54 November/December 2020

A

AS THE SUN ROSE OVER THE HORIZON,

a Japanese aviator worked to get

his bearings above enemy territory.

Anti-aircraft shells rocked his f loat-

plane 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 Army engi-

neer Colonel John F. Ohmer Jr.,

though the intended mark for his

greatest illusion—the Imperial Jap-

anese Navy—had yet to actually

appear. The art and science of cam-

ouf lage 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 Brit-

ain’s wartime concealment efforts, he

marveled as German attackers wasted

their bombs in open fields brilliantly

attired to appear as vital targets.

As commander of the Army’s 604th

Engineer Camouf lage 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

December 7, 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 February 25, 1942, air defense

gunners around Los Angeles blasted

1,400 shells into the spotlight-pierced

night sky, chasing the ghosts of uniden-

tified 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 bat-

teries. 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 airplane-producing

facility could lengthen the war con-

siderably. If a factory like 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, raid-

ing movie studios to leverage the skills

of set designers, art directors, paint-

ers, 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 illu-

sion from building elaborate movie sets.

Some of the concealment efforts

were relatively simple. Southern Cali-

fornia aircraft-building facilities such

as Consolidated, North American, and

Northrop quickly disappeared under a

confusing web of drab paint and cam-

ouf lage 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 Mon-

ica, induced the cover-up crews to go

much further. In order to make the

big facilities vanish into their native

landscape, artists and craftsmen cre-

ated false neighborhoods on the tops

of enormous assembly buildings, com-

plete with realistic-looking streets,

trees, yards, 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 min-

utes. As Douglas Airview (a ma g a z i ne

from the Douglas Aircraft Company)

put it, “This would give defending BO

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