January 24, 2024 • 51 mins
In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, paranoia reigned across the western US -- and the country entirely. From California to Washington, civilians and the military alike were terrified that another attack was imminent. The country's aircraft manufacturers were prominent sitting ducks, and too inconvenient to move. With instructions to spin up manufacturing as soon as possible, the clock was ticking and no one was sure what to do. Enter John Francis Ohmer, Jr. -- a veteran, amateur stage magician and man obsessed with camouflage. He traveled across the states, pitching a crazy plan: "What if," he asked, "we keep all the aircraft facilities where they are... and just disguise them?" Tune in as Ben, Noel and Max explore the strange story of Boeing's Wonderland in part one of this two-part series.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Big, big shout out to our super producer,
mister Max Willims.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
What isn't that a thing? Is like a military thing?
Who Ah?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, there's whoa, there's Hurrah, there's Nathan Otowski.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hey, what it's like one of them's for Navy seals,
particularly in particular.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Believe yeah, I believe. I believe there are a couple
of different ones. It depends on the branch. And one
thing we can tell you folks as civilians, just ask,
don't they're gonna take it the wrong way if you
if you do an oohrah when you should do a hoorah?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
What about a huzzah? You can never go wrong with
a hussa. I like as I like us very ren fair. Yeah,
I've been bowling. You're no brown, and we are here
in person. Nathan Otowski by the way, as a dear
friend and coworker of ours. Not that people don't yell
Nathan Otowski in the arm service. That'd be cool. I
was about to say, it really does work as kind
of an exclamatory. Yes, my goodness, love it, love the energy.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
This is a two parter that has a lot of
returning or turning guests and events.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Today we're coming in hot with that big bowing energy.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna make it off the plane,
hopefully in one piece. Boeing's been getting u Boeing has
been getting put through the pr ringer.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Oh wait, because of like shoddy workmanship. Okay, let's not
blame it on the folks to build the planes. It's
more probably a top down issue, perhaps with maintenance and
checking on things like windows, seals, And wasn't there something
about a door flying open? Yes?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yes, fight club style and regulation and why regulation is important.
We've talked about this on one of our other shows.
Stuff they don't want you to know. We also are
returning to some wacky World War II stuff we wanted
to w w way, sorry, perfect, We're returning to this
(02:28):
because we wanted to explore a story about Bowie that
is not the the unfortunate stuff you're hearing in the
news today.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Folks, also being what this episode is, is this some
sort of anniversary It.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Is our Washington episode? Oh snat, yeah, take that sous John. Yeah, yeah,
he gave that up long ago. It was always a ruse.
But I'm holding out. We're taking it serious. We're taking it.
We keep our promises. I have an entire doc that's right,
crack at all, that's right.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We're gonna have to eventually expand globally, like we have
to get to territories once we run out of states,
and then it's gonna be wild.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Giving me ideas right now.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I love it. I love you know what. We're idea people, Max,
We just hand out ideas. We're regular Don Draper's orphan factory.
Oh boy, Yeah, that's the name of my new noise
metal band.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yes, that's not just a phrase that I threw at you.
We discussed this off Mike, but today on Mike we're
discussing something different, some very crafty tactics deployed by the
Boeing Company that folds in the kind of stuff that
I think we all love, uh, involving theme park design.
That's right, Yes, I do love this.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
What a great way in because this takes us back
to the time when everybody was striving for some sort
of edge in World War two.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Supremacy.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, a lot of out of the box ideas like
balloon bombs. We did an episode on that the bombing
runs in Oregon that Japan very unsuccessful.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
They were bomb bombs. They bombed, they bombed on the
bomb run.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, and so the bomba aside, we do know that
people started taking they took the threats of these bombs
very seriously, and they started going through some dare we say,
ridiculous steps to protect themselves. And one of those things,
the reason we're mentioning theme parts here, one of these
(04:25):
things was a move of subterfuge, right, a feat of Imagineeri.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Telling lies no Papa. According to Rare Historical Photos, which
is a beautifully descriptive name for a website, Deceiving the
enemy as to what you are doing is not new.
Trying to hide positions from observation is not new. Trying
to hide whole factories from aerial bombing during the Second
(04:52):
World War, wait for it was new?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, yeah, Okay, So it's true story, folks. The US
tried to hide their aircraft factories in plane site p
l a inn.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's a site gag, you got it.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So they're in a pickle because they have to have
these factories. It's a huge infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And very large. They're very visual.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, yeah, they're not. They're not easy to move, right.
You can't just hop on, you can't just toss them
on a pickup truck. So they had to figure out
a way to hide the factories. Uh, and they pulled
it off. We want to give a big special shout
out to Bill Yane over at Boeing one, who wrote
Boeing Wonderland the Fake Cities on America's West Coast for
(05:44):
Warfare History Network.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
That's one of our primary sources. Well, it's one of
our primary sources because Bill, I believe, is the descendant
of somebody who actually was directly involved. So I mean
that's the best primary source we could possibly have here.
So we will continue to shout out Bill throughout this
because we are liberally pulling from his incredible work and research.
(06:07):
Bill Big Bill, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Wild Bill Wild, Bill son of the employee at Boeing.
PLAYT two really quickly before we jump into it. Have
you guys seen the television series The English it is?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I believe it. It was a BBC production. I think
it's on Amazon now. Its stars Oh my goodness, she
played Mary Poppins and the Mary Poppins reboot. She's married
to the guy for who plays the dude who looks
at the camera all the time in the office, who's
also i think Jack Reacher or something. Anyway, I'm not
forgetting is her name anyhow. It's a Western and it
(06:43):
is incredible. Emily Blood, Thank you, Emily Blood. It is
a Western and it is sweeping, John. It is sweeping
in its scope, absolutely beautiful cinematography, music, and the performances.
And it's another in what we're seeing in a long
line or medium line of shows that really show accurate
depictions of the indigenous experience really really dogs lately, and
(07:08):
this one does that as well. And it has some
of the most menacing big bads that you get a
couple of them throughout the series, and it's a limited series.
Get you to a streamer and watch this as soon
as you can. Brought I don't even remember. I just
wanted to Yeah, I just wanted to share about No,
(07:29):
there was something that came to mind just just about
the American wests and our fascination with it, and it's how,
you know, it has always been a place of innovation
and striving and kind of you know, the sort of
personification of what is quote unquote the American dream and spirit,
which is oftentimes a freaking nightmare right right.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And also, uh, as anybody because a fan of history
knows the weird thing about these so called wild West
is a very short period of time in American history.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
But I agree with you the I know what it was,
you called him wild Bill, Yeah, and that's what That's
what we got there. That's perfect.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Uh. This is also uh, I agree with the point
about the romanticization of the West as as this idea
and this symbol, and that holds true even even today.
Like we have to realize that during World War Two,
as weird as it sounds, people were extremely, extremely worried
(08:31):
that Japanese forces could get across the Pacific because they
did it in Hawaii.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
It's an entry point. I mean, it is sort of
the frontier of Like That's why I mean, I think
it has so much romantic kind of thinking around is
because it is sort of like the end of the
line or the beginning of the line, you know, depending
on me. Obviously there's the East coast too, but the
West Coast is where this literal enemy that we were
facing would potentially access and invade our country.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, and picture it, you know, as a Bill is
writing in his work for Warfare History Network. Within just
a month of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese
forces conquered Manila in the Philippines, and then Hong Kong
and then Singapore fell. So there was a lot of expansion,
a lot of violence. And you can't blame people living
(09:19):
in the US for happening by the West coast and
looking out at the horizon, as Bill says, and half
expecting to see a Japanese invasion fleet.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
You know what's interesting is, you know, there's this new
Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus one that everyone's screaming about. I
haven't seen that very so that's what I've heard. I'm
very excited to see it.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
But I liked Monarch too, by the way, to show
this show, Yes, I mentioned that because Godzilla has always
been kind of a stand in for nuclear war and
you know, attacks from outside, you know, in the Japanese
kind of mindset.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
But you also picture that view of a beach and
the horizon and the things coming towards you, you know,
this impending doom. So I think Godzilla could also be
sort of a stand in for the idea of like
an invading force. You know, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
I think it's a powerful, powerful symbol. And weird thing
about Japan, Godzilla is super popular. Like it's not a stereotype,
it's not weyu boo stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
People in Japan get excited about Godzilla. Godzilla is awesome,
and there's different flavors of him. I'm trying this new one.
He's a real pill. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And then there's the force of nature one the Great
Defender Cang versus Godzilla is great. But people right now
are they're having that moment you described. They're looking out
and they're just waiting to see a disturbance in the water,
a ship on the horizon. And civilians are affected by
this propagandas everywhere Japanese Americans are getting interned.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
In just a stunning misstep of justice.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Prison camps right right, yeahah, and the top brass is
also very worried about this, just like American civilians. Let's
introduce General John help me with this one, John, liz Ny.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That's a risk. That is what you'd call unga paka.
You know, it's like they just a hat on a hat,
like wouldn't Lesnie be enough. It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It feels like it feels like if you went into
a really authentic Italian restaurant, they would say, oh, we
don't serve lasagna here, we serve the authentic dish.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
We serve, we serve they shall we served that a
really unauthentic Italian place too, Like they just don't know
how to pronounce that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
We cannot legally call this lasagna. Uh so for tax purposes,
it's Lesney.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And much like revenge is to dish best served cold.
But we do have General John Lesesney do it, do it?
And he is the commander of the fourth U. S
Army and the Western Defense Command, and he's his imagination
is running a little bit wild during these times as well,
much like the civilians who are picturing these invading, you know,
(12:09):
forces coming in from the beaches. But he's someone that
can actually do something about it. Yes, yeah, he has
shaped his thinking and his strategy. Yes, he has the
agency here. And he is super paranoid.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
He's staying up awake at night, worried about spies and
sabatures in every nook and cranny of the West Coast.
And his fear is what he uses to justify the
enforcement of Executive Order nine zero sixty six. This is
the one that led to the prison camps, the internment
(12:45):
of all Japanese American civilians, including of course people who
just had Japanese grandparents. You know, they're like, dude, I'm
from Pasadena and they locked him up.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, I mean we know that the thinking around race
and ethnicity during these times was very black and white.
