was converted into our armoury, bedding etc was arranged upstairs and soon we had a brew of tea going and a meal was prepared. Young P took me for a walk down towards the ferry, and showed me a concrete bunker which still remains. It contained numerous instruments and switches and without saying a word, he took me west of the shelter, some 600 yards or so, and we came to a large brick built structure, circular in shape which was fitted out to allow oil to be burnt. This left me puzzled and we made our way back to the pub. He still wouldn’t say what we were going to do, but told me to keep the sentry alert and warned me that David had a motorbike, and to listen out for him. Apparently, we would all be briefed on the following day.
Percy Ronald Payne RN
We were detailed off the Chatham Barrack's Drafting Office to HMS Wildfire Sheerness. This was a shore establishment getting on in years and looked it! One doesn't think too muchof our history when getting a Draft Chit, just wonder where one ends up. On arrival at Sheerness, we thought we were the "forgotten army"; in any case we were not eager to find out and tried to find ourselves a cup of tea. After a time a young RNVR Officer, Sub Lieutenant David Clark arrived accompanied by S/Lt Paverley. David gave us a quick look-over; I wondered what he thought of us. He in turn reported us "all correct" to the Captain who after looking after us for a while said "You are going to a place - I can't tell you where, but will be doing an important job", adding much to our dismay, "if you survive you could get a medal."
The next day
The next day, as prophesied, S/Lt David Clark called us to a parade and explained our task. The site bore similarities to the location of the old Medway Oil Store which stored Oil for the Navy, and was located on the Isle of Grain, across the Medway opposite Sheerness. The reason for the brick built structure was now obvious – the purpose of our posting was to somehow fool the enemy into dropping its bombs on the Isle of Harty, rather than on the important Admiralty Oil Store on Grain. The site was ‘top secret’ and was given the code name SH2 (Sheerness 2). Stores continued to arrive and there was a lot of coming and going and I was just starting to find my way around the old pub and beginning to enjoy the countryside when David came to the site and asked “Do any of you know how to row a boat?” Being an old hand, I knew the value of never volunteering for anything! He continued as if I had offered - “You and one other are to row me across the Swale tomorrow. I’m going to show you your new home”.
The following morning, and off across the Swale we rowed, nearly grounding on Horseshoe Sands. We landed on a nice sandy, cockle-filled beach just west of the Anti-Shipping Boom stretching across the Swale. Presently, I was shown a cable that came across the Swale and along the river bed through the sea wall across Graveney Marsh and into a concrete shelter and was told that this was to be our operating room for another decoy station which was designated SH1. The reason for this particular choice of sites will now become clear to the reader, for if north of the Swale was to be the Isle of Grain where the Admiralty Oil Store was located, then, south of it would have to be Sheerness town and Dockyard. We two men were somehow going to try and pass ourselves off as Sheerness. No wonder the Captain said there might be a medal in it for us! The cable in fact ran right over to the Isle of Harty (SH2) and Area HQ at Sheerness. The total area of SH1 at Graveney Marsh was at our disposal and totalled almost 80 acres, which was laid out with various decoy devices which were fashioned in such a way as to be invisible to all but the closest scrutiny during the day, but represented the activities of a town being bombed at night.
Below is an aerial photo showing the location of the SH1 Starfish Site - Cleve Hill Graveney Marsh, Kent. Photo courtesy of Timescapes Kent / The Forgotten Frontline.
AT THE SH1 STARFISH SITE
Original site drawing showing electrical circuits and devices
The devices were primarily the opening and closing of doors, letting out momentary flashes of light to represent the inhabitants running out to their shelters; misplaced roof slates with light poking through the roof; the explosion of sticks of bombs as other aircraft in their formation dropped their bombs on the target. Street lighting would be in the process of being switched off one by one off across the town – don’t forget, this was in the era of gas lighting where each individual gas light had to be turned off by hand. I will describe some of the gadgets which enabled us to do this later.
