airplane plants camouflaged by set designers in WWII

Lockheed plant (before)

Lockheed plant (after)

Above and below Various US government views of a WWII aircraft factory, concealed from aerial view by suspended imitations of suburban neighborhoods.

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Susan Elia MacNeal, THE HOLLYWOOD SPY: A Maggie Hope Mystery. New York: Bantam, 2021.

They passed through tall, imposing gates to a security checkpoint, and John showed his identification. "Yes, Flight Commander Sterling," one of the guards said, a lean man with a bulbous nose. "Mr. Hughes told us you'd be here this afternoon—and bringing a guest." He waved them through. 

As they walked into the giant wooden hangar, Maggie looked around. Men in coveralls, and even one woman—her hair tied up in a Rosie the Riveter bandanna—were working on the planes. The air smelled faintly of oil and jet fuel. "Impressive," she said, voice lost in the cavernous space. 

"Takeoffs to the west have to be coordinated with the Los Angeles International Airport," John said. 

Warplanes going to the Pacific, Maggie realized. "Where are the factories?" 

"Close by, but hidden. The defense companies worked with set designers to camouflage the plants—they've even gone so far as to put fake grass and wooden cows on the roofs.”  

"That's very...Hollywood." 

above and below ground views

RELATED LINKS    

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

WWII aircraft factories hidden from enemy aerial view

Above An aerial view of the Lockheed-Vega aircraft factory in Burbank CA, during WWII, when the entire facility was hidden beneath a vast simulation of houses, stores and residential neighborhoods.

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CAMOUFLEURS GOT BUSY in Daily News (Perth, Western Australia) August 4, 1945, p. 10—

The US entered World War II with many a war plant that needed careful defense.

Among the most vulnerable were flimsily protected airplane plants along the eastern and western coasts. They were unexpendable and immovable. Their nakedness demanded some sort of wrapping.

So the US Corps of Engineers put to work a motley legion of industrial designers, billboard painters, crack Hollywood illusionists, and serious artists.

By last week, workmen were yanking wire trees and make-believe houses off many camouflaged war plants.

The makeup job had been costly: Fullblown protective concealment of thirty-seven vital plants had cost 22 million dollars. Other money went for simpler tone-down work, or “disruptive painting,” at smaller plants and airfield hosts.

In the heat of its enthusiasm for plenty of camouflage, the Corps of Engineers gave out contracts for disguising fields hundreds of miles inland.

Famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy turned camoufleur to plan the two million dollar “passive protection” of Baltimore’s Glenn Martin bomber factory.

Warner Brothers technicians had to protect the big Douglas plants at Santa Monica against twin risks. Within easy periscope sight from the Pacific, it was vulnerble to shells as well as bombs.

Douglas airfield architects had their camouflage plan ready before Pearl Harbor. They made minatures, then photographed them from simulated bombing altitudes.

Building the dummy airport, phony plants, and a fake residential [neighborhood], complete with washing on clotheslines, took two and a half years, and cost two and a half million dollars.

It was duplicated on the plants when the war came.

Masking the consolidated plant at San Diego called for great nets draped over the Pacific Highway.

At Seattle, the task was difficult.

Boeing’s Flying Fortress plant was sandwiched between busy Boeing Field and a natural landmark, the Duwamish River.

Camoufleurs hid the field so trickily that veteran pilots had to ask the way in.

Atop the Boeing plants went a 26-acre village, made of chicken wire, canvas, lumber and painted chicken featers. The town had fifty-three houses, stores and a gas station.

Some of its streets crossed the field, went up Beacon Hill.

Camoufleurs skipped the river.

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Below The large, concealed underground parking lot at the Lockheed-Vega plant in Burbank.

concealment of a california aircraft plant during WWII

Above View from above of the spurious suburban neighborhoods that covered the Donald Douglas Aircraft plant in Southern California during World War II. Below in this post is a view of the same structure, as seen from the concealed factory level.

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Donald Albrecht, World War II and the American Dream. National Building Museum, and MIT Press, 1995, p 196—

Because the [Donald Douglas Aircraft] plant was dangerously near the coast, its buildings were camouflaged so that enemy aviators would see only what appeared to be an unbroken stretch of suburban subdivisions. Paint was applied to simulate streets and houses, and nearby trees were trimmed to the height of the plant buildings to present a uniform appearance from the air. The Santa Monica factory featured an even more elaborate deception scheme, with canvas houses, fake trees, and camouflage netting covering the entire plant. 

