Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
HOW MOVIE SET DESIGNERS HID WWII AIRCRAFT FACTORIES
Aas the sun rose over the horizon, a Japanese aviator worked to get his bearings above enemy territory. Anti-aircraft shells rocked his floatplane bomber as he looked for his target, a giant aircraft factory. The imposing building and expansive runways should be unmistakable, but there were only houses below. American interceptors would surely find him soon. Seconds turned into minutes he couldn’t afford. He was still searching in vain when a pair of American P-40 Warhawk fighters zoomed in behind him, lining up to end his failed mission.
In early 1942, this scenario played out clearly in the mind of US Army engineer Colonel John F Ohmer Jr, though the intended mark for his greatest illusion – the Imperial Japanese Navy – had yet to actually appear. The art and science of camouflage had infatuated Ohmer for years. After joining the army in 1938, he combined his love of magic and photography to find inventive ways to fool the eye and the lens. When Ohmer went overseas to study Britain’s wartime concealment efforts, he marvelled as German attackers wasted their bombs in open fields brilliantly attired to appear as vital targets.
As commander of the US Army’s 604th Engineer Camouflage Battalion, Ohmer campaigned to demonstrate his craft by obscuring Hawaii’s Wheeler Field in 1941. His superiors rejected his proposal because of the $56 210 price tag (nearly $900 000 today). Then on 7 December 1941, Japanese attackers bombed and strafed Oahu’s exposed airfields, along with the naval base at Pearl Harbor. Wheeler alone lost 83 warplanes, each one nearly worth the cost of Ohmer’s proposed cover-up.
With America at war, it seemed like only a matter of time before America’s West Coast bases and factories became the next targets of the Japanese navy. Enemy raiders were spotted skulking offshore. One Japanese submarine shelled an oil storage facility near Santa Barbara and in the early morning hours of 25 February 1942, air defence gunners around Los Angeles blasted 1 400 shells into the spotlight-pierced night sky, chasing the ghosts of unidentified aircraft.
The threat of an imminent attack led Ohmer’s superiors to reassess the value of his vision. He received a dream assignment, one that was simple in concept, but colossal in scope. He had to make everything worth bombing, from San Diego to Seattle, disappear. The long list included airfields, oil depots, aircraft warning stations, military camps, and defensive gun batteries. The most visible and vulnerable targets were a dozen or so distinctive, wooden aircraft assembly buildings. Military leaders fretted that just a few air-dropped incendiary bombs would burn them to the ground. The loss of just one major aeroplane-producing facility could lengthen the war considerably. If a factory such as Lockheed burned in 1942, the military would lose roughly 3 500 fighters, bombers, and cargo planes they were counting on. It could easily take a year or more to get such a facility up and running again.
Ohmer turned to Hollywood to find the most adept civilian workers, raiding movie studios to leverage the skills of set designers, art directors, painters, carpenters, and landscape artists for the urgent task, along with a handful of willing animators, lighting experts, and prop designers. Ohmer knew that these artisans worked fast and already understood the fundamentals of illusion from building elaborate movie sets.
Some of the concealment efforts were relatively simple. Southern California aircraft-building facilities such as Consolidated, North American, and Northrop quickly disappeared under a confusing web of drab paint and camouflage netting. The Army called the jobs ‘tone-downs’, meant to blur and obscure the distinct lines of the plants.
Factories located in urban areas, such as Lockheed in Burbank, Boeing in Seattle, and Douglas in Santa Monica, induced the cover-up crews to go much further. In order to make the big facilities vanish into their native landscape, artists and craftsmen created false neighbourhoods on the tops of enormous assembly buildings, complete with realistic-looking streets, trees, gardens, and homes.
Crunched for time and resources, the army and the Hollywood crews understood that the illusion only had to be good enough to
confuse an enemy pilot for a few critical minutes. As Douglas Airview (a magazine from the Douglas Aircraft Company) put it, ‘This would give defending planes and guns their chance. In the bookkeeping of war, that possibility is worth any cost.’
Ohmer’s trickery worked so well that American fliers looking for Douglas became lost, complaining someone had absconded with their once-familiar buildings and runway. Lockheed’s disguise was so wellexecuted that the Warner Brothers studio facility suddenly stood out as the most imposing complex in the San Fernando Valley. Jack Warner worried that his moviemaking complex might be mistaken for the hidden aircraft factory. Unconfirmed rumours circulated that he hired a company painter to scribe a huge arrow on the roof of one of his massive sound stages, along with the words ‘Lockheed That-A-Way’.
the crown jewel of ohmer’s concealments took place near Seattle, where the Boeing’s Plant 2 sprawled over 65 000 m2 of floor space. Inside, thousands of men and women churned out a new B-17 Flying Fortress heavy bomber roughly every 90 minutes.
Ohmer placed his top movie studio recruit on the Boeing project, architect John Detlie. He was pure Hollywood, married to movie star Veronica Lake. Before Detlie joined the war effort, he was an Oscar-nominated art director and set designer at MGM. In Seattle, Detlie assembled 13 architects and draftsmen, eight commercial artists, seven landscape architects, five engineers, and a soil-management expert.
Thwarting an enemy reconnaissance flier took more than simply covering the factory building. A sharp-eyed scout might zero in on the adjoining airfield, parking lots, or ramp areas. Making Boeing’s entire production facility disappear meant sowing confusion over several square miles of land.