I mean, no pun intended there.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Shout out to George. Oh, Goshulu, George, Ta kai George.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That's right. But de Witt he also ordered that the
nineteen forty two Rose Bowl football game be moved away
from Pasadena because he thought that it would be a
pretty excellent target for a Japanese attack, and perhaps in
its symbolism, you know, in what it represented, and also,
(13:33):
you know, obviously a large crowd a massed in one place.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Important side note right here, do you guys know who
won the twenty twenty four Rose.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Bull I have absolutely no could I possible? University of Michigan, right,
Maxis you really had to drop that? Yeah? This this
Brie's been ready.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
I wrote this brief for when I was going to
be in Seattle on October and we're just now recording it.
We could have recorded it then and I wouldn't be
able to celebrate that my University of Michigan Wolverine.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
I actually for you, I'll text Alexis to a code
name Doc Holliday Jackson over on stuff they want you
to know because she is from Michigan and like you, Max, Well, actually,
like everybody I met from Michigan super into Michigan based
sports teams, so she probably already knows. But this point
about overarching paranoia almost Orwellian in its scope. It reminds
(14:28):
me a lot of the months after the attacks on
September eleventh, and every news channel we went to, every
local affiliate. You would have someone far inland, in a
rural area and they would say, well, the terrorists are
going to hit our town next. You know, our town
with a population of seventeen hundred, right, Because I distinctly remember,
(14:53):
I think was a Fox News affiliate. I was interviewing
a lady somewhere in Oklahoma, I want to say, and
she was worried terrors were going to attack because there
was a new Walmart being built.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, paranoia can get very compartmentalized in that way and
can cause some pretty serious myopic thinking, you know. But
this wasn't unfounded though, as the thing, I mean, we
had a precedent, you know, with Pearl Harbor, with all
of these events in the world going on, and the
power of the Japanese you know military, I mean they
(15:24):
were good. They were good at what they did, right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, they had a lot of shock and awe. They
had overwhelming forces. And as the general here he is,
he is incredibly aware of the possibility of being overrun
by Japanese forces. He's looking at his ground troops and
he's saying, look, all the folks under my command, that's
not enough. You know, if they roll through the way
(15:56):
they rolled through Manila.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well, and they not only were strategic, quite advanced, and
technologically quite advanced, they had, you know, soldiers pilots that
were literally willing to die for the cause, not just
to put themselves in harm's way, to be the bomb,
to be the bullets. You know, it's pretty powerful. Just
(16:17):
and knowing that, you would think, well, what won't they
do exactly what are they capable of?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And he shares this concern. As paranoid as it may sound,
this was a very understandable and common worry amid civilians
and the military alike. And it was backed up by
Japanese actions. Japanese submarine shelled different oil storage facilities ten
miles from Santa Barbara, California. So they're in America's back door.
(16:47):
And that was on February twenty third. I want to say,
so the next night, people are so freaked out that
gunners who are keeping the night watch are convinced. They
see I almost set a flock and ar moda of
Japanese bombers heading over Los Angeles, and so they start
(17:07):
shooting off aircraft shells. They don't wait to verify, and
they start flooding the night with search lights, and people
are thinking of the London Blitz.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I was about to say, I mean, there's precedent for
this kind of stuff too, that's already been kind of
seared into the American consciousness. You know, the idea of
these blitzes leveling cities, creating sort of like images of
Hell on Earth scenarios.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, and it's very very logical. You know what happened
in Hawaii, you know what happened in Hong Kong, in
the Philippines. There is absolutely no reason to assume California
would be immune to those kinds of actions. And this
is where we introduced the Navy Secretary Frank Knox. He announces, hey, guys,
the Battle of Los Angeles. That's a false alarm, even
(17:57):
though by this point people are already saying, like, hey,
was UFO.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
That's right, we talked about it. I got to say,
that's the Battle of Los Angeles. Something we've talked about
on stuff that I want you to know, because there were,
you know, within a vacuum, you know, you kind of
conspiracies run amok. You know, people start to think about
what it could have been. They're certain looking for something
with search lights, you know, going wild, shooting our artillery rounds,
you know, into the sky and there's nothing there. But
that's what paranoia does. And when you have people who
(18:23):
are really paranoid at the top of the of the
food chain, right, crazy things can happen.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, and this LA situation is a false alarm. But
the Santa Barbara situation is not. This is the attack
on the oil reserves, right, this is the attack on
Fort Stevens.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Oh my goodness. Okay, there was another thing we talked
about earlier. Where there were bombings of oil reserves, So
you're right. We talked about the Santa Barbara incident where
Japanese submarine I seventy five destroyed oil reserves. Now also
on the West coast, a little further up north, though,
we've got activities of this same kind happening in Washington State.
(19:03):
Japanese submarine I twenty five attacks Fort Stevens two nights
in a row. Yeah, it's looking ugly.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And then in the same month in June, Japanese forces
we talked about this in previous episodes, did they invade
and occupy the two Aleutian Islands. So check out our
episode of the Battle of the Aleutian Islands. And this
is terrifying to Uncle Sam because now there is an
active Japanese base on the doorstep of Alaska. Merchant ships
(19:37):
are being sunk left and right off the West coast.
Attacks are coming from the air. There were these couple
of these bombing missions over southwestern Oregon, which we covered
in another episode, and that's actually kind of a wholesome
story that one absolutely the bombing goes so terribly wrong,
and then the guy who who bombed on behalf of
(19:59):
the Japanese, a gentleman named Nobu Fujita. He ends up
becoming like the most popular dude in that town. It's
kind of that's worth The reason is.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It is, it has it has a cuddly ending. And again,
huge shoutouts to Bill Yen for a lot of this chronology.
And you know, I mean, we've talked about all of
these events separately, but it really does take a very
discerning eye and a historians kind of mind to put
all the stuff together, you know, to create kind of
a bigger picture of what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Agreed, Agreed, And for each of these things that we
can verify actually occurring, there were at the time hundreds
of other weird rumors, you know what I mean, like well,
the Japanese are getting into our schools, or they're going
to get in.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
The water infiltrating you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's
it's like Red Scare type stuff, only worse because this
is a hot war, right you know, And.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
So we've established this deeply, deeply paranoid vibe of the US,
especially on the West coast in nineteen forty two. At
this point, Axis armies both in the European and Pacific
Theater seem unstoppable, and people are beginning to think increasingly
(21:14):
it's only a matter of time before the shoe drops
and America is attacked directly. And so shout out to
one of our favorite catchphrases. America decides to beef up
and they're like, we got to get this infrastructure going.
This had been this has been kind of in the
works already. I think it was nineteen forty so before
(21:38):
Pearl Harbor, President FDR said, look, my fellow Americans, we
need like fifty thousand fighter planes.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, that's an insane number. You know, that's a lot
of the standards of those days for sure. And at
that point, just to hit home, like what a huge
ask that was, the Navy and the Army Air Corps
had less than ten thousand. I would say, of what
that number would be around a fifth. It's a hell
of a spinoff, big time. Yeah, And you know, we
(22:08):
know manufacturing technology has come a long way since then,
but it still takes a long time to churn out
these types of you know, aircraft. This would be a
damn near impossible ask, you know, in the time they
would need to accomplish it.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, this is like a new deal level of centralized planning,
which is that kind of military direction is a little
bit too close to socialism for a lot of FDR's opponents.
But everybody decides to kind of put these internal disagreements
to one side and say, look, we can figure it
(22:44):
out after the war. Right now, regardless of your political ideology,
your socioeconomic demographic, we can all agree that aircraft factories
are the most important thing we have going on right now.
We need to mobilize private industries and force them to
make planes. This is a really interesting time for car
(23:06):
manufacturers too, because car manufacturing figures out, Yeah, they're making
tanks now.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Same with like I mean, on the other side, we
had in Japan, you know, like Japanese toy factory and
stuff that we're taking their tin and using it to
make these things. And then once they maybe it was
the other way around after the war ended, then the
ten was repurposed to start making the toys. It's interesting stuff,
just the way like you know we see it with
like Coca Cola even, you know, and like companies that
(23:33):
were pivoting you know, their production lines to serve the war.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I know, Adidas's factory was it used to make anti
tank weapons because it was like Audi Dostler's wife I believe,
ran on front of like US tanks to stop them
from blowing up. It's like it's actually a shoe factory.
Let us just make shoes, and like that's what's spared
that factory.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Well, that's a really good point, Max, because what we're
talking about today is more of that kind of bait
and switch, kind of subterfused, less about disguising one type
of factory as another, but about disguising it as something
completely different. We're going to get to that totally. Let's
hit a little bit of a bit more of the
history before we get there, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
So nineteen forty, the US administration or the FDR administration
creates something called the National Defense Advisory Commission, and they're
supposed to herd the cats of this massive level of
infrastructure expansion, and Congress just rubber stamps a bunch of stuff.
If you can get Uncle sand to open his wallet,
then there's not really a limit to how much you'll
(24:32):
spend if he's interested. And so they start this new bureaucracy.
Because it's still a government outfit, it's called the Defense
Plant Corporation. It's operated by existing manufacturers. The separation between government,
government and business is very blurred during this time.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Oh and we got another big bill type figure entering
the chat. Roosevelts brought in a hind him William Signius.
Big Bill Old Knudsen sounds like a kind of guy
that would run like a dealership in Fargo. I think so.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I was thinking that or a deli that's known for
egregious sandwich Knudsence. Yes, is that a thing already? Well,
I think it feels like it is.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
There's a TV show or a movie where there's a
family called the Knutsens, and it's just it's escaping me. AnyWho,
This guy understands the industry of mass production. He comes
from the automotive industry that we're just talking about. He
was an executive and he was the president of a
little company called General Motors. Never heard of it. Yeah,
(25:36):
since the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty
seven was actually the year that my father was born.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Interesting fact, getting to know you, getting to know all
about you. No, that's interesting, and also it's also it
reminds me two of the car stuff. We did episodes
of this on car stuff because they have a huge
resource allocation problem. For anybody's a fan of something like
sim city or civilization, all resource management games. Ninety percent
(26:04):
of all the manufacturing capability for aircraft in the US
nineteen forty ninety percent of it is in five states,
and sixty five percent of this manufacturing power is along
or near the coast. California, often thought to be the
most vulnerable state on the West Coast, has forty four
(26:26):
percent of all the aircraft making stuff. They're very visible,
they're very vulnerable. The same battle group that had attacked
Pearl Harbor had just been camped out two hundred miles
off the Malibu.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Coast, and.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
If they attacked, then pretty much most of the US
airplane manufacturing ability would be gone in moments. And everybody
knew this. This was an acknowledged fact. They said, we're
gonna build these factories Inland. We're gonna go to Illinois, Michigan,
(27:05):
shut out max Missouri and Texas.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
But like you said, Noel, they still need time. You
can't just do this by Tuesday. No, No, this is
very nuts and bolts literally. So it was clear that
this is going to require a lot of planning. Ka
Nutsten obviously had the smarts, you know, to understand the
organization of a giant company that manufactures, but they also
(27:31):
needed someone that really could dial in the logistics of
all of this stuff, you know, in reality on the grounds.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, they needed a guy who thought out of the box,
and they found that person, Major John Francis Omer Junior.
