Obviously the German soldiers might notice a tree where there had not
been one before. That’s why the British Empire’s Royal Engineers built
fake trees to resemble specific trees in no man’s land. During the
night, they’d cut down the original and replace it with the fake:
To develop the O.P. Tree, Royal Engineers representatives
selected, measured, and photographed the original tree, in situ,
extensively. The ideal tree was dead; often it was bomb blasted. The
photographs and sketches were brought back to the workshop, where
artists constructed an artificial tree of hollow steel cylinders, but
containing an internal scaffolding for reinforcement, to allow a sniper
or observer to ascend within the structure. Then, under the cover of
night, the team cut down the authentic tree and dug a hole in the place
of its roots, in which they placed the O.P. Tree. When the sun rose over
the field, what looked like a tree was a tree no longer; rather, it was
an exquisitely crafted hunting blind, maximizing personal concealment
and observational capacity simultaneously.
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