How Hollywood Set Designers Hid America's Wwii Aircraft Factories

As 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.

- Cory Graff

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.