Let's learn a little bit about him. He's an Ohio
guy born in Dayton, eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Buckeye state, isn't that one? Ohio is?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Cool, and he is.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
His father is an inventor, manufacturer, a business owner. And
John gets a master's degree in engineering, sort of following,
you know, his father's inventive footsteps. He has attended Cornell University,
he joins the military, uh service in World War One,
(28:17):
and then he when he comes back from the war,
he's in the family business. But he's still he's still
a member of the Reserve Corps.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
You know. It's interesting. I was thinking about how, when
we talk about the history of the country at this time,
a lot of the top minds and top you know
kind of thinkers were military officials as well, because it
was just the thing to do, right you know. I
mean it was like, yeah, if you want to be
considered a team player, you were going to join, you know,
(28:47):
the military. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
It's interesting you mention that, because I think culturally in
the West, for a very long time, it was considered
the right and moral thing. It was like it was
a right of passage. You didn't need a law that
said everybody had to join the military because it was
expected to do so. It wasn't until the US became
increasingly siding Vietnam War, Drean War and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, people really kind of trusted the government to a
certain degree, and at least on paper, you know, the
government was maybe a little more trustworthy. I don't know
what you think that's me. I don't know. I don't know, man,
we I mean, neither of us were there.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Uh, it's it's probably demographically dependent, right, So I'm sure
if you're a straight white dude, then things are better.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Opportunities abound. There we go, there we go.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
And so, uh, there's another fact here that just really
sticks out to me. Our buddy Omer is a renaissance man.
He loves photography. He is an amateur magician.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
I love magic so much. I don't trust age magician. Hey,
that's fair. I find him smug enough. Hey, look, it's
all it's all in your stage banter. But I've always
been fascinated with sleight of hand and like you know,
stage magic, close close up magic is super cool. I
know one cool card trick where I can make a
card disappear, but that's all I've got. But I'm big
(30:13):
fan of that, and it just you know, I see
what you're saying. It is a it is a discipline
that is entirely based on bullshiting you. But that kind
of serves, right, and we're talking about here. It's perfect casting, right.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
So he uh, he starts getting interested in different other
artistic endeavors.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And this is a true story, folks. He gets super.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Into camouflage like that becomes his hobby.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
And I've just pictoried.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Like if online dating was a thing at this point,
I would love to see this guy's profile where he's like,
my interest include camouflage, just the idea of it's a
cool look.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
It's easy to take it for granted today because you
think about camouflage and you think about it more as
like an interesting fashion choice reality, but it is in
and of itself a kind of technology, and we start
talking about things like dazzle camouflage where they use these
weird striped patterns on warships that they borrowed from the wild.
They borrowed from the way zebras are able to kind
(31:18):
of blend in in a herd and with like the
horizon or whatever. Really really interesting and it required a
lot of creative outside the box thinking the kind of
stuff you might associate with, like the imagineers of Disney fame,
you know, who created things like basically visual effects technologies
that didn't exist yet or would take you know, existing
(31:40):
things like the Peppers Ghost, you know, sort of effect
where you could create what looks like a hologram and
just take it to the next level.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And he becomes a one man pitch army. He's always
trying to demonstrate camouflage techniques and he's saying, look, I
studied the success of the Royal Air Force during the
Battle of Britain in nineteen forty. Uh huh, just so,
And he says, look, let me show you guys what
(32:08):
I'm thinking about. And so he's at Fort Eustace, Virginia
making his pitch. He goes to different Air Force bases
like backxwell Field and Alabama and people in general seem
to agree it's a good idea, but they don't have
the budget for it.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, so the money's going into making the damn things
fighting the actual fight, being as prepared as possible militarily speaking,
you know, to camouflage and all of this stuff. Well,
very important. Clearly they made a whole bureaucracy with factory
Defense in the name. You know, it was important. But
he had to kind of sell the brass on some
(32:46):
of these more unusual, innovative kind of ideas.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
One hundred percent. Yeah, So he perseveres and he's traveling
all around the country pitching this stuff. In March of
nineteen forty one, like so many other people who are
in the reserves, he is ordered back to active duty,
called to serve, Called to serve, and he gets sent
to Hawaii to study defenses as part of his work
(33:12):
under the Chief of Engineers Operations and Training Section. So
he gets out there to Wahoo and he says, look,
here's what we need to do to camouflage Wheeler Field,
which is only twelve miles north of Pearl Harbor. And
they say this is great. Oh, you're a really smart guy.
How much does it cost? And he says fifty grand
(33:33):
and they say go home.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Yeah, I mean maybe we should and maybe we should.
Can we do a boop? Can we have fession? I
think you know, we know a little bit about military spending, dude,
So what are we talking here?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
In nineteen forty one, fifty thousand dollars is worth one
point zero four million today, which is high for like
a person, but for the military.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, we hear about budgets in the trillions, you know,
but again it's a different time and we're not actively.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Five thousand dollars hammer or specific hammer they have to
use on sealth bombers that won't do something.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Man. We heard a story a while back about these
like coffee mugs, like they have like electronics built in
them to keep your coffee warm. It was a story
about waste in military spending, and that was a big topic.
And I think that they spent like hundreds of thousands
of dollars and they went to waste as well.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I believe that was part of it a bit. There's
a lot of crypt too, and there's a well, there's
stories to be told about that.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
All that to say, though, one point five million to
make sure your factories don't get blown up. Seems like
a pretty reasonable ask. I think maybe they just weren't
so sure about his methods.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And here's where it becomes a parable of sorts because
after they turn him down and say, okay, we get it.
You like magic, we're not camouflaging this. Just a few
weeks later, it's December seventh and the airfield gets attacked yep,
and it lost most of its planes.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And it was the same you know, group of fighter
pilots battalion or whatever you want to call it that
had destroyed Pearl Harbor. So at this point the brass
are a little bit more open to some of these
outside of the box ideas because they were desperate and
they realized that whatever they were doing wasn't working and
(35:32):
they needed somebody to kind of come in and rewrite
the game plan.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And General de Witt, you know, like cut back to
him in the film here, he is bonkers by this point.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
He's the one that's been already entertaining all of these
paranoid Yes, scare we stay delusions. But again, is it
just being really prepared exact or is it like, you know,
are you losing your marbles a little bit.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Paranoia doesn't mean you're wrong, is the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
So and when your paranoia is confirmed, it just deep
we're seeing. And so our buddy DeWitt is saying, I
knew it. I'm not crazy. Omer.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I need you to develop a camouflage plan for the
entirety of the West Coast. And Omer, now our magician
protagonist to this story, he says, this is great. I
have been thinking about this all the time. I'm not
sure if you're aware, general, but camouflage is my primary hobby.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, at this point, and then in two since I
was a kid, I could lay completely still under the
cover as my parents wouldn't even know I was there.
And so this is a dream job for this guy.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
And now we get to the point where Uncle Sam
opens his wallet. Price is no object, and so this
guy starts saying, all right, I am going to camouflage
the entire aircraft industry of California. I'm going to show
you a demonstration on one airfield, and then we're going
to work out, you know, how how we maintain a
(37:01):
working air field while still camouflaging it. And this is
crazy because he goes to Hollywood, so creative, I think
that's cool.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, it was not for nothing that I was mentioning
the Disney imagineers and just how so much of the
thinking behind magic and stagecraft things like that goes into
the design of theme parks. It's all about it's not
exactly camouflage, but it is about, like, for example, hiding
infrastructure in plain sight. You know, a lot of the
work that goes into, you know, designing ride queues and
(37:41):
things at theme parks is to cover up stuff that
may be considered unsightly or a peak behind the curtain
that they don't want the visitors to have. So there
is a lot of overlap in that guy or making
a widespread surveillance. Yeah, and it also reminds me of
things we see in modern cities in the West today,
(38:01):
which is, you know, a facade buildings that are entirely
to disguise infrastructure. He did a whole episode on that
with stuff they I want you to know, we actually
went and discovered some of these fake buildings in person.
I think there's a video of that still on the internet. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Shout out to a con ed for not arresting us.
They did chase us off, they shoot us. They did aggressively.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
They did politely but firmly shoot the heck out of us.
So so Omer goes to Hollywood and he talks to
movie set designers, he talks to scene painters, and these
are the top talent of their respective fields. And all
of the major Hollywood studios are super duper down to
(38:43):
help with this because it's great pr for this, absolutely,
you know what I mean. And then later, because of
the way Hollywood works, later they can reach out to
a general or something and say like, hey, Kember, are
a couple of tanks we're filming a think.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Well, we already know, and I think again, start keep
invoking stuff I don't want you to know. But we've
read an episode in that about the cozy relationship between
the military and movie studios.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, as long as the deal is you can get
as a film studio, you can get us military stuff
in your in your story, so long as the military
looks good.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah, they probably got like a style guide or something.
Oh sure, they just distribute. By the way, I think,
I was texted you and matt Our co host and
something that I want you to know that I was
at a TJ Max and I saw which is where
you can find kind of second like tier kind of
toys and stuff that nobody wants of the other story.
And I saw this line of army toys officially branded
(39:38):
army toys with things like you know, tanks and and uh,
personnel carriers and things like that. It was very interesting.
