In early 1942, a pilot flying over Burbank, California, would have seen rows of houses, trees, lawns and a few parked cars. Underneath, thousands of people were building warplanes. The suburb was made of canvas, netting, chicken wire and paint, and much of it was put together by people who normally built film sets.

A post doing the rounds on Instagram tells the story of how Lockheed’s factory was made to disappear. It is essentially right, and the real story is even bigger: Lockheed was one of several West Coast plants hidden this way.

Fear After Pearl Harbor

After 7 December 1941, the West Coast expected to be next. A Japanese submarine shelled an oil facility near Santa Barbara in February 1942, and the same month Los Angeles spent a night firing anti-aircraft guns at enemy aircraft that were never there. The aircraft plants of Southern California, building fighters and bombers for the war, looked like obvious targets.

The Army turned to John F. Ohmer Jr., a camouflage officer who had studied how the British concealed facilities during the Battle of Britain. According to Lockheed’s own history, his earlier proposals had been turned down, but after Pearl Harbor he was given authority to use whatever means necessary to protect the Burbank plant.

A Suburb Made of Canvas

Ohmer recruited artists, set designers and painters from Hollywood studios including Disney, Paramount and 20th Century Fox. They stretched chicken wire, netting and painted canvas over the main factory to form a canopy, then dressed it as a California suburb. Trees were made with chicken feathers spray-painted green and brown, to match healthy and dying foliage. Runways and parking lots were painted green to look like alfalfa fields. Burlap bungalows and clotheslines made the neighbourhood look lived in, and the illusion was kept up by moving things around, including laundry on the lines and, according to some accounts, inflatable rubber cars.

Underneath, the work never stopped. Workers moved through the site using underground walkways, and air ducts kept the covered buildings ventilated. Lockheed’s Burbank plant built aircraft such as the Hudson and the P-38 Lightning; nearly 10,000 P-38s were built during the war, almost all of them by Lockheed.

The test of the illusion came from above. Lockheed says a War Department general was taken up on a reconnaissance flight at 5,000 feet and could not pick out the plant. All he could see was suburb after suburb.

Boeing’s Even Bigger Wonderland

Lockheed was not alone. Douglas hid its Santa Monica plant under burlap stretched over chicken wire on about 400 poles, with help from Warner Bros. set designers; the result was reportedly so convincing that pilots landed at the wrong field. Consolidated Vultee, North American and Northrop plants were camouflaged too.

The most elaborate disguise was in Seattle. From May 1942 the Army Corps of Engineers covered Boeing’s Plant 2, which built B-17s, with a fake neighbourhood designed by John Stewart Detlie, a former MGM art director and Academy Award nominee. It covered 26 acres of roof and included about 300 artificial trees, 53 houses, two dozen garages, a store and a gas station, laid out along streets with names such as Burlap Boulevard.

Was It Ever Needed?

No Japanese bomber ever appeared over a West Coast city, and Japanese reconnaissance aircraft almost certainly never saw the fake villages. Boeing revealed its camouflage publicly in June 1945, the Corps of Engineers began dismantling the villages that July, and by the end of 1946 the last of the West Coast camouflage was gone. Whether it would have worked against a real attack is impossible to know. As an insurance policy, though, it was one of the strangest collaborations of the war: Hollywood stagecraft protecting the factories that built America’s air power.

What the Viral Post Gets Right

The essentials are correct: after Pearl Harbor, the Army had Lockheed’s Burbank plant hidden under a fake neighbourhood built with help from Hollywood studio artists, with chicken-feather trees and clotheslines, while P-38s were built underneath, and Lockheed itself tells the story of the general who could not find the plant from 5,000 feet. Two details need care. The factory was not literally beneath a neighbourhood but under a camouflage canopy dressed to look like one, and Lockheed’s history calls Ohmer a colonel, while other accounts say he was a major when the work began in 1942. And the claim that this could only happen in California is not quite right: Boeing did it on an even larger scale in Seattle.

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Sources: Lockheed Martin, “Lockheed During World War II: Operation Camouflage”; Bill Yenne, “Wonderland: The Fake Cities on America’s West Coast”, Warfare History Network (2018); Wikipedia, Boeing Plant 2 and Lockheed P-38 Lightning.