Speaker 1: Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: the show Ridiculous Historians. Thank you as old Ways so
Speaker 1: much for tuning in. Shout out to the man, the
Speaker 1: myth legend super producer, mister Max Williams.
Speaker 2: Hey, Hey, what was the other one? It was?
Speaker 1: It was rah orrah, hrah, hoorah and huzzah and haza
Speaker 1: and a towski.
Speaker 2: That's right. Huzzah's the one where if you're like a
Speaker 2: night in something, you know that's your rallying.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you and I both will occasionally throw it
Speaker 1: in an email.
Speaker 2: No doubt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm part of the culture of how stuff works.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've big bullet. You're an old Brown.
Speaker 1: Because a big shout out to how stuff works. Man,
Speaker 1: we've been we've been doing us for a while. It's
Speaker 1: crazy that we haven't gotten to this story earlier. What's
Speaker 1: a good for our folks and playing along at home?
Speaker 1: What's a good recap?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, first of all, listening to the episode
Speaker 2: one that gives you a good This is a really
Speaker 2: backstory rich tale here. So I think we did our
Speaker 2: due diligence there. Teased a little bit about some of
Speaker 2: the incredible interactions between the US Air Force and Hollywood,
Speaker 2: Baby Hollywood and some of the most brilliant set designers
Speaker 2: and builders and fabricators and you know, just creative minds
Speaker 2: of the time to camouflage these crucial airplane manufacturing facilities
Speaker 2: to make them look like suburban towns in the hopes
Speaker 2: that the Japanese bombers would be confused and they would
Speaker 2: bomb other stuff. But then we ended the story of
Speaker 2: episode one kind of on the movie studios now being
Speaker 2: the only ones not camouflage, and this cluster of these
Speaker 2: kind of warehouse ye air plane hangar type facilities, to
Speaker 2: which the executives were like, hey, we need this too,
Speaker 2: because now we're gonna be seen as the target. We
Speaker 2: look a lot like airplane hangers. I think that's that's
Speaker 2: where we are, yeah, with Boeing, because that really what
Speaker 2: was what we teased this whole series to be about.
Speaker 2: I don't know that we've mentioned Boeing specifically quite yet.
Speaker 1: No, we just we gave them a hard time about
Speaker 1: the planes and the fact that's right, I almost died one.
Speaker 2: But uh, I don't think we mentioned that part.
Speaker 1: But movie Okay, our hero of the story here is
Speaker 1: the Boeing Wonderland. And that's that's what part two of
Speaker 1: this series is really focusing on. So, like you said,
Speaker 1: everybody's trying to keep up with the Joneses.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Now, camouflage is something you must have because all these
Speaker 1: other places are camouflage.
Speaker 2: Lockheed's clover Field facility.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and so if we travel to Seattle, we'll see
Speaker 1: that Boeing's president, Philip Johnson has been paying attention to
Speaker 1: his buddies at Douglas Aircraft and he says, look, the
Speaker 1: biggest deal for us at Boeing is Plant two. Despite
Speaker 1: the name, it is our number one inspired, our number
Speaker 1: one asset.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: So it's uh, December eleventh, four days after Pearl Harbor,
Speaker 1: Boeing puts out a press release and they say the
Speaker 1: following Plant two has been quote entirely transformed from a
Speaker 1: daylight plant to a blackout plant to enable to know
Speaker 1: night operations during blackouts.
Speaker 2: Okay, it goes on a little braggadociously. This plant is
Speaker 2: believed to be one of the first, if not the first,
Speaker 2: major defense plant in the country to complete this transformation.
Speaker 2: So I talk like a wizard there or something.
Speaker 1: We both we both made some weird choices in our
Speaker 1: quotation voices. But this is true. What they're saying essentially
Speaker 1: is that now we can operate overnight.
Speaker 3: Actually, I think a big thing to say about it
Speaker 3: is it now means that if you black out the
Speaker 3: city for bombers are coming, they can still keep working
Speaker 3: in there.
Speaker 1: Yes, good point Max with fects.
Speaker 2: Oh, there it is there, it is. Oh, it's a
Speaker 2: big deal, you know, because they need to be As
Speaker 2: we mentioned in episode one, the goal that FDR had
Speaker 2: set for the number of bombers that he wanted in
Speaker 2: their fleet is that what you call it in the
Speaker 2: sky was insane fifty thousand, I believe right. So they
Speaker 2: couldn't they didn't have a moment to spare.
Speaker 1: And we also know that the Boeing News Bureau came
Speaker 1: out with a report about this and said, well, they
Speaker 1: released on April first, nineteen forty two, but it was
Speaker 1: not in April day joke. What they were describing to
Speaker 1: the public at large was the urgency created by the
Speaker 1: Pearl Harbor attack. And they said, look, we're not gonna
Speaker 1: waste any time. We are getting everybody together that we
Speaker 1: can to help us do this blackout transformation.