It sounds uh, it sounds fast, borderline propagandistic. Well I
would even short yeah, but but okay, so everybody's rolling
out the red carpet.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
The US government is saying take all the money. W
the big wigs in Hollywood are saying, let's hook you
up with anyone who can help. And if for a
time this becomes like a very very busy, big film
production to turn Marchfield into a working demonstration of these
(40:17):
camouflage ideas, and people in the Army are like, oh, geez,
looked at We're at all Hollywood studio now. Eventually they
disguised thirty four different air bases in a couple of
different states, Washington, Oregon, California, all up and down the
West coast. And the biggest ticket item isn't the airfields themselves,
(40:41):
it's the manufacturing plants like Lockheed in Burbank or North
American aviation inglewood, because again, most of the manufacturing capability
is there in just those five.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, and there was another story we did about how
during World War Two, I believe it was Pairs, they
built like a tiny version of Paris that from the
sky would appear to be the actual Paris, and they
turned all the actual lights of the city of Paris
off and lit up this sort of facsimile, sort of
(41:13):
miniature version, and that also worked. You know, this is
practical effects we're talking about here. I think that's why
this one is such a neat crossover between military history
and the history of you know, effects and illusion, because
that's exactly what they did. They cloaked the factories by
essentially building I'm imagining on their roof these kind of
(41:36):
facsimiles of suburbs, so that an airplane flying at an
altitude of around five thousand feet that's what it would
look like. And they knew exactly what that distance, what
kind of view that distance would provide, and they tailored
it accordingly, right.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Because remember a lot of enemy aircraft they're hunting by sight,
you know what I mean, So if you can manipulate
their perspective, then you're going to come out the winner.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
This is kind of what you'd call syops, right, yeah,
a little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're monkeying with people's
expectations and their senses, you know.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah, it's a it's a kissing cousin to syops, and
it's just it's defensive rather than offensive. But we know
a lot of companies, private aircraft manufacturers, didn't want to
wait around for the military to have a plan.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
They were like, they were let in on the plan.
I guess though they sort of knew what was going
on with some of these test cases or these like
sort of case studies. Yeah, they were aware of it. Right,
it was a pilot program and they were not and
they were not all yet included. So they were like, okay,
we get the basic idea. We know kind of how
the sausage is being made. Let's make our own sausage.
(42:48):
Before you know, the sausage King comes to bestow his
sausages upon us. That's the that's omer street name. The
sausage is sausage King.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Yeah, we're not going to tell you why there's a family,
but that's what people called him. Don't fact check us, please,
So all right, so we know that we know that
Donald Douglas, the owner of Douglas Aircraft Company, decided to
be proactive about this. He is very well aware of
the camouflage conversation, the innovations that are recurring, and in
(43:19):
nineteen forty one he goes to an engineer named Frank
Colebaum and says, hey, man, I need help. Can you
put together a team that can camouflage my aircraft plant
over in Santa Monica? And Colebaum is kind of like
a consultant in this, so he says, you know what,
I know a guy who's perfect for this. His name
(43:41):
is h Roy Kelly. We're throwing a lot of characters
in the story today, but I think it's important right
for us to learn a little bit about our pal Kelly.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Absolutely and one, once again, I can't shout him out
enough Bill Yen for his incredible work in Boeing Wonderland
the Fake Cities on America's West Coast.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yeah, so Bill introduces us to Kelly. Kelly is at
this point a pretty storied guy.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Uh. He is the dude who invented ranch style homes.
Whoa did he also invent ranch style dressing?
Speaker 1 (44:14):
No?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
That was a cook who invented it in Alaska. Oh
that's right now. How did I know that? You wouldn't
know that because I hate ranch? Oh so you hate ranch?
You hate doctor Pepper. What kind of American are you? Oh? Geez,
I like a lot of other stuff. You know what
I mean? More, you know, more ranch for everybody else.
I'm just the blue cheese guy. I'm a blue cheese
got too. I'm not a huge fan of ranch either.
(44:34):
It's too tany.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
It's such a weird insists upon itself, it insists upon
its pushes.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Always is the best, either blue cheese or ranch.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
We're sorry for wing sauce. Wing sauce, just generic wingsa guys.
I gotta be honest.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
It's taken a lot of effort not to twist this
into a conversation about food.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I ate lunch. I didn't eat lunch. I didn't usually
I eat my before I get here.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
But nope, Yeah, so we we've got an appointment for
lunch later.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
But for now, what you need to know is that
ranch style homes isn't that weird. It's like the home
of jajure of America. From that point on, this is
the mid century we're talking about here. These types of
homes now, of course, are really sought after. You know,
but whenever you look at real estate listings or whatever
in Zillow, you know, so many homes today are considered
(45:28):
ranch style.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yeah, and our buddy Kelly teams up with an architect
from California landscape man named Edward Huntsman Trout.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
And this guy is famous because he's designed things like
Scripts College and Kelly and Huntsman Trout go to Hollywood
set designers, in this case specifically from Warner Brothers, and
they create a thing that goes on top of the
roof of Douglas Aircraft Factory.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Yeah, it's a tension compression in structure. It's five million
square feet of chicken wire and four hundred poles all together.
Like some of it is built to look like those
ranch style homes.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
It's from the they outside they're clearly not full houses.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, it's sort of like, I mean, we need to
think about class the golden age of Hollywood, those kind
of facades where it's it looks like the front of
us of a storefront or the atomic towns exactly much
the same as as some of the fake buildings that
we explored, you know, for stuffing. I want you to
know there are these kind of facades or something that
looked like a subway you know, entry, but it actually
(46:38):
you can't go in and behind it, it's covering up
some sort of you know, pipes or electrical equipment.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
And they fill this fake village with houses, fences, even closed.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Lines home fill town fill. Yeah. And they also an
arrested development reference to anyone screeching their head to the
point of perspective.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
They do something really clever where they're like, let's build
a street grid that looks like it goes seamlessly into
the real world in.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Smart so cool, and then the script kind of gets
flipped here from what we were talking about before. Again thanks
to Billy In for this insight. Executives at Warner Brothers
Movie Studio saw this and we're like, we want you
to do that for us, to help, you know, kind
of plus up our sound stages.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, and they were also like, look, we don't we
make movies not airplanes, but from far enough away, our
sound stages look a little bit more like aircraft hangers
than we would, like, we don't want to get bombed.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
That's a good point. They really do know if you've
ever seen like air or even like the Warner Brothers
pre roll thing that shows that kind of gauzy, gold
hued view. Those buildings, the sound stages, they look like
giant aircraft hangars from above, big rectangular buildings, all kind
of in sequence next to each other. So they were concerned, Well,
(48:04):
they weren't trying to, you know, get him to help
them make movie magic. They were trying to get him
to help keep them from maybe getting bombed accidentally.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Yeah, exactly, And that's a very smart thing to do, right,
And add to this, there's a bit of a keeping
up with the Joneses mentality because because these studio heads
are looking around and they say, dang, there's clover Field
camouflage just three miles away. Lockheed's got some dope camouflage.
(48:32):
Our studio is literally the only thing that looks like
an aircraft hanger.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's a good point.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
So we have to do it because if we don't,
we look like the target, the sitting duck.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah. No, that's very very interesting, and you know it worked.
It worked maybe in ways that were unintentionally kind of
hilariously not good. That pilots trying to land in Santa
Monica at Cloverfield would occasionally get lost and not be
able to figure out where the base was. So that's
a pretty good bell weather, you know how. You know,
(49:06):
so effective this.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
Stuff was, Yeah, they had to they had to start
doing a thing where they would have a guy at
the end of the runway waving a red flag to
let you know you were in the right place, because
otherwise you're like, I'm supposed to land in this town, right.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
I wonder at you what level of classified these programs were,
because it does seem that you would want you wouldn't
want there to be any chatter about this kind of
stuff on places where the enemy could pick it up.
So I would imagine it would have been pretty tightly
held secret to the point where maybe even some personnel
didn't know, you know, what to look for my wife,
(49:43):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
No, it's it's true because oh and then shut out
to atari.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
How's it going.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
I love recording in the studio, man, it's a nice
when people drop by. So this sets up the scene
for the star of our series this week, the Transformation
Boeing's Plant number two. Eventually it was called Boeing Wonderland.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Ah it sounds like a theme park. It sounds like
a place, a lovely place to take the family on vacation.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
And perhaps lovely place to end our episode for today.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
I think that's right. I think we've set up the
history really well again, thanks to mister Yen for his
incredible research. And we're going to get to the promised
Boeing Wonderland in part two of this two part episode.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
And for now, we want to give a big, big
thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Research associated
mister Max Williams. Jonathan Strickland aka the wizd Eves Jeff.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Goat, who may be returning to the show very soon,
I hope so. Chris frasciotis here in spirit his wizard
Beard may it ever grow long. Jonathan Strickland the Quizzler. A. J.
Jacobs the Puzzler. Yeah, we're not super creative with the names. Well,
we didn't make up the Puzzler, we did. It just
happens to be the perfect rivalry, which you will hopefully
(51:02):
experience firsthand one of these days very soon on Ridiculous History.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
(00:27):
the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so much
for tuning in. Big, big shout out to our super producer,
mister Max Willims.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
What isn't that a thing? Is like a military thing?
Who Ah?
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Yeah, there's whoa, there's Hurrah, there's Nathan Otowski.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
Hey, what it's like one of them's for Navy seals,
particularly in particular.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
Believe yeah, I believe. I believe there are a couple
of different ones. It depends on the branch. And one
thing we can tell you folks as civilians, just ask,
don't they're gonna take it the wrong way if you
if you do an oohrah when you should do a hoorah?
Speaker 2 (01:04):
What about a huzzah? You can never go wrong with
a hussa. I like as I like us very ren fair. Yeah,
I've been bowling. You're no brown, and we are here
in person. Nathan Otowski by the way, as a dear
friend and coworker of ours. Not that people don't yell
Nathan Otowski in the arm service. That'd be cool. I
was about to say, it really does work as kind
of an exclamatory. Yes, my goodness, love it, love the energy.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
This is a two parter that has a lot of
returning or turning guests and events.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Today we're coming in hot with that big bowing energy.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna make it off the plane,
hopefully in one piece. Boeing's been getting u Boeing has
been getting put through the pr ringer.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Oh wait, because of like shoddy workmanship. Okay, let's not
blame it on the folks to build the planes. It's
more probably a top down issue, perhaps with maintenance and
checking on things like windows, seals, And wasn't there something
about a door flying open? Yes?
