Using mannequins/dummies to deceive has a long and honourable history. Honourable, that is, if you were on the Allied side.
Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle Obit. 5th Sept 2010.
Quote:
Lieutenant-Commander Tony Bentley-Buckle, who has died aged 88, spent the last 18 months of the Second World War as a prisoner-of-war in Germany, when he and his fellow inmates of Marlag-O, a PoW camp for naval officers in northern Germany, built a man-sized dummy called “Albert RN”.
The dummy was hidden in towels and carried in its component parts to the wash house outside the camp, where it was assembled. It was then carried back into camp in the midst of the marching men, leaving one man to hide in the latrine while the Germans made their headcount. Later the hiding man would emerge and make his escape.
Bentley-Buckle was the camp’s watch repairer and lock picker, and he made the mechanism which enabled Albert’s eyes to blink and move, giving added realism to the dummy. In 1953 a highly fictionalised version of the episode was made into a film, Albert RN, but Bentley-Buckle’s true wartime adventures, behind enemy lines in Italy and Yugoslavia, were even stranger than fiction.
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Trailer from the 1953 film...
Daily Telegraph obituary. Paywalled, but you know the score.