1918 pandemic spitting image | deja flu all over again

Above A poster issued by the United States Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation (Philadelphia), as a means of controlling the spread of the “Spanish Flu” in late 1918. Source: Free Library of Philadelphia.•

The narrative at that weblink describes conditions that are disturbingly parallel to those of the current spread of COVID-19—

[The flu epidemic] reached Philadelphia by early September 1918, after infected sailors from Boston came to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Once patients began appearing, it became apparent how ill-informed and ill-prepared the City was. World War I created demands for increased labor at home and doctors abroad. This resulted in overcrowding in the city, and critical shortages of the doctors, hospital space, morgues, and burial services necessary to handle an out-of-control crisis. Accelerating the devastation was the City’s refusal (against the advice of the medical experts) to cancel a rally for the Fourth Liberty Loan Campaign, which brought 200,000 Philadelphians together on Broad Street, on September 28. Within three days (the incubation period of the virus), the number of cases skyrocketed. The epidemic in Philadelphia claimed 16,000 lives altogether, with 12,000 of those deaths occurring in the five-week period immediately following that war bonds rally.

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Here is more information about that pandemic from the Wikipedia article on the Spanish Flu—

The Spanish flu, also known as the 1918 flu pandemic, was an unusually deadly influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. Lasting from February 1918 to April 1920, it infected 500 million people–about a third of the world's population at the time–in four successive waves. The death toll is typically estimated to have been somewhere between 17 million and 50 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in human history.…

While systems for alerting public health authorities of infectious spread did exist in 1918, they did not generally include influenza, leading to a delayed response. Nevertheless, actions were taken. Maritime quarantines were declared on islands such as Iceland, Australia, and American Samoa, saving many lives. 

Social distancing measures were introduced, for example closing schools, theatres, and places of worship, limiting public transportation, and banning mass gatherings. Wearing face masks became common in some places, such as Japan, though there were debates over their efficacy. There was also some resistance to their use, as exemplified by the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco.

Vaccines were also developed, but as these were based on bacteria and not the actual virus, they could only help with secondary infections. The actual enforcement of various restrictions varied.…

• Thanks to Claudia Covert for alerting us to this image.

Chicago Skyline Camouflage | Merchandise Mart

Camouflaged Merchandise Mart (c1943), Chicago

In its May 23, 1943 issue, The Milwaukee Sentinel included an illustrated article on the “Newest Tricks of Camouflage” (p. 41). Among the featured topics was the application of disruptive patterns to buildings in urban centers like Chicago, to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to recognize conspicuous landmarks. The article included the above image, a “doctored” aerial photograph of that city’s Merchanise Mart (which had been at one time the world’s largest building) to show the effects of disruption.

The caption with the photograph reads—

The Merchandise Mart in Chicago as it would appear after camouflaging by the Army’s hocus pocus artists. Through a Nazi’s bombsight the single large object would seem a number of smaller innocuous ones—all by the ingenious use of paint.

In the accompanying article, the following paragraph also appears—

If and when Nazis fly over an American city, say Chicago, our camouflage artists are ready for them, along with our anti-aircraft crews. Every large building, such as the Merchanise Mart, will be so camouflaged that even with binoculars from on high the Nazis will see only a crazy quilt confusion that will give their bombardiers trouble in distinguishing steel and concrete from mere razzle-dazzle.

Experiments in building camouflage had been used earlier in World War I, as seen in the camouflage pattern applied to the Victoria Hospital in the UK (shown below). The WWII proposal to camouflage the Merchandise Mart may have originated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (founder and head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago) and Hungarian designer György Kepes (who taught camouflage at the same school). In 1969, Moholy’s widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, recalled the following in her book, Moholy Nagy: Experiment in Totality (pp. 183-184)—

On December 19, 1942, Moholy was appointed to the Mayor’s personal staff in charge of camouflage activites in the Chicago area.…[in the course of which] he pondered how to conceal the vastness of Lake Michigan with a simulated shore line and floating islands…As head of the Camouflage Workshop, György Kepes produced a wider range of new techniques and concepts. When they were displayed for the first time in 1943, they aroused wide attention.

