Dressing as the Enemy: Difference between revisions

* Navies love this trope. During the Age of Sail, a popular tactic was to raise enemy colours (or, if you were really sneaky, a plague flag) and only lower them at the moment of firing. Died out after advanced naval gunnery and explosive shells meant that it was common practice to sink enemy vessels rather than capture them (the deception only worked if the disguised ship pretended to be a captured enemy one). Still the British raid on St Nazaire used this, flying a German ensign from the HMS Campbeltown. It worked.

** A particularily funny example from [[World War I]] also combined with [[Because I'm Jonesy]]. The British and Germans both employed armed merchant ships (the Germans used them to attack British shipping, the British to hunt down German raiders), and often used fake markings, false smokestacks, and other elements to disguise them as the other side's ship. In the 1914 [[wikipedia:Battle of Trindade|Battle of Trindade]], the German SMS ''Cap Trafalgar'' encountered the British RMS ''Carmania'', both of which were disguised. The problem was that not only was ''Cap Trafalgar'' disguised as ''Carmania'', ''Carmania'' was also disguised as ''Cap Trafalgar''. At that early point in the war, neither side actually knew which merchant ships the other had converted into auxiliary cruisers, and thus both ships' captains made poor choices of disguise.

 

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