Having returned to Harty later that night, and finding that David had been called to HQ, I asked young P “If you let me go home, you can have all the medals”. He laughed and said again that he had already told me that he would be going along and to make sure my crew could make a good cup of tea. Not much reassurance, but it cheered me up. Eventually, we made the move across the Swale and settled down to our new life. Young P was housed in a hut near the Observation Post (OP) and had to suffer the same rations as the crew which were prepared by Alfie, a three-badged pensioner of many years’ service (he was said to have known Nelson!). He was a terrible cook and was said to clean his hands in flour whilst making duffs (puddings). We found that the only way to deal with him was not to watch him at work!
Reference - 'Q' Lighting
The current for the circuits and decoy lighting was 240 volts which we obtained from a 22 horsepower generator. We charged banks of accumulators and a set of dry cells as a stand-by but could run the whole site on the Petter, which stood seven foot tall with a massive fly wheel.
Starting it up
To start it, a large plug had to be unscrewed, from the Head or Bulb and a cartridge had to be lit and inserted. It took three men to start the motor with a large crank together with a few flicks on the throttle and off she’d go with a noise that would wake the whole countryside! After its initial spurt, we could put the generator ‘on load’ and this would slow it down somewhat and quieten the engine to a degree, but the steady “Boom Boom” could be heard for miles around. We found that it was impossible to use at night during a raid as no messages could be heard in the Observation Post, nor were we able to hear the objects being dropped on us in the night! Imagine the thrill of parachute mines coming to visit you? It’s quite nice to hear the “Puff, Puff” sound of the chutes opening, but the dream was shattered with a terrific flash and blast that leaves a shallow crater and lots of flimsy canvass and hessian camouflage strewn over 80 acres! The blasts would also break a number of electrical connections. One does not hear very much of decoy sites as a means of defence, but I know that thanks to the efforts of ours and similar sites many tons of bombs were diverted from their intended targets.
I should mention at this time, Lt Commander Hall from AHQ was a regular visitor to SH1 with David as was their Wren driver, 2nd Officer Wanda Morgan. She could knock back a neat tot of Navy Rum and ask for more, possibly something to do with her name! A man we were told to look out for, but never saw was an Admiral Becks.
Young P was killed at sea and Lt Com Hall was killed on a decoy site in the Humber area. Another good mate, Petty Officer Stoker, Joe Crawley, came to the site after young P left. Joe was very good with electrics and I learned a lot from him and we had quite a lot of fun in our own way. His hobby was clock making and he was very good at it. However, came the day, Joe was declared fit for sea and away he went. I never saw or heard from him again. I had been called for medicals on two occasions and nearly got my ticket, but I think it was David who managed to keep me on this job – a true officer and a gentleman!
Reference - 'Q' Lighting
The current for the circuits and decoy lighting was 240 volts which we obtained from a 22 horsepower generator. We charged banks of accumulators and a set of dry cells as a stand-by but could run the whole site on the Petter, which stood seven foot tall with a massive fly wheel.
A new hazard - the Butterfly Bomb
Amongst the routine of wartime shortages and separation, came a new hazard; this was the Butterfly Bomb. Instructions on how to deal with it duly arrived from above, seemingly the best advice was to put sandbags around it and explode it by firing a shotgun at it. A lovely double-barrelled shotgun complete with a good supply of No.5 cartridges was duly provided - good news for us, but bad news for the hares and ducks!. All went well until the supply of No.5 cartridges dried up and nothing other than a solid lump of lead could be obtained. This cartridge could stop an elephant at full charge, but no use to us, so I sat about making my own shot by melting down lead and letting it slowly trickle down into a bucket of water. It looked like grape shot, eventually, even this supply dried up and our prized shotgun had to be returned to stores. Someone not getting their fair share of game? The butterfly bombs continued to rain down on our beckoning decoys, so we had to find a method of dealing with them. We found an abundant supply of .22 ammunition, and we were issued with a Morris Tube, which fitted into the lining of a standard .303 Rifle. This allowed us to get on with the job, not to mention, restock the larder!
