Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-41

by William L. Shirer

BOULOGNE, August 16 How wonderfully the Germans have camouflaged their temporary airfields! We drove by at least three between Calais and Boulogne. They have established them not in pastures, as I had expected, but in wheat-fields. The shocks of wheat are left in the field, with only narrow lanes left free across the field for the planes to take off from and land on. Each plane is hidden under a hangar made of rope netting over which sheaves of wheat have been tied. As at Ghent, the sides and back of each hangar are protected by sandbags. In one big wheat-field there must have been a hundred of these little hangars. Workshops and oil dumps were also housed under the same kind of netting. The “pocket” system which I saw at Ghent is also used. The planes, when they have landed, taxi down a lane or a road to a nearby “pocket” that may be some distance from the field proper. Here the planes are either hidden under netting or backed up into a wood.