Brit had done the same to the Italians in 1940 when they had less than 30,000 troop in Libya and Italians over 100,000. They Italians held off attacking thinking there was amajor force against them. See following from NZ Division diary.
Middle East Command wanted 500 dummy trucks and 300 dummy tanks for deception purposes and it wanted them in a hurry. Colonel Heath was told on 17 June that the order must be filled by the 24th and to get busy. Fifth Field Park was ordered to organise the stores and build the trucks, while 6 Field took care of the tanks. Within the hour lorries were heading for
Cairo,
Alexandria and
Suez to pick up material, while Captain Morrison and Lieutenant
Bucknell20 did some hard thinking. There were only three days left by the time the prototypes had been built, saw benches erected and the components spread along the assembly line. Four hundred men were borrowed from the infantry and artillery and mass production started. The flow of components was co-ordinated by Sergeant
Lineham21 and as each unit was completed Corporal
Brittenden22 gave it a shot of camouflage paint from a homemade outfit mounted on a compressor truck.
The finished articles, which used up twenty miles of timber battens and ten acres of hessian, were knocked down for transport and the last units delivered to the railway people within half an hour of the deadline. Captain Morrison remarked in his report that the only major difficulty was the recovery of hundreds of hammers and saws from the infantry and artillery helpers.
The dummies were used to good purpose, for General Wavell in his despatch on the early operations in the desert up to November 1940 mentions the smallness of the force falling back from the frontier in the face of Italian superiority in men and material and concludes: 'Nevertheless this small force continued to inflict heavy casualties on the enemy with practically no loss to itself, and to hold in check a force of four or five divisions for a further six weeks. A skilful use was made of dummy tanks to deceive the enemy.'