As time passed by, we got used to the routine hazards of our job, but we were quite unprepared for an attack by our own side. We were out fixing cables when we suddenly came under Mortar attack. We scrambled back into our OP and during a lull, then, managed to attract the army’s attention by firing a few short bursts on the Bren gun. We were unscathed, but the cables were badly mauled. Another time, some ratings in charge of a naval lieutenant started firing across our area with rifles. They had landed at Faversham Creek for exercise, the whole trouble being that our site was so ‘hush hush’.
COMMAND POST CLEVE HILL SH1 "Q" SITE
Photo taken shortly before demolition. The site is now covered over by the London Array Sub Station which serves the offshore wind farms. Photo courtesy - Timescapes Kent/ The Forgotten Frontline.
SKETCH OF A TYPICAL "Q" SITE
This sketch shows the flimsy nature of the various elements of a typical "Q" site. In the foreground can be see the scaffold poles supporting fake ship lights and a signal lamp. At the rear are three tanks containing heavy oil, paraffin and water to represent the action of a storage tank being hit by a bomb. This was an effort to attract following bombers to offload on the site. The tent-like structures, covered in hessian, had a number of devices fitted to represent missing tiles on roofs and opening doors as the inhabitants rushed to their shelters. There were also charges buried in the field to represent bombs bursting on what was supposed to be Sheerness.
The deception - our "Q" site in action
The site itself, and others like it, was designated a “Q” site as opposed to decoy aerodromes which were known as “K” Sites. I have already described how the topography of the site alone would have confused many a pilot but don’t forget, they were not having it all their own way having to dodge flak from the numerous Heavy Anti-Aircraft gun sites both on the Island, but also at Iwade and Poot Lane, Upchurch. Our job was to tempt the pathfinders to start something on our site. During the big build up of aircraft we were able to ignite various types of fires including an incendiary carpet as though a basket of incendiaries had been dropped at a target. This carpet was dropped as a marker for following aircraft and laid out in the shape of a large cigar. To back this up – there were metal framed wooden boxes filled with a combustible material. At SH2 on Harty, we had a device which was made up of three storage tanks sited on top of scaffolding - one filled with fuel oil, one with paraffin, and the other with water. Each tank fed one flushing cistern which led through pipes to a rough building shape which was put together with sheets of metal. Inside the ‘building’ were metal trays filled with old scrap iron etc. inside the trays were scraps of waxed hessian wicks. To start this type of fire we had flare bags wired to igniter fuses. When the start button was pushed, the igniters would set fire to the hessian wicks. This then lit a piece of tarry hemp on the end of long thin wire which was attached to the valve's fuel oil and paraffin tanks. Each valve had a lead weight attached, as the hemp burned through, the weights caused the valves to open. At the same time, flare bags attached to the hessian wicks were ignited and kept alight by the constant spraying of creosote. The first flush was from the paraffin tank, which, on reaching the burning wicks, shot out large bursts of flame into the air. This was followed by a flush of fuel oil, giving off clouds of thick black smoke with flames licking through representing the imaginary Oil Storage Tanks blowing up. A third flush came from the cistern containing water which quickly turned into clouds of steam on contact with the hot metal plates in the cisterns. This gave off a pretty convincing impression of the action of the fire-fighters trying to dampen the flames. We added further flushes of paraffin to keep it going, and we had a real thing going – Lord Haw Haw, the Nazi propagandist (Germany Calling!) often broadcast “Our forces left large fires burning in the Thames Estuary” – if he had only known!
Location of Starfish Control Bunker
This superb aerial photo shows the position of the Control Bunker, also a Type 23 Pillbox, overlaying the modern Thames Array Electrical sub-station at Cleve Hill, near Faversham, Kent.
Photo - Timescapes Kent / The Forgotten Frontline - supplied by Mark Harrison.
All a bit Heath-Robinson
Our devices were all a bit Heath-Robinson, and required a lot of attention to make them credible. One recurring problem was that our flare bags got damp. This was remedied by inserting them into old style French Letters, as condoms were called in those days. These arrived in red canvas bags from AHQ – we often wondered what our colleagues in HMS Wildfire thought we were up to! We also had wooden frames in the shape of houses approximately 1.8m by 1.2 m by 900mms high all covered by camouflage paint with a 40 Watt bulb inside. Their roofs were covered in wooden slates with one or two deliberately set askew to represent ‘leaky roofs’. Alongside would be hessian covered frames in the shape of a half sized sentry box which were operated by a selector mechanism which opened a small window to represent someone rushing out of their house making their way to their shelter.
