Wooden bombs, The Goon Show and Dad's Army

There's a story about Word War II that surfaces regularly on social media. It involves the Germans taking an age to build a dummy wooden airfield, only for the RAF to fly over when it's finished and drop a single wooden bomb on it.

I thought of that story listening to a 1955 episode of The Goon Show, as one does, on the wartime career of Neddy Seagoon. In an attempt to be invalided out of the Army on medical grounds, he comes up with madder and madder ideas.

His problem was that these ideas were seized upon by his superiors, put into action and invariably turned out to be a brilliant success.

At one point, he advocated covering Salisbury Plain with cardboard tanks to fool the Luftwaffe. This was followed by a news bulletin:

"This is the BBC Home Service. Last night fleets of German bombers dropped cardboard bombs on Salisbury Plain."

The top brass were delighted with all the extra cardboard because they could use it to make more tanks. (It's The Goon Show: it doesn't have to make sense.)

So it's an old joke: the Snopes page about the wooden bomb story even traces it back to 1940. But is the story true?

Almost certainly not.

The Snopes page lists several reasons not to believe it. To me the clincher is that there is no earthly reason why you would want the enemy to know they have failed to deceive you. You'd want them to think their wooden airfield is a great success and to waste their time building dozens more.

And if you think you've seen such a wooden bomb in a museum, it was almost certainly an aircraft float light.

Back to my episode of The Goon Show.

At one point the following exchange takes place:

Which one of you two is Mr Crun?

I'm Miss Bannister.

Never mind who you are. Which one is Henry Crun.

Don't tell him, Henry.

Yes, it's more or less the "Don't tell him, Pike" joke long before Dad's Army. And I've heard the Pike joke in a more obscure radio comedy, older than Dad's Army, that BBC Radio 4 Extra repeated too.

The audience at The Goon Show enjoyed it - they were having a good time - but the Pike joke barely got a laugh in the obscure comedy.

Which tells that the reason "Don't tell him, Pike" has gained immortality is the characters involved. We know Captain Mainwaring, and that's just the sort of mistake he would make. And we know Pike, and that's just the way he would react.

And now, here's Max Geldray.