One square acre = 4840 square yards

I looked that up because of a post I read recently about something that took place 67 years ago.

In 1942 fear ran high that America's west coast might be attacked by the Japanese, particularly airplane manufacturing facilities like the Lockheed plant in Burbank, California. So the Army Corp of Engineers, with the help of scenic designers, painters, art directors, landscape artists, carpenters, lighting experts and prop men from MGM, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Universal did something about it.

They made Lockheed disappear.

Well, it didn't disappear from the earth, but it did disappear when viewed from the air, where Japanese bombers would have been looking from. The entire plant was camouflaged to look like farmland and a rural housing subdivision. Now remember, an airplane manufacturing plant is not one simple factory building. It's a complex consisting of many buildings. There are buildings for fabricating parts and assembly, huge hangers for aircraft, offices for designers and support staff, runways, and parking lots for the thousands who work there. It's spread out over acres and acres. Lockheed was at least 25 acres. So this was a huge undertaking.

Which brings me back to the title of this post... if one square acre = 4840 square yards, then twenty five acres equals...

wait for it...

121,000 square yards.

One hundred and twenty one thousand square yards of camouflage, rolled out and tented over every building, parking lot, runway and road in the place. By hand. And painted to look like haystacks, barns and split level ranch houses.

This is stunning, completely stunning in its simplicity. I can hear the briefing now...

"Colonel, how are we going to do this?"

"Well General, we'll get a hundred thousand yards of fabric, and paint it to look like a bunch of houses and farms. Then we'll roll it out over everything and hold it up with a bunch of sticks"

"Sounds good Colonel. Dismissed!"

It sounds crazy, but you know what? It worked. It worked brilliantly. Look at the pictures.

This is before...


And this after... almost the same angle as the before picture. Where did Lockheed go?








Lockheed was under all that stuff... see?








So simple in execution, yet so effective. This was the cutting edge technology of the time. Chicken wire, glue, wood, nails, some paint, and hard work. I don't guess this would hold up today, but in 1942 it was perfect.

Could you tell the difference from the air?