Speaker 1 (02:05):
Yes, fight club style and regulation and why regulation is important.
We've talked about this on one of our other shows.
Stuff they don't want you to know. We also are
returning to some wacky World War II stuff we wanted
to w w way, sorry, perfect, We're returning to this
(02:28):
because we wanted to explore a story about Bowie that
is not the the unfortunate stuff you're hearing in the
news today.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Folks, also being what this episode is, is this some
sort of anniversary It.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
Is our Washington episode? Oh snat, yeah, take that sous John. Yeah, yeah,
he gave that up long ago. It was always a ruse.
But I'm holding out. We're taking it serious. We're taking it.
We keep our promises. I have an entire doc that's right,
crack at all, that's right.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
We're gonna have to eventually expand globally, like we have
to get to territories once we run out of states,
and then it's gonna be wild.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Giving me ideas right now.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I love it. I love you know what. We're idea people, Max,
We just hand out ideas. We're regular Don Draper's orphan factory.
Oh boy, Yeah, that's the name of my new noise
metal band.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yes, that's not just a phrase that I threw at you.
We discussed this off Mike, but today on Mike we're
discussing something different, some very crafty tactics deployed by the
Boeing Company that folds in the kind of stuff that
I think we all love, uh, involving theme park design.
That's right, Yes, I do love this.
Speaker 1 (03:39):
What a great way in because this takes us back
to the time when everybody was striving for some sort
of edge in World War two.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Supremacy.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, a lot of out of the box ideas like
balloon bombs. We did an episode on that the bombing
runs in Oregon that Japan very unsuccessful.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
They were bomb bombs. They bombed, they bombed on the
bomb run.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, and so the bomba aside, we do know that
people started taking they took the threats of these bombs
very seriously, and they started going through some dare we say,
ridiculous steps to protect themselves. And one of those things,
the reason we're mentioning theme parts here, one of these
(04:25):
things was a move of subterfuge, right, a feat of Imagineeri.
Speaker 2 (04:31):
Telling lies no Papa. According to Rare Historical Photos, which
is a beautifully descriptive name for a website, Deceiving the
enemy as to what you are doing is not new.
Trying to hide positions from observation is not new. Trying
to hide whole factories from aerial bombing during the Second
(04:52):
World War, wait for it was new?
Speaker 1 (04:56):
Yeah, yeah, Okay, So it's true story, folks. The US
tried to hide their aircraft factories in plane site p
l a inn.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
It's a site gag, you got it.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So they're in a pickle because they have to have
these factories. It's a huge infrastructure.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
And very large. They're very visual.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
Yeah, yeah, they're not. They're not easy to move, right.
You can't just hop on, you can't just toss them
on a pickup truck. So they had to figure out
a way to hide the factories. Uh, and they pulled
it off. We want to give a big special shout
out to Bill Yane over at Boeing one, who wrote
Boeing Wonderland the Fake Cities on America's West Coast for
(05:44):
Warfare History Network.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
That's one of our primary sources. Well, it's one of
our primary sources because Bill, I believe, is the descendant
of somebody who actually was directly involved. So I mean
that's the best primary source we could possibly have here.
So we will continue to shout out Bill throughout this
because we are liberally pulling from his incredible work and research.
(06:07):
Bill Big Bill, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Wild Bill Wild, Bill son of the employee at Boeing.
PLAYT two really quickly before we jump into it. Have
you guys seen the television series The English it is?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I believe it. It was a BBC production. I think
it's on Amazon now. Its stars Oh my goodness, she
played Mary Poppins and the Mary Poppins reboot. She's married
to the guy for who plays the dude who looks
at the camera all the time in the office, who's
also i think Jack Reacher or something. Anyway, I'm not
forgetting is her name anyhow. It's a Western and it
(06:43):
is incredible. Emily Blood, Thank you, Emily Blood. It is
a Western and it is sweeping, John. It is sweeping
in its scope, absolutely beautiful cinematography, music, and the performances.
And it's another in what we're seeing in a long
line or medium line of shows that really show accurate
depictions of the indigenous experience really really dogs lately, and
(07:08):
this one does that as well. And it has some
of the most menacing big bads that you get a
couple of them throughout the series, and it's a limited series.
Get you to a streamer and watch this as soon
as you can. Brought I don't even remember. I just
wanted to Yeah, I just wanted to share about No,
(07:29):
there was something that came to mind just just about
the American wests and our fascination with it, and it's how,
you know, it has always been a place of innovation
and striving and kind of you know, the sort of
personification of what is quote unquote the American dream and spirit,
which is oftentimes a freaking nightmare right right.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
And also, uh, as anybody because a fan of history
knows the weird thing about these so called wild West
is a very short period of time in American history.
Speaker 2 (08:02):
But I agree with you the I know what it was,
you called him wild Bill, Yeah, and that's what That's
what we got there. That's perfect.
Speaker 1 (08:10):
Uh. This is also uh, I agree with the point
about the romanticization of the West as as this idea
and this symbol, and that holds true even even today.
Like we have to realize that during World War Two,
as weird as it sounds, people were extremely, extremely worried
(08:31):
that Japanese forces could get across the Pacific because they
did it in Hawaii.
Speaker 2 (08:36):
It's an entry point. I mean, it is sort of
the frontier of Like That's why I mean, I think
it has so much romantic kind of thinking around is
because it is sort of like the end of the
line or the beginning of the line, you know, depending
on me. Obviously there's the East coast too, but the
West Coast is where this literal enemy that we were
facing would potentially access and invade our country.
Speaker 1 (08:57):
Yeah, and picture it, you know, as a Bill is
writing in his work for Warfare History Network. Within just
a month of the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese
forces conquered Manila in the Philippines, and then Hong Kong
and then Singapore fell. So there was a lot of expansion,
a lot of violence. And you can't blame people living
(09:19):
in the US for happening by the West coast and
looking out at the horizon, as Bill says, and half
expecting to see a Japanese invasion fleet.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
You know what's interesting is, you know, there's this new
Godzilla movie, Godzilla Minus one that everyone's screaming about. I
haven't seen that very so that's what I've heard. I'm
very excited to see it.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
But I liked Monarch too, by the way, to show
this show, Yes, I mentioned that because Godzilla has always
been kind of a stand in for nuclear war and
you know, attacks from outside, you know, in the Japanese
kind of mindset.
Speaker 2 (09:55):
But you also picture that view of a beach and
the horizon and the things coming towards you, you know,
this impending doom. So I think Godzilla could also be
sort of a stand in for the idea of like
an invading force. You know, yeah it is.
Speaker 1 (10:11):
I think it's a powerful, powerful symbol. And weird thing
about Japan, Godzilla is super popular. Like it's not a stereotype,
it's not weyu boo stuff.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
People in Japan get excited about Godzilla. Godzilla is awesome,
and there's different flavors of him. I'm trying this new one.
He's a real pill. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
And then there's the force of nature one the Great
Defender Cang versus Godzilla is great. But people right now
are they're having that moment you described. They're looking out
and they're just waiting to see a disturbance in the water,
a ship on the horizon. And civilians are affected by
this propagandas everywhere Japanese Americans are getting interned.
Speaker 2 (10:57):
In just a stunning misstep of justice.
Speaker 1 (11:00):
Prison camps right right, yeahah, and the top brass is
also very worried about this, just like American civilians. Let's
introduce General John help me with this one, John, liz Ny.
Speaker 2 (11:14):
That's a risk. That is what you'd call unga paka.
You know, it's like they just a hat on a hat,
like wouldn't Lesnie be enough. It's got to be.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It feels like it feels like if you went into
a really authentic Italian restaurant, they would say, oh, we
don't serve lasagna here, we serve the authentic dish.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
We serve, we serve they shall we served that a
really unauthentic Italian place too, Like they just don't know
how to pronounce that.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
We cannot legally call this lasagna. Uh so for tax purposes,
it's Lesney.
Speaker 2 (11:47):
And much like revenge is to dish best served cold.
But we do have General John Lesesney do it, do it?
And he is the commander of the fourth U. S
Army and the Western Defense Command, and he's his imagination
is running a little bit wild during these times as well,
much like the civilians who are picturing these invading, you know,
(12:09):
forces coming in from the beaches. But he's someone that
can actually do something about it. Yes, yeah, he has
shaped his thinking and his strategy. Yes, he has the
agency here. And he is super paranoid.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
He's staying up awake at night, worried about spies and
sabatures in every nook and cranny of the West Coast.
And his fear is what he uses to justify the
enforcement of Executive Order nine zero sixty six. This is
the one that led to the prison camps, the internment
(12:45):
of all Japanese American civilians, including of course people who
just had Japanese grandparents. You know, they're like, dude, I'm
from Pasadena and they locked him up.
Speaker 2 (12:56):
Yeah, I mean we know that the thinking around race
and ethnicity during these times was very black and white.
I mean, no pun intended there.
Speaker 1 (13:05):
Shout out to George. Oh, Goshulu, George, Ta kai George.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
That's right. But de Witt he also ordered that the
nineteen forty two Rose Bowl football game be moved away
from Pasadena because he thought that it would be a
pretty excellent target for a Japanese attack, and perhaps in
its symbolism, you know, in what it represented, and also,
(13:33):
you know, obviously a large crowd a massed in one place.
Speaker 3 (13:36):
Important side note right here, do you guys know who
won the twenty twenty four Rose.
Speaker 2 (13:41):
Bull I have absolutely no could I possible? University of Michigan, right,
Maxis you really had to drop that? Yeah? This this
Brie's been ready.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
I wrote this brief for when I was going to
be in Seattle on October and we're just now recording it.
We could have recorded it then and I wouldn't be
able to celebrate that my University of Michigan Wolverine.