Disguising the active runways and taxiways as an innocuous urban scene called for a two-dimensional solution to not impede aircraft operations. Planners envisioned a pattern of visual noise composed of lawns, buildings, and roads criss-crossing the active airfield. First, builders mixed finely crushed rock into bitumen, an asphalt-like substance, and applied it to areas heavily trafficked by aircraft. The mixture provided a dull texture that gobbled up reflections and shine emanating from the airfield’s large, flat concrete surfaces. In non-traffic spaces, the men added wood chips and cement to absorb light.
Over the rough texture, workmen used paint to create an intricate top-down view of a typical neighbourhood, devised by Detlie’s crew. Its pigment, developed by Warner Brothers, was reputed to ‘resist disclosure of the camouflage through infrared photography’. Oil mixed with the custom paint helped establish a convincing crosshatch of artificial roads. On the airport’s infield, men constructed 15 cm-high false buildings made from concrete blocks. From overhead, the ludicrously small structures cast realistic shadows and gave just a small amount of depth, giving more life to the scene. The finished deception looked amazingly impressive from the ‘attacker’seye-view’ at five to ten thousand feet. Only as a pilot came in low for landing did the hidden runway lose its illusion.
To blot out expansive ramps and automobile parking lots surrounding the factory, workers installed 30 m wooden masts in sturdy concrete footings before webbing the tall poles with heavy steel cable.
Boeing never finished covering its parking areas, but similar projects utilised hundreds of masts and more than 300 000 m of cable. Builders would stretch acres of camouflage netting from the suspended cables, creating a dazzling pattern of fields, lawns, and buildings over parked cars and newly built aircraft. At another factory, more than 350 000 m2 of string netting spanned the parking lots. These nets were interwoven with burlap strips and blocks of fabric, then dotted with wads of green-painted chicken feathers affixed with tar to look like vegetation. But when it rained, the paintinfused feathers smelled awful. And when it was warm, fuzzy green tar-coated plumes drifted off and stuck to fresh-from-thefactory aeroplanes.
Workers obscured the heart of Boeing’s facility, Plant 2, with 10.5 ha of camouflage netting stretched across the roof to create the appearance of a new faux ground level elevated roughly 15 m above the surrounding landscape. The building’s uneven bays and distinctive saw-tooth profile required the netting to be supported by wooden scaffolding or steel cables in low spots.
Reinforced catwalks, sometimes masquerading as sidewalks, included wood and wire handrails to keep a distracted
maintenance person from straying off the supported path and plunging through the netting.
Detlie’s mock rooftop neighbourhood at Boeing called for 53 houses, a dozen or so garages, greenhouses, a garage, and a store. The width and length of the structures stayed life-size, while the height, barely perceptible to fast and high-flying aircraft, was truncated. For the sake of speed, cost, and the rarity of wartime materials, many of the rooftop houses were only about two metres tall.
Beams affixed to the factory roof penetrated the netting vertically to become the corner posts of the artificial structures. Clad in burlap and plywood, the houses wore dark panels for windows, and light and earthy exterior paint tones seen in any American neighbourhood of the era. Roofs, which would be most visible from the skies, often appeared in white, red, or a dark gray hue. Two full-height houses on Boeing’s rooftop were real, providing the living quarters for army gun crews protecting the factory.
Roads and driveways made from oilstained burlap overlaid the netting and spanned the rooftop scene. Dotting the roads, workers built dozens of imitation automobiles from wooden frames clad in fabric. Unlike the graceful, rounded cars of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the fake autos were slab-sided and plain. Plant workers lashed down the artificial cars to keep the lightweight structures from moving on windy days.
In the neighbourhood’s yards, workers created artificial vegetation ranging from expansive victory gardens to 3.5 m-tall trees. Each of the 300 imitation trees began with a trunk and main branches hammered together from lumber. Artists made foliage for the trees and bushes from chicken wire and fibreglass flocked in painted feathers – these all-weather tree construction methods were used a decade later when Disneyland opened in 1955.
In an attempt to break up the distinctive shadows created at the edges of the massive building, workers camouflaged its outer walls in a multicoloured pattern and constructed cantilevered wads of artificial foliage along its perimeter.
The factory’s tallest chimneys disappeared inside strategically placed pump houses and sheds while smaller vents received a coat of red paint to look like fire hydrants. The tinderbox setwork required an actual firesuppression system, too, made up of 100 functioning fireplugs, 67 sprinkler units, and concealed fire-fighting towers equipped with powerful spray nozzles.
Factory employees accessed the rooftop site via hatches and patrolled on the catwalks above the plant. As they inspected and repaired the neighbourhood they called ‘Wonderland’, they also moved cars around the scene and even rearranged laundry on clothes lines to maintain a lived-in look. Periodic application of new paint shades assured that the bogus vegetation and artificial lawns continued to look realistic in every season.
As America pushed its forces across the Pacific, the threat of an attack on the continental United States became less and less likely, yet the factory camouflage stayed secret until July of 1945. That month, as Allied forces closed in on the Japanese home islands, army officials felt safe enough to permit national publications to run with the story of the strange neighbourhoods made from burlap, plywood, and feathers. Though the Japanese bombers never materialised in American skies, readers marvelled at the ingenuity and achievement of one of America’s most peculiar wartime engineering feats.