Camouflaged Victoria Hospital (c1918)

Lady Camoufleurs Make Camouflage on NY Streets

On this page are two World War I government photographs, showing the contributions of the Camouflage Reserve Corps of the National League for Women's Service. In the photo above they are applying a disruptive camouflage scheme to a War Savings Stamp booth at Broadway and 43rd Street in New York. August 1918. NARA 165-WW-599G-041. At the bottom of this page, they are painting a War Savings Stamp theatre in Times Square, New York, in the same month. NARA 165-WW-599G-016. It had been decided that painting disruptive camouflage schemes on buildings and vehicles was an effective means of attracting a crowd for fundraising and recruiting events. 

 

The first event was described in considerable detail in a news article, reproduced in full below.

 

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Anon, LADY CAMOUFLEURS WORK IN TIMES SQ.: But Their Overalls Give Nary a Thrill to That Blasé Region; PROTECT WSS STAND: Twelve of 'Em Climb Ladders and Paint Right Into the Dusk in the New York Sun, August 21, 1918, p. 2—

Twelve lady artists from Greenwich Village, who are serving their country as captains, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals and privates of the Camouflage Reserve Corps of the National League for Women’s Service [NLWS], passed yesterday afternoon painting a futuristic, or cubistic, mince pie nightmare on the little Thrft Stamp stand in Times Square, so that if a German submarine sails up Broadway or one of Fritz’s Zeppelins comes along dropping bombs on the revellers of the Great White Way the camouflaged stand will just melt away into the surrounding landscape of subway holes and theatrical billboards and the Thrift Stamp cashbox won’t be disturbed.

The twelve ladies were assisted by two Beaux Arts men, members of the shipping board, A[lon] Bement of Columbia University and Artist [Henry] Davenport, who came over from Boston to help boss the job.

Worked to Beat the Moon

The fourteen toiled manfully to finish the chef d’oeuvre before nightfall, because as Captain Myra Hanford of the Camouflage Corps [CC] remarked in a pause of her task of holding the chalk with which the design was marked, the moon was at the full and moonlight nights were just the time the Huns took to make their raid. And with Eddie Cantor of the Follies and Frances Victory of the “Eyes of Youth” and a lot of other talent coming to open the drive for $25,000,000 the CC of the NLWS would never forgive itself if it left that stand unprotected, a target for the Huns.

They toiled manfully, as before stated; lithely the overalled limbs of the ladies skipped up and down the ladders; merrily the paint brushes flirted with the rough boards of the stand. And just as the excitement was at its height along came a painter, just the common garden variety of painter, with a red nose and a pipe and a pail of beer in his hand, and cocked an eye at his lady competitors and spake thus to his mate, an electrician with a coil of wire over his grimy shoulder:

“Them wimmin don’t know how to handle a brush. They pecks at the boards like a canary bird. You wanna hold the brush wit’ a free sort of grasp and make broad strokes.”

“They’re probably workin’ by the piece,” mused the electrician. “Say, ain’t war what Sherman said it was? Wimmin has to put on overalls and climb ladders in Times Square to make the world safe for democracy. Pretty tough.”

On the whole, though, Times Square didn’t pay much attention to the busy band of lady painters. So blase has a suffrage campaign and a year of war students made the Great White Way that a woman in overalls, who would have been mobbed ten years ago, was worth scarcely a passing glance.

A few men stopped and gazed with expressions which said: Good Lord! what is this world coming to? or, If my wife ever does such a thing she’ll hear from me; or, Bully for the nervy dames; or, What’s it all about, anyway, according to their natures; and a few women examined their emancipated sisters with eyes that expressed amusement, admiration, disdain or inanity, all according to their natures; but that was all.

The WSS press agent who prophesied that the police reserves would have to be called out to handle the crowds was sadly disappointed. The crowd at no time was more than one hundred, even counting the two stray dogs that hung around tasting the paint brushes.

The stand is a dinky little affair which some of those zephyrs that whiz around Times Square will probably lift right off of its legs some day, but there’s one thing about it, it represents subway folk without paying for it. For half a dozen husky workmen from the subway excavations around there put it up, in Mr. [Theodore] Shonts’s time, too, and what is more they brought some of Mr. Shonts’s lumber to do it with.

The lumber was covered with posters and bills and things—no, there wasn’t any of Mr. Shonts’s poetry on it—but three nice young soldiers and a sailor and a fat WSS press agent worked hours scraping those posters off. One of Marjorie Rambeau’s eyes and several of the nether limbs of the Dolly Sisters still remained when, early in the afternoon, the twelve members of the Camouflage Corps, in natty khaki suits and caps, arrived with their paint pots and brushes.

