AMERICAN RUBBER INFLATABLE PARADUMMY ("PD PACK") !
Used during Operation Anvil/Dragoon in Southern France in August, 1944; and later against the Japanese in the Philippines. This four foot tall rubber paradummy, called the "PD Pack" - code for "Paratrooper Dummy Pack" - was also called "Oscar" by some people. It was inflated via a CO2 bottle that was triggered automatically after the folded PD Pack was pitched from the plane and yanked open by static line. It was usually rigged with a sound device that simulated small arms fire; and was also rigged with a block of TNT which blew up the dummy upon landing, and/or served as a booby trap for any Germans who found the dummy. This dummy is often mistaken for the type that was dropped on D-Day - however, there has not yet been any solid evidence found that these rubber dummies were ever actually used on D-Day, June 6th, 1944. But there is plenty of evidence they were used in France in August '44 and also in the Philippines. No known original PD Pack paradummies have been positively located yet. Hopefully some are out there somewhere. One of the PD Pack dummy's original designers, Dick Switlik, of Switlik Parachute Company, searched for decades after the war but could not locate one. So he finally made some "reproductions" based on the original design specs and he donated these repros to war museums in the U.S. and Europe. The photo on the left above shows one of Switlik's reproductions which now hangs in a famous French Airborne Museum. The dummy on the right "appears" to be an actual original PD Pack paradummy from the WW II era, however, the location of this photograph has not yet been confirmed, so it remains a possibility that this is a repro dummy also. Either way, both dummies shown here are an exact representation of what the originals looked like.
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