TARGET 100915

Hiding An Entire Wartime Factory Complex

How do you hide something like this from aerial attack?

Make it look like this.

During WW II, after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Lockheed Aircraft Company was an obvious target for any Japanese bombers which might invade the U.S. Drawing on the movie industry's ability to create props and scenes of non-existant locations, they decided to use a version of special effects to hide the entire factory complex.

They covered it with camouflage netting to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

The real world beneath the false one.

Everything beneath the canopy remains in the same place, and in at least one or two spots, it remains uncovered, but unless the Japanese had time to look closely at every inch of the American landscape from above, there wouldn't have been much of a chance of them spotting the factory. But it's all still there!

The rest of the entire plant, loading area, highway, all the industrial-looking buildings around the plant, and even the railroad siding are also beneath the canopy. The grass camouflage, commonly used in combat during the war, was employed here to make it look like a rural neighborhood.

They even went through camouflaging this slanted roof, which you can see in the first aerial shot next to the main part of the factory. It looks weird from here, but it looked real above!

They built model houses on the roof of the plant, and then set up trees to appear to blend in with the grass. It was modeled off of the surrounding landscape, as it was before it became a suburban landscape.

The parking lot was also covered.

The huge parking lot was relatively well guarded, and the engineers even went to the extent of moving cars around on the surrounding, uncamoflaged streets to appear to be parked and driven, as though there was normal, rural activity. You can see the parking lot in the "before" picture at the top of this page, off to the left of the factory.

The parking lot

As you can see, the cover from below looks relatively translucent, as if it should've been see-through, but as soon as you get above the canopy - as you can see from the rooftop shot - the canopy appeared very similar to grass, even at close distances. From a high-flying bomber, it was indistinguishable from real ground.

The planes being manufactured

The whole purpose of this, obviously, was to protect the planes that the Lockheed plant was creating, most specifically, the P-38 Fighter, which had multiple uses, including bombing, ground attack, and air to air combat. These planes shot down more Japanese aircraft than anything else in WWII. Lockheed was also producing several Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and many other aircraft. The Army didn't necessarily camouflage all of these plants across the United States, but felt it was necessary for Lockheed due to its proximity to the West coast.

Unfortunately the Lockheed Burbank plant is gone now. All of these buildings were torn down in the 1990's. The old P-38 production line and original Lockheed buildings are now a shopping center called the Empire Center. They have depictions of various Lockheed aircraft on the parking light poles, much the same as the Disneyland parking lot used to have characters.

FEEDBACK MAP

To learn more about Lockheed plant and its WWII protection, take a look at the following web sites:

Amusing Planet (How the Army hid the plant)
A gallery of pictures of the plant, planes, people
GoDickson.com (A map of the plant)
GoDickson.com (Wartime employees bid the company farewell)

Many thanks to Ray McClure for providing this Target of the Week