Speaker 1 (14:01):
I actually for you, I'll text Alexis to a code
name Doc Holliday Jackson over on stuff they want you
to know because she is from Michigan and like you, Max, Well, actually,
like everybody I met from Michigan super into Michigan based
sports teams, so she probably already knows. But this point
about overarching paranoia almost Orwellian in its scope. It reminds
(14:28):
me a lot of the months after the attacks on
September eleventh, and every news channel we went to, every
local affiliate. You would have someone far inland, in a
rural area and they would say, well, the terrorists are
going to hit our town next. You know, our town
with a population of seventeen hundred, right, Because I distinctly remember,
(14:53):
I think was a Fox News affiliate. I was interviewing
a lady somewhere in Oklahoma, I want to say, and
she was worried terrors were going to attack because there
was a new Walmart being built.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
Yeah, paranoia can get very compartmentalized in that way and
can cause some pretty serious myopic thinking, you know. But
this wasn't unfounded though, as the thing, I mean, we
had a precedent, you know, with Pearl Harbor, with all
of these events in the world going on, and the
power of the Japanese you know military, I mean they
(15:24):
were good. They were good at what they did, right.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
Yeah, they had a lot of shock and awe. They
had overwhelming forces. And as the general here he is,
he is incredibly aware of the possibility of being overrun
by Japanese forces. He's looking at his ground troops and
he's saying, look, all the folks under my command, that's
not enough. You know, if they roll through the way
(15:56):
they rolled through Manila.
Speaker 2 (15:57):
Well, and they not only were strategic, quite advanced, and
technologically quite advanced, they had, you know, soldiers pilots that
were literally willing to die for the cause, not just
to put themselves in harm's way, to be the bomb,
to be the bullets. You know, it's pretty powerful. Just
(16:17):
and knowing that, you would think, well, what won't they
do exactly what are they capable of?
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And he shares this concern. As paranoid as it may sound,
this was a very understandable and common worry amid civilians
and the military alike. And it was backed up by
Japanese actions. Japanese submarine shelled different oil storage facilities ten
miles from Santa Barbara, California. So they're in America's back door.
(16:47):
And that was on February twenty third. I want to say,
so the next night, people are so freaked out that
gunners who are keeping the night watch are convinced. They
see I almost set a flock and ar moda of
Japanese bombers heading over Los Angeles, and so they start
(17:07):
shooting off aircraft shells. They don't wait to verify, and
they start flooding the night with search lights, and people
are thinking of the London Blitz.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
I was about to say, I mean, there's precedent for
this kind of stuff too, that's already been kind of
seared into the American consciousness. You know, the idea of
these blitzes leveling cities, creating sort of like images of
Hell on Earth scenarios.
Speaker 1 (17:34):
Yeah, and it's very very logical. You know what happened
in Hawaii, you know what happened in Hong Kong, in
the Philippines. There is absolutely no reason to assume California
would be immune to those kinds of actions. And this
is where we introduced the Navy Secretary Frank Knox. He announces, hey, guys,
the Battle of Los Angeles. That's a false alarm, even
(17:57):
though by this point people are already saying, like, hey,
was UFO.
Speaker 2 (18:00):
That's right, we talked about it. I got to say,
that's the Battle of Los Angeles. Something we've talked about
on stuff that I want you to know, because there were,
you know, within a vacuum, you know, you kind of
conspiracies run amok. You know, people start to think about
what it could have been. They're certain looking for something
with search lights, you know, going wild, shooting our artillery rounds,
you know, into the sky and there's nothing there. But
that's what paranoia does. And when you have people who
(18:23):
are really paranoid at the top of the of the
food chain, right, crazy things can happen.
Speaker 1 (18:29):
Yeah, and this LA situation is a false alarm. But
the Santa Barbara situation is not. This is the attack
on the oil reserves, right, this is the attack on
Fort Stevens.
Speaker 2 (18:42):
Oh my goodness. Okay, there was another thing we talked
about earlier. Where there were bombings of oil reserves, So
you're right. We talked about the Santa Barbara incident where
Japanese submarine I seventy five destroyed oil reserves. Now also
on the West coast, a little further up north, though,
we've got activities of this same kind happening in Washington State.
(19:03):
Japanese submarine I twenty five attacks Fort Stevens two nights
in a row. Yeah, it's looking ugly.
Speaker 1 (19:13):
And then in the same month in June, Japanese forces
we talked about this in previous episodes, did they invade
and occupy the two Aleutian Islands. So check out our
episode of the Battle of the Aleutian Islands. And this
is terrifying to Uncle Sam because now there is an
active Japanese base on the doorstep of Alaska. Merchant ships
(19:37):
are being sunk left and right off the West coast.
Attacks are coming from the air. There were these couple
of these bombing missions over southwestern Oregon, which we covered
in another episode, and that's actually kind of a wholesome
story that one absolutely the bombing goes so terribly wrong,
and then the guy who who bombed on behalf of
(19:59):
the Japanese, a gentleman named Nobu Fujita. He ends up
becoming like the most popular dude in that town. It's
kind of that's worth The reason is.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
It is, it has it has a cuddly ending. And again,
huge shoutouts to Bill Yen for a lot of this chronology.
And you know, I mean, we've talked about all of
these events separately, but it really does take a very
discerning eye and a historians kind of mind to put
all the stuff together, you know, to create kind of
a bigger picture of what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1 (20:28):
Agreed, Agreed, And for each of these things that we
can verify actually occurring, there were at the time hundreds
of other weird rumors, you know what I mean, like well,
the Japanese are getting into our schools, or they're going
to get in.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
The water infiltrating you know. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's
it's like Red Scare type stuff, only worse because this
is a hot war, right you know, And.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
So we've established this deeply, deeply paranoid vibe of the US,
especially on the West coast in nineteen forty two. At
this point, Axis armies both in the European and Pacific
Theater seem unstoppable, and people are beginning to think increasingly
(21:14):
it's only a matter of time before the shoe drops
and America is attacked directly. And so shout out to
one of our favorite catchphrases. America decides to beef up
and they're like, we got to get this infrastructure going.
This had been this has been kind of in the
works already. I think it was nineteen forty so before
(21:38):
Pearl Harbor, President FDR said, look, my fellow Americans, we
need like fifty thousand fighter planes.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Yeah, that's an insane number. You know, that's a lot
of the standards of those days for sure. And at
that point, just to hit home, like what a huge
ask that was, the Navy and the Army Air Corps
had less than ten thousand. I would say, of what
that number would be around a fifth. It's a hell
of a spinoff, big time. Yeah, And you know, we
(22:08):
know manufacturing technology has come a long way since then,
but it still takes a long time to churn out
these types of you know, aircraft. This would be a
damn near impossible ask, you know, in the time they
would need to accomplish it.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, this is like a new deal level of centralized planning,
which is that kind of military direction is a little
bit too close to socialism for a lot of FDR's opponents.
But everybody decides to kind of put these internal disagreements
to one side and say, look, we can figure it
(22:44):
out after the war. Right now, regardless of your political ideology,
your socioeconomic demographic, we can all agree that aircraft factories
are the most important thing we have going on right now.
We need to mobilize private industries and force them to
make planes. This is a really interesting time for car
(23:06):
manufacturers too, because car manufacturing figures out, Yeah, they're making
tanks now.
Speaker 2 (23:11):
Same with like I mean, on the other side, we
had in Japan, you know, like Japanese toy factory and
stuff that we're taking their tin and using it to
make these things. And then once they maybe it was
the other way around after the war ended, then the
ten was repurposed to start making the toys. It's interesting stuff,
just the way like you know we see it with
like Coca Cola even, you know, and like companies that
(23:33):
were pivoting you know, their production lines to serve the war.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
I know, Adidas's factory was it used to make anti
tank weapons because it was like Audi Dostler's wife I believe,
ran on front of like US tanks to stop them
from blowing up. It's like it's actually a shoe factory.
Let us just make shoes, and like that's what's spared
that factory.
Speaker 2 (23:53):
Well, that's a really good point, Max, because what we're
talking about today is more of that kind of bait
and switch, kind of subterfused, less about disguising one type
of factory as another, but about disguising it as something
completely different. We're going to get to that totally. Let's
hit a little bit of a bit more of the
history before we get there, for sure. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
So nineteen forty, the US administration or the FDR administration
creates something called the National Defense Advisory Commission, and they're
supposed to herd the cats of this massive level of
infrastructure expansion, and Congress just rubber stamps a bunch of stuff.
If you can get Uncle sand to open his wallet,
then there's not really a limit to how much you'll
(24:32):
spend if he's interested. And so they start this new bureaucracy.
Because it's still a government outfit, it's called the Defense
Plant Corporation. It's operated by existing manufacturers. The separation between government,
government and business is very blurred during this time.
Speaker 2 (24:50):
Oh and we got another big bill type figure entering
the chat. Roosevelts brought in a hind him William Signius.
Big Bill Old Knudsen sounds like a kind of guy
that would run like a dealership in Fargo. I think so.
Speaker 1 (25:05):
I was thinking that or a deli that's known for
egregious sandwich Knudsence. Yes, is that a thing already? Well,
I think it feels like it is.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
There's a TV show or a movie where there's a
family called the Knutsens, and it's just it's escaping me. AnyWho,
This guy understands the industry of mass production. He comes
from the automotive industry that we're just talking about. He
was an executive and he was the president of a
little company called General Motors. Never heard of it. Yeah,
(25:36):
since the Year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and thirty
seven was actually the year that my father was born.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Interesting fact, getting to know you, getting to know all
about you. No, that's interesting, and also it's also it
reminds me two of the car stuff. We did episodes
of this on car stuff because they have a huge
resource allocation problem. For anybody's a fan of something like
sim city or civilization, all resource management games. Ninety percent
(26:04):
of all the manufacturing capability for aircraft in the US
nineteen forty ninety percent of it is in five states,
and sixty five percent of this manufacturing power is along
or near the coast. California, often thought to be the
most vulnerable state on the West Coast, has forty four
(26:26):
percent of all the aircraft making stuff. They're very visible,
they're very vulnerable. The same battle group that had attacked
Pearl Harbor had just been camped out two hundred miles
off the Malibu.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
Coast, and.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
If they attacked, then pretty much most of the US
airplane manufacturing ability would be gone in moments. And everybody
knew this. This was an acknowledged fact. They said, we're
gonna build these factories Inland. We're gonna go to Illinois, Michigan,
(27:05):
shut out max Missouri and Texas.
Speaker 2 (27:07):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (27:08):
But like you said, Noel, they still need time. You
can't just do this by Tuesday. No, No, this is
very nuts and bolts literally. So it was clear that
this is going to require a lot of planning. Ka
Nutsten obviously had the smarts, you know, to understand the
organization of a giant company that manufactures, but they also
(27:31):
needed someone that really could dial in the logistics of
all of this stuff, you know, in reality on the grounds.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:38):
Yeah, they needed a guy who thought out of the box,
and they found that person, Major John Francis Omer Junior.