Ships, supposedly anchored off Sheerness were represented by a couple of scaffold poles fitted with two lights to imitate proper ship lights, also a signalling light flashing real Morse letters or numbers back and forth from the OP on Graveney. We also had buried sticks of cordite charges buried in a line of four or five to give the impression of bombs being dropped over the target and persuading enemy aircraft to drop theirs, alongside. These cordite bombs were actually five gallon cans with the lids removed and filled with cordite, packed down into the surrounding earth and detonated by an igniter sheathed in a waterproof cover (condom), operated by a switch on a selector board within the OP. When we had plots of aircraft coming our way, we had to issue a ‘drop here’ invitation. We would start our fires by means of the incendiary carpet and simulate the fall of enemy bombs by igniting our buried cordite charges.
One severe drawback was the weather; we could only operate in conditions of low cloud - in clear conditions, our hands were tied. We could only sit and watch as Canterbury burned, but towards the end of the war a move was made for “Smoke Pots” to be installed. These would cover the area in a white vapour and was used in the Blackheath area because the large open spaces were a good landmark; lakes in the area were also covered with camouflage netting for the same reason.
Came a day, and I was told to watch out for something. I wasn’t told what it looked like, but told to report to AHQ giving the speed and heading if anything strange or unusual came over. The code name was ‘Wild Geese’. We watched out with trepidation not knowing what we were going to see, when one afternoon, from the south we could hear a noise but we couldn’t see anything. Whatever it was sounded like something in a hurry, so I made my way over to the Bren gun, and then watched as something came over the ridge. It was short and had stubby wings with a flame at the tail and although within range but not knowing who it belonged to, we let it fly past. It went on towards London, coming within range of a Heavy Anti Aircraft gun-site in the estuary but they too let it pass for the same reason. I was still on the phone to AHQ telling them about our ‘wild geese’ when the engine cut out, which was followed by a large explosion. This was our first encounter with a V1. Later on in the war, the sky would become filled with white vapour trails, as they were being chased down by squadrons of our planes, night and day as they tried to destroy the fling bombs before they reached London.
As the enemy bombing effort scaled down to nuisance value, we were more or less stood down and told to busy ourselves tidying up the site. Two chalk pits in Faversham received our barbed wire and scrap iron, so come on you modern day archaeologists, see what you can discover! After returning stores to HMS Wildfire, we returned to Chatham Barracks hoping for an early de-mob. This wasn’t to be; I was drafted onto an aircraft carrier, I wasn’t much interested so don’t remember its name. I had to keep an eye on an evaporator; the water was from the dockyard mains and was called ‘Luton Water’ and had a certain amount of salt in it. Another job was to turn all the machinery a fraction of a turn each hour. The propeller shaft had been fitted with ‘turning gear’ – a massive ratchet lever with a rope at one end for two or three men to tug on. Being big hearted, I attempted to do it by myself one day, slipped on the chequered plate and ended up in hospital. My reward was a strangulated hernia. I woke up in a ward to the sound of beautiful singing and someone holding a mask to my face. I thought I was in heaven! Came the next day and I was given a teaspoon of beer to mark Victory over Japan! My war was over! Joe and I didn’t get any special medals but we did get a citation from the Commodore at the RN Barracks. I do know little of this is heard about the valiant efforts of the operators of “Q Sites”; maybe the reader will have a better understanding now.
A job well done
Appendix
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Location of SH1 and Historical survey conducted recently as part of the development of Cleve Hill Solar Energy Park, Graveney, Kent.
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“Fortress Sheppey” has many excellent photos, including some of the OP at SH2”Q” Site on the Isle of Harty, showing a typical arrangement of fuel tanks intended to replicate burning oil tanks, and efforts of fire fighters to deal with them.
These memories of Percy Ronald Payne's experiences at the World War II decoy site for Sheerness were written by Ron Crowdy.