A new sign for Operation Starfish.
Ripponden Parish Council worked with Yorkshire Water rangers to erect a sign to identify the Operation Starfish site on Flints Moor, explaining the highly secret wartime project and the role the land at Slate Delfs Hill played in confusing enemy bombers during World War Two.
Starfish sites were decoy sites to help protect specific industrial targets: in our local case, the marshalling yards at Greetland station and sites over in Greater Manchester.
Ripponden Parish Council provided the sign and the timber for the sign display structure, and Yorkshire Water rangers, seen here with Councillor Judith Crossley, positioned and erected the sign on site.
About the site
This starfish site at Slate Delfs Hill, Cragg Vale was one of many highly secret Operation Starfish sites dotted around the UK during the Second World War. Little remains of these sites today but here, at the Cragg Vale site, luckily the remains of the control building can be seen.
These sites were essentially decoy sites to help protect industrial conurbations and specific industrial targets by diverting German bombing and hopefully thinking the burning decoys were their intended industrial targets.
The decoys consisted of a double line of about a dozen flash pans, where oil would be burned to simulate incendiary bombs. There would also have been decoy lights and shadow buildings, possibly constructed using walling stone from alongside some of the enclosure period tracks in the area. The bunker consists of two rooms either side of a central entrance passage, defended by a high blast screen.
They were the idea of Colonel Turner inspired by Churchill who sought, following the bombing of Coventry and the later blitzes, to offset the psychological effects on public morale.
The Cragg Vale site was built to protect the Greetland Railway marshalling yards because much of the wartime armament manufactured in the Huddersfield and Halifax area was transported from these yards to the military. The Cragg Vale site also confused the bombers aiming for the now Greater Manchester industrial targets.
As records illustrate, not to mention the location and terrain, it is a fallacy to suggest there was any runway or aeroplanes.