Let's learn a little bit about him. He's an Ohio
guy born in Dayton, eighteen ninety one.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
Buckeye state, isn't that one? Ohio is?
Speaker 1 (27:53):
Yes?
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Cool, and he is.
Speaker 1 (27:56):
His father is an inventor, manufacturer, a business owner. And
John gets a master's degree in engineering, sort of following,
you know, his father's inventive footsteps. He has attended Cornell University,
he joins the military, uh service in World War One,
(28:17):
and then he when he comes back from the war,
he's in the family business. But he's still he's still
a member of the Reserve Corps.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
You know. It's interesting. I was thinking about how, when
we talk about the history of the country at this time,
a lot of the top minds and top you know
kind of thinkers were military officials as well, because it
was just the thing to do, right you know. I
mean it was like, yeah, if you want to be
considered a team player, you were going to join, you know,
(28:47):
the military. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (28:48):
It's interesting you mention that, because I think culturally in
the West, for a very long time, it was considered
the right and moral thing. It was like it was
a right of passage. You didn't need a law that
said everybody had to join the military because it was
expected to do so. It wasn't until the US became
increasingly siding Vietnam War, Drean War and stuff.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah, people really kind of trusted the government to a
certain degree, and at least on paper, you know, the
government was maybe a little more trustworthy. I don't know
what you think that's me. I don't know. I don't know, man,
we I mean, neither of us were there.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
Uh, it's it's probably demographically dependent, right, So I'm sure
if you're a straight white dude, then things are better.
Speaker 2 (29:35):
Opportunities abound. There we go, there we go.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
And so, uh, there's another fact here that just really
sticks out to me. Our buddy Omer is a renaissance man.
He loves photography. He is an amateur magician.
Speaker 2 (29:52):
I love magic so much. I don't trust age magician. Hey,
that's fair. I find him smug enough. Hey, look, it's
all it's all in your stage banter. But I've always
been fascinated with sleight of hand and like you know,
stage magic, close close up magic is super cool. I
know one cool card trick where I can make a
card disappear, but that's all I've got. But I'm big
(30:13):
fan of that, and it just you know, I see
what you're saying. It is a it is a discipline
that is entirely based on bullshiting you. But that kind
of serves, right, and we're talking about here. It's perfect casting, right.
Speaker 1 (30:28):
So he uh, he starts getting interested in different other
artistic endeavors.
Speaker 2 (30:35):
And this is a true story, folks. He gets super.
Speaker 1 (30:38):
Into camouflage like that becomes his hobby.
Speaker 2 (30:43):
And I've just pictoried.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Like if online dating was a thing at this point,
I would love to see this guy's profile where he's like,
my interest include camouflage, just the idea of it's a
cool look.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
It's easy to take it for granted today because you
think about camouflage and you think about it more as
like an interesting fashion choice reality, but it is in
and of itself a kind of technology, and we start
talking about things like dazzle camouflage where they use these
weird striped patterns on warships that they borrowed from the wild.
They borrowed from the way zebras are able to kind
(31:18):
of blend in in a herd and with like the
horizon or whatever. Really really interesting and it required a
lot of creative outside the box thinking the kind of
stuff you might associate with, like the imagineers of Disney fame,
you know, who created things like basically visual effects technologies
that didn't exist yet or would take you know, existing
(31:40):
things like the Peppers Ghost, you know, sort of effect
where you could create what looks like a hologram and
just take it to the next level.
Speaker 1 (31:46):
And he becomes a one man pitch army. He's always
trying to demonstrate camouflage techniques and he's saying, look, I
studied the success of the Royal Air Force during the
Battle of Britain in nineteen forty. Uh huh, just so,
And he says, look, let me show you guys what
(32:08):
I'm thinking about. And so he's at Fort Eustace, Virginia
making his pitch. He goes to different Air Force bases
like backxwell Field and Alabama and people in general seem
to agree it's a good idea, but they don't have
the budget for it.
Speaker 2 (32:23):
Yeah, so the money's going into making the damn things
fighting the actual fight, being as prepared as possible militarily speaking,
you know, to camouflage and all of this stuff. Well,
very important. Clearly they made a whole bureaucracy with factory
Defense in the name. You know, it was important. But
he had to kind of sell the brass on some
(32:46):
of these more unusual, innovative kind of ideas.
Speaker 1 (32:49):
One hundred percent. Yeah, So he perseveres and he's traveling
all around the country pitching this stuff. In March of
nineteen forty one, like so many other people who are
in the reserves, he is ordered back to active duty,
called to serve, Called to serve, and he gets sent
to Hawaii to study defenses as part of his work
(33:12):
under the Chief of Engineers Operations and Training Section. So
he gets out there to Wahoo and he says, look,
here's what we need to do to camouflage Wheeler Field,
which is only twelve miles north of Pearl Harbor. And
they say this is great. Oh, you're a really smart guy.
How much does it cost? And he says fifty grand
(33:33):
and they say go home.
Speaker 2 (33:35):
Yeah, I mean maybe we should and maybe we should.
Can we do a boop? Can we have fession? I
think you know, we know a little bit about military spending, dude,
So what are we talking here?
Speaker 1 (33:49):
In nineteen forty one, fifty thousand dollars is worth one
point zero four million today, which is high for like
a person, but for the military.
Speaker 2 (34:00):
Yeah, we hear about budgets in the trillions, you know,
but again it's a different time and we're not actively.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
Five thousand dollars hammer or specific hammer they have to
use on sealth bombers that won't do something.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Man. We heard a story a while back about these
like coffee mugs, like they have like electronics built in
them to keep your coffee warm. It was a story
about waste in military spending, and that was a big topic.
And I think that they spent like hundreds of thousands
of dollars and they went to waste as well.
Speaker 1 (34:30):
I believe that was part of it a bit. There's
a lot of crypt too, and there's a well, there's
stories to be told about that.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
All that to say, though, one point five million to
make sure your factories don't get blown up. Seems like
a pretty reasonable ask. I think maybe they just weren't
so sure about his methods.
Speaker 1 (34:47):
And here's where it becomes a parable of sorts because
after they turn him down and say, okay, we get it.
You like magic, we're not camouflaging this. Just a few
weeks later, it's December seventh and the airfield gets attacked yep,
and it lost most of its planes.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
And it was the same you know, group of fighter
pilots battalion or whatever you want to call it that
had destroyed Pearl Harbor. So at this point the brass
are a little bit more open to some of these
outside of the box ideas because they were desperate and
they realized that whatever they were doing wasn't working and
(35:32):
they needed somebody to kind of come in and rewrite
the game plan.
Speaker 1 (35:35):
And General de Witt, you know, like cut back to
him in the film here, he is bonkers by this point.
Speaker 2 (35:42):
He's the one that's been already entertaining all of these
paranoid Yes, scare we stay delusions. But again, is it
just being really prepared exact or is it like, you know,
are you losing your marbles a little bit.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Paranoia doesn't mean you're wrong, is the problem.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
So and when your paranoia is confirmed, it just deep
we're seeing. And so our buddy DeWitt is saying, I
knew it. I'm not crazy. Omer.
Speaker 1 (36:07):
I need you to develop a camouflage plan for the
entirety of the West Coast. And Omer, now our magician
protagonist to this story, he says, this is great. I
have been thinking about this all the time. I'm not
sure if you're aware, general, but camouflage is my primary hobby.
Speaker 2 (36:27):
Yeah, at this point, and then in two since I
was a kid, I could lay completely still under the
cover as my parents wouldn't even know I was there.
And so this is a dream job for this guy.
Speaker 1 (36:38):
And now we get to the point where Uncle Sam
opens his wallet. Price is no object, and so this
guy starts saying, all right, I am going to camouflage
the entire aircraft industry of California. I'm going to show
you a demonstration on one airfield, and then we're going
to work out, you know, how how we maintain a
(37:01):
working air field while still camouflaging it. And this is
crazy because he goes to Hollywood, so creative, I think
that's cool.
Speaker 2 (37:18):
Well, it was not for nothing that I was mentioning
the Disney imagineers and just how so much of the
thinking behind magic and stagecraft things like that goes into
the design of theme parks. It's all about it's not
exactly camouflage, but it is about, like, for example, hiding
infrastructure in plain sight. You know, a lot of the
work that goes into, you know, designing ride queues and
(37:41):
things at theme parks is to cover up stuff that
may be considered unsightly or a peak behind the curtain
that they don't want the visitors to have. So there
is a lot of overlap in that guy or making
a widespread surveillance. Yeah, and it also reminds me of
things we see in modern cities in the West today,
(38:01):
which is, you know, a facade buildings that are entirely
to disguise infrastructure. He did a whole episode on that
with stuff they I want you to know, we actually
went and discovered some of these fake buildings in person.
I think there's a video of that still on the internet. Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
Shout out to a con ed for not arresting us.
They did chase us off, they shoot us. They did aggressively.
Speaker 1 (38:22):
They did politely but firmly shoot the heck out of us.
So so Omer goes to Hollywood and he talks to
movie set designers, he talks to scene painters, and these
are the top talent of their respective fields. And all
of the major Hollywood studios are super duper down to
(38:43):
help with this because it's great pr for this, absolutely,
you know what I mean. And then later, because of
the way Hollywood works, later they can reach out to
a general or something and say like, hey, Kember, are
a couple of tanks we're filming a think.
Speaker 2 (38:54):
Well, we already know, and I think again, start keep
invoking stuff I don't want you to know. But we've
read an episode in that about the cozy relationship between
the military and movie studios.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Yeah, as long as the deal is you can get
as a film studio, you can get us military stuff
in your in your story, so long as the military
looks good.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yeah, they probably got like a style guide or something.
Oh sure, they just distribute. By the way, I think,
I was texted you and matt Our co host and
something that I want you to know that I was
at a TJ Max and I saw which is where
you can find kind of second like tier kind of
toys and stuff that nobody wants of the other story.
And I saw this line of army toys officially branded
(39:38):
army toys with things like you know, tanks and and uh,
personnel carriers and things like that. It was very interesting.
