IMO an urban legend, no more than a good story for the pub, the sort of thing that’s always been done by someone else. It’s never been proved as any more than that, at least to my satisfaction.
The debate about the wooden bomb comes and goes, and there’s even a recent book which tries to confirm it really happened. The intro at that link is suitably dramatic (they’re trying to shift product, after all) but ignores some real historical details that if not ignored makes the “Yes It Was Real” proposition very dodgy.
(1) During the early part of the war, there were lots of complaints both from aircrew and from RAF high command about propaganda-leaflet raids. The RAF was rightly outraged by losing planes and men to enemy flak and fighters for what seemed no better reason than supplying Nazi Germany with toilet-paper.
Later in the war, with Allied strategic bombing making itself felt, air-dropped propaganda was far more effective, like this leaflet called “Fortress Europe Has No Roof” which shows the shift in proportion of who was getting hit most.
Not in 1940-41; then it needed a special sort of optimism to believe that showers of “You’ve been very naughty! Put everything back and go home!” leaflets would have the slightest effect on a country whose army had rolled up Western Europe like a souvenir carpet and sent the British Empire’s Expeditionary Force scurrying across the Channel any which way it could.
(2) A fake-bomb raid on a fake-airfield target would be even less popular than a leaflet drop, since it didn’t serve any military purpose whatsoever. Risking even one plane and one to three men for the sake of a joke wouldn’t be seen as funny at all - and it certainly wasn’t what that link describes as a “milk run” - because the bullets and shells being chucked at them all the way through their hilarious sortie would be as real and deadly as they’d be on a proper mission.
(3) Finally, it’s often better to let the enemy keep thinking their deception has worked. If they realise they’ve been rumbled, the next fake installations will look far more realistic and the real ones far better hidden, until it reaches the stage that aircraft and crew will be put at risk and ordnance expended to bomb everything in an attempt to make sure they’ve hit something real.
Central England was once full of these tanks…
…indicating to German reconnaissance that the invasion of Europe was going to take the obvious short route from Dover to Calais, and anything else, like for instance an attack in Normandy, was a diversion to be ignored.
Nazi high command never found out that those tanks were actually fake…
…so the Panzer Divisions that might have turned the tide on D-Day were still up near Calais, waiting for an invasion that never came.
If they HAD found out about the deception, would they have dropped inflatable bombs on the inflatable tanks?
I doubt it; they’d have readied their real tanks to move against any attack that happened elsewhere, because they’d have known Calais, once so obviously the place, was confirmed as not the place at all…
For any and all of those reasons, anyone who’s going to bomb a fake airfield will do it like they mean business and use real bombs. After that, feel free to spin a yarn about wooden ones down at the pub, preferably after a few pints have made the audience less inclined to say, “Ah, but…”
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