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One military tale of one-upmanship, about one group of combatants' engaging in a defiantly symbolic gesture directed at their enemies, is the well-traveled wooden bomb anecdote that dates to at least the first year of World War II: As far as we know, the wooden bomb story's earliest telling comes from CBS news correspondent William L. Shirer's book, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941,, in which he recorded the following entry for 27 November 1940: Shirer did not claim to have witnessed the event, or even to have heard about it directly from any of the participants; he merely repeated a humorous anecdote told to him by an unnamed source. Multiple variants of this narrative event, with differing details (e.g., the incident occurred later in the way, the wooden bomb was dropped by Germans on a British decoy airfield rather than vice-versa, the fake bomb was dropped in Germany by American pilots). The use of decoy airfields and other make-believe facilities during World War II was more than legend, of course; both the Germans and the Allies engaged in many such ruses, one of the most famous examples being the fictitious First U.S. Army Group (FUSAG) built up around General George S. Patton in England to mislead the Germans into believing the main Allied invasion of France would take place at the Pas de Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy. And dangerous missions were sometimes undertaken more for their psychological value than for their practical results, such as General James H. Doolittle's bombing raid on Tokyo in April 1942). However, several aspects of this tale tend to place it far more in the wartime morale-building joke column than the historical event column: Update: As has been pointed out by many on social media, the so-called wooden bomb pictured at the top of this article is more likely an aircraft float light:
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