It sounds uh, it sounds fast, borderline propagandistic. Well I
would even short yeah, but but okay, so everybody's rolling
out the red carpet.
Speaker 1 (39:57):
The US government is saying take all the money. W
the big wigs in Hollywood are saying, let's hook you
up with anyone who can help. And if for a
time this becomes like a very very busy, big film
production to turn Marchfield into a working demonstration of these
(40:17):
camouflage ideas, and people in the Army are like, oh, geez,
looked at We're at all Hollywood studio now. Eventually they
disguised thirty four different air bases in a couple of
different states, Washington, Oregon, California, all up and down the
West coast. And the biggest ticket item isn't the airfields themselves,
(40:41):
it's the manufacturing plants like Lockheed in Burbank or North
American aviation inglewood, because again, most of the manufacturing capability
is there in just those five.
Speaker 2 (40:53):
Yeah, and there was another story we did about how
during World War Two, I believe it was Pairs, they
built like a tiny version of Paris that from the
sky would appear to be the actual Paris, and they
turned all the actual lights of the city of Paris
off and lit up this sort of facsimile, sort of
(41:13):
miniature version, and that also worked. You know, this is
practical effects we're talking about here. I think that's why
this one is such a neat crossover between military history
and the history of you know, effects and illusion, because
that's exactly what they did. They cloaked the factories by
essentially building I'm imagining on their roof these kind of
(41:36):
facsimiles of suburbs, so that an airplane flying at an
altitude of around five thousand feet that's what it would
look like. And they knew exactly what that distance, what
kind of view that distance would provide, and they tailored
it accordingly, right.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Because remember a lot of enemy aircraft they're hunting by sight,
you know what I mean, So if you can manipulate
their perspective, then you're going to come out the winner.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
This is kind of what you'd call syops, right, yeah,
a little bit, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're monkeying with people's
expectations and their senses, you know.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah, it's a it's a kissing cousin to syops, and
it's just it's defensive rather than offensive. But we know
a lot of companies, private aircraft manufacturers, didn't want to
wait around for the military to have a plan.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
They were like, they were let in on the plan.
I guess though they sort of knew what was going
on with some of these test cases or these like
sort of case studies. Yeah, they were aware of it. Right,
it was a pilot program and they were not and
they were not all yet included. So they were like, okay,
we get the basic idea. We know kind of how
the sausage is being made. Let's make our own sausage.
(42:48):
Before you know, the sausage King comes to bestow his
sausages upon us. That's the that's omer street name. The
sausage is sausage King.
Speaker 1 (42:57):
Yeah, we're not going to tell you why there's a family,
but that's what people called him. Don't fact check us, please,
So all right, so we know that we know that
Donald Douglas, the owner of Douglas Aircraft Company, decided to
be proactive about this. He is very well aware of
the camouflage conversation, the innovations that are recurring, and in
(43:19):
nineteen forty one he goes to an engineer named Frank
Colebaum and says, hey, man, I need help. Can you
put together a team that can camouflage my aircraft plant
over in Santa Monica? And Colebaum is kind of like
a consultant in this, so he says, you know what,
I know a guy who's perfect for this. His name
(43:41):
is h Roy Kelly. We're throwing a lot of characters
in the story today, but I think it's important right
for us to learn a little bit about our pal Kelly.
Speaker 2 (43:50):
Absolutely and one, once again, I can't shout him out
enough Bill Yen for his incredible work in Boeing Wonderland
the Fake Cities on America's West Coast.
Speaker 1 (44:00):
Yeah, so Bill introduces us to Kelly. Kelly is at
this point a pretty storied guy.
Speaker 2 (44:06):
Uh. He is the dude who invented ranch style homes.
Whoa did he also invent ranch style dressing?
Speaker 1 (44:14):
No?
Speaker 2 (44:14):
That was a cook who invented it in Alaska. Oh
that's right now. How did I know that? You wouldn't
know that because I hate ranch? Oh so you hate ranch?
You hate doctor Pepper. What kind of American are you? Oh? Geez,
I like a lot of other stuff. You know what
I mean? More, you know, more ranch for everybody else.
I'm just the blue cheese guy. I'm a blue cheese
got too. I'm not a huge fan of ranch either.
(44:34):
It's too tany.
Speaker 1 (44:35):
It's such a weird insists upon itself, it insists upon
its pushes.
Speaker 3 (44:41):
Always is the best, either blue cheese or ranch.
Speaker 2 (44:44):
We're sorry for wing sauce. Wing sauce, just generic wingsa guys.
I gotta be honest.
Speaker 1 (44:51):
It's taken a lot of effort not to twist this
into a conversation about food.
Speaker 2 (44:56):
I ate lunch. I didn't eat lunch. I didn't usually
I eat my before I get here.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
But nope, Yeah, so we we've got an appointment for
lunch later.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
But for now, what you need to know is that
ranch style homes isn't that weird. It's like the home
of jajure of America. From that point on, this is
the mid century we're talking about here. These types of
homes now, of course, are really sought after. You know,
but whenever you look at real estate listings or whatever
in Zillow, you know, so many homes today are considered
(45:28):
ranch style.
Speaker 1 (45:30):
Yeah, and our buddy Kelly teams up with an architect
from California landscape man named Edward Huntsman Trout.
Speaker 2 (45:38):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (45:39):
And this guy is famous because he's designed things like
Scripts College and Kelly and Huntsman Trout go to Hollywood
set designers, in this case specifically from Warner Brothers, and
they create a thing that goes on top of the
roof of Douglas Aircraft Factory.
Speaker 2 (45:57):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (45:58):
Yeah, it's a tension compression in structure. It's five million
square feet of chicken wire and four hundred poles all together.
Like some of it is built to look like those
ranch style homes.
Speaker 2 (46:12):
There you go.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
It's from the they outside they're clearly not full houses.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
Yeah, it's sort of like, I mean, we need to
think about class the golden age of Hollywood, those kind
of facades where it's it looks like the front of
us of a storefront or the atomic towns exactly much
the same as as some of the fake buildings that
we explored, you know, for stuffing. I want you to
know there are these kind of facades or something that
looked like a subway you know, entry, but it actually
(46:38):
you can't go in and behind it, it's covering up
some sort of you know, pipes or electrical equipment.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
And they fill this fake village with houses, fences, even closed.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Lines home fill town fill. Yeah. And they also an
arrested development reference to anyone screeching their head to the
point of perspective.
Speaker 1 (47:01):
They do something really clever where they're like, let's build
a street grid that looks like it goes seamlessly into
the real world in.
Speaker 2 (47:08):
Smart so cool, and then the script kind of gets
flipped here from what we were talking about before. Again thanks
to Billy In for this insight. Executives at Warner Brothers
Movie Studio saw this and we're like, we want you
to do that for us, to help, you know, kind
of plus up our sound stages.
Speaker 1 (47:28):
Yeah, and they were also like, look, we don't we
make movies not airplanes, but from far enough away, our
sound stages look a little bit more like aircraft hangers
than we would, like, we don't want to get bombed.
Speaker 2 (47:41):
That's a good point. They really do know if you've
ever seen like air or even like the Warner Brothers
pre roll thing that shows that kind of gauzy, gold
hued view. Those buildings, the sound stages, they look like
giant aircraft hangars from above, big rectangular buildings, all kind
of in sequence next to each other. So they were concerned, Well,
(48:04):
they weren't trying to, you know, get him to help
them make movie magic. They were trying to get him
to help keep them from maybe getting bombed accidentally.
Speaker 1 (48:12):
Yeah, exactly, And that's a very smart thing to do, right,
And add to this, there's a bit of a keeping
up with the Joneses mentality because because these studio heads
are looking around and they say, dang, there's clover Field
camouflage just three miles away. Lockheed's got some dope camouflage.
(48:32):
Our studio is literally the only thing that looks like
an aircraft hanger.
Speaker 2 (48:36):
That's a good point.
Speaker 1 (48:37):
So we have to do it because if we don't,
we look like the target, the sitting duck.
Speaker 2 (48:43):
Yeah. No, that's very very interesting, and you know it worked.
It worked maybe in ways that were unintentionally kind of
hilariously not good. That pilots trying to land in Santa
Monica at Cloverfield would occasionally get lost and not be
able to figure out where the base was. So that's
a pretty good bell weather, you know how. You know,
(49:06):
so effective this.
Speaker 1 (49:07):
Stuff was, Yeah, they had to they had to start
doing a thing where they would have a guy at
the end of the runway waving a red flag to
let you know you were in the right place, because
otherwise you're like, I'm supposed to land in this town, right.
Speaker 2 (49:20):
I wonder at you what level of classified these programs were,
because it does seem that you would want you wouldn't
want there to be any chatter about this kind of
stuff on places where the enemy could pick it up.
So I would imagine it would have been pretty tightly
held secret to the point where maybe even some personnel
didn't know, you know, what to look for my wife,
(49:43):
I mean.
Speaker 1 (49:44):
No, it's it's true because oh and then shut out
to atari.
Speaker 2 (49:47):
How's it going.
Speaker 1 (49:49):
I love recording in the studio, man, it's a nice
when people drop by. So this sets up the scene
for the star of our series this week, the Transformation
Boeing's Plant number two. Eventually it was called Boeing Wonderland.
Speaker 2 (50:07):
Ah it sounds like a theme park. It sounds like
a place, a lovely place to take the family on vacation.
Speaker 1 (50:12):
And perhaps lovely place to end our episode for today.
Speaker 2 (50:16):
I think that's right. I think we've set up the
history really well again, thanks to mister Yen for his
incredible research. And we're going to get to the promised
Boeing Wonderland in part two of this two part episode.
Speaker 1 (50:32):
And for now, we want to give a big, big
thanks to our super producer, mister Max Williams. Research associated
mister Max Williams. Jonathan Strickland aka the wizd Eves Jeff.
Speaker 2 (50:41):
Goat, who may be returning to the show very soon,
I hope so. Chris frasciotis here in spirit his wizard
Beard may it ever grow long. Jonathan Strickland the Quizzler. A. J.
Jacobs the Puzzler. Yeah, we're not super creative with the names. Well,
we didn't make up the Puzzler, we did. It just
happens to be the perfect rivalry, which you will hopefully
(51:02):
experience firsthand one of these days very soon on Ridiculous History.
We'll see you next time, folks. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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