There was still time for a lot of scraping, for the CC had to dress. Camouflaged by a rickety screen they performed this operation in a corner of the stand, with the populace gazing hungrily at the screen and waiting for what might come forth.

McMillan, Hand Me a Brush

Various visions came forth and crawled down the ladder. As a matter of fact, not all wore overalls. Private [Helen] Harrison was extremely efficient in a real pair, the kind with straps going over the shoulders and pockets for tools, neat fitting to the legs; but Corporal [Ellen] McMillan, who is youthful and curly haired, was brazenly feminine in a pale blue smock with pink embroidery. But her knickers were sufficiently mannish. Lieut. [Louise] Larned, who was the first to mount the ladder and paint, stuck to her brief khaki skirt. One or two wore artists’ smocks of gray, and one donned a kitchen apron.

Still there was a general effect of overalled feminine limbs clambering up and down. Also the camouflagers called each other by their last names without any handles—“Harrison, are you doing the blue or shall I?” “McMillan, hand me a brush”—and so forth. It had a businesslike sound.

The shades of night had fallen when the stand finally bloomed forth in its startling dress of blue and yellow and white and black, done in highly futuristic patches according to the design drawn by the Shipping Board representatives. And the twelve camouflagers took off their overalls and aprons and picked up their paint pails and marched off to their well earned dinners, musing proudly on the part their work will have in the salesmen’s drive which opens tomorrow, when every membersof the national salesmen’s organization now in New York will start in on a week’s voluntary service service for Uncle Sam and the War Savings Stamps.

Captain. Charles H. McKinney of the Twenty-sixth police precinct is extremely pround of the camouflaged stand. He, it will be remembered, is the knight of the Women Police Reserves, and a champion of the cause of women. He said it was a source of gratification to him that his district, which produced the first women police reserves, also had the distinction of possessing one of the first works of art of the lady camouflagers done in Uncle Sam’s name.

 

Roland Penrose | Cubism, Illusion and Camouflage

Roger Penrose, Impossible Triangle

Above The uncle of British mathematician Roger Penrose was the surrealist artist and art collector Roland Penrose. The former is commonly credited with the design of an illusionistic three-dimensional shape called the "impossible triangle" also called the Penrose triangle. A gif animation of that initially puzzling shape is available online. It has much in common with certain aspects of the Ames Demonstrations in psychology, as well as perspective-based illusions used for ground and naval camouflage during both World Wars. See our earlier posts on those subjects here and here.

Roland Penrose was an early important biographer of Pablo Picasso. He was greatly interested in cubism, which is frequently said to resemble disruptive, dazzle or "high difference" camouflage. Perhaps not surprisingly, he was also involved in wartime civilian camouflage. During WWII, he teamed up with other artists (notably Stanley William Hayter, John Buckland Wright, and Julian Trevelyan) in founding a company that provided questionable camouflage for industrial landmarks. Later, he taught camouflage and compiled an instructional guidebook, titled Home Guard Manual of Camouflage (October 1941), the cover of which is shown below.

Related to this, there is a passage from Penrose's notebooks, published in Elizabeth Cowling, ed., Visiting Picasso: The Notebooks and Letters of Roland Penrose. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2006, pp. 245-246, in which he talks about Picasso's reaction when he first saw (Penrose's nephew's) the impossible triangle in 1962—

Showed P[icasso] the impossible triangle. He looked at it, puzzled for some minutes, then started making other versions of it. "Your brother [sic] should have been a cubist," he said. "It's an attempt to catch the 4th dimension. They always say the cubists were trying to catch the truth—they were really trying to make a deception—just like this—cubism was full of deception. Your brother [sic] should have worked with us; we would have found a lot in common."

Roland Penrose book cover (1941)

Dazzle Prosthesis | Face Recognition Camouflage

Article from Interactive Architecture Lab (2015)

Eric Sloane | Camouflage and Comic Books

Eric Sloane (1942), Camouflage Simplified

We've talked about American artist Eric Sloane (1905-1985) in an earlier blog, specifically in reference to a 60-page Illustrated guidebook called Camouflage Simplified, published in 1942. It's easily our all-time favorite comic-style overview of the subject. It's a delight just to look at the drawings, such as the examples above and below. It turns out that, according to the Hathi Trust Digital Library, the book is now in public domain, and is available in full online. Take a look at it; it's a pleasurable way to spend some time.

Eric Sloane (1942), Camouflage Simplified