Speaker 2: We're gonna have a painting party. We'll have a painting party. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And when when we say blackout in this situation, we
Speaker 2: are referring literally to blacking out the building, right, like
Speaker 2: painting it as dark a color as humanly possible. I
Speaker 2: don't think they had that, like the blackest paint ever
Speaker 2: to exist at that point, but just you know, regular
Speaker 2: old black paint would probably do the trick. And then
Speaker 2: that you know, created a shroud around which they could
Speaker 2: build the thing that was you know, meant to catch
Speaker 2: the eye exactly.
Speaker 1: And again, these enemy bombers will be hunting with their
Speaker 1: own eye sight, that's right. So so it makes sense
Speaker 1: to black everything out and reduce the amount of light
Speaker 1: the factory is emitting.
Speaker 2: Funny though, to think about it today, with like advances
Speaker 2: in GPS technology and imaging, stuff like this wouldn't really work,
Speaker 2: would it. You'd be able to kind of see the
Speaker 2: shape or kind of know what you were looking at
Speaker 2: a little better if you had certain types of radar
Speaker 2: technology or like satellite you know imagery. But I mean
Speaker 2: even that, there are obviously ways that the military does
Speaker 2: their best to you know, camouflage their stuff. To those
Speaker 2: kinds of things, it would have been be a different
Speaker 2: type of job though, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so Boeing is already blacked out
Speaker 1: as a factory, you know, the windows are painted, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But they needed to do more and so in May
Speaker 1: of nineteen forty two, the core of Engineers takes takes
Speaker 1: on this project. They say, we're going to camouflage this
Speaker 1: factory in addition to having it blacked out. And again
Speaker 1: shout out to Bill Bill Why who wrote some fantastic
Speaker 1: research on this. So to accomplish this camouflage our top
Speaker 1: talent in the world of military camouflage. The amateur magician
Speaker 1: over sends one of his boys from Hollywood, a guy
Speaker 1: named John Stewart, art director. He sends this guy over
Speaker 1: to the Boeing plant. He had pulled him from MGM
Speaker 1: from the experiments they were doing back on the loss.
Speaker 1: I just want to add one little thing before we
Speaker 1: get into the actual full camouflage, the blackout situation with
Speaker 1: the paint where they was at all hands on deck.
Speaker 1: Apparently they required about four miles of air hose in
Speaker 1: order to allow for the operation of spray guns. So
Speaker 1: we don't have this exact you know, square footage or
Speaker 1: the number of windows that they painted over. But if
Speaker 1: that's any indication, this is a huge job and a
Speaker 1: massive feat to accomplish in a couple of days. So
Speaker 1: now we're on to you know, the business at hand,
Speaker 1: like to really make this building look like something else. Yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 1: that's that's the idea, right, And so Deadly is living
Speaker 1: this Hollywood dream. He's got a cool job that everybody wants.
Speaker 1: He has, you know, that degree in architecture. He is
Speaker 1: working as a set design. He even gets nominated for
Speaker 1: an Oscar back in the day for his work on
Speaker 1: a film called Bitter Sweet, which I have not seen.
Speaker 2: Nor have I And a lot of the Oscar wins
Speaker 2: you know of of this era of Hollywood are gonna
Speaker 2: be a little bit deep, deeper cuts than he might think. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, unless they're like the big classics that get remembered.
Speaker 2: Not all Oscar winners do stand the test of time.
Speaker 2: But I am interested to see this this guy's work.
Speaker 2: By checking out Bitter Sweet.
Speaker 1: I feel like I won't pay attention to the story.
Speaker 2: I'll just be watching. I know we do too much. Yeah,
Speaker 2: we've ruined it for ourselves in the stars of that.
Speaker 2: I'm also particularly familiar with Jeanete MacDonald and Nelson Eddie
Speaker 2: Nelson Eddie, I don't know Nelson, Okay, I don't either.
Speaker 2: I just thought if I said it enough, I was
Speaker 2: almost there. But in nineteen forty, Dutley is only thirty
Speaker 2: two years old, and he actually, like you said, live
Speaker 2: in that Hollywood dream. Mary's at Angenoux by the name
Speaker 2: of Constance Ackelman Love. It is a great old, cool
Speaker 2: Hollywood name, and they were quite a power couple in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: very sought after, both for their own set of skills,
Speaker 2: with Constance, you know, being a up and coming kind
Speaker 2: of starlet, and of course deathly being a very sought
Speaker 2: after art director.
Speaker 1: Question question for both of you, guys, do you think
Speaker 1: a thirty two year old man should marry an eighteen
Speaker 1: year old noll?
Speaker 2: Weird? I don't know what's the formula? Isn't there a formula?
Speaker 2: Not as bad as Charlie Chaplin? That's that guy had
Speaker 2: a darkness.
Speaker 3: I mean thirty two eighteen, I mean, yeah, this is
Speaker 3: a really cringe age plus seven your age plus seven even.
Speaker 1: That I feel is weirdly Oh it is.
Speaker 2: I'm just saying it is a thing people say.
Speaker 3: I was finding a guy not that long ago. Like
Speaker 3: a friend of mine, he's he's he's in his mid
Speaker 3: twenties and he's on tender. He's looking at like all
Speaker 3: these nine year old girls like to like he said, well,
Speaker 3: like six years older than him.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, man, like I don't know a teenager. That's
Speaker 2: like a lot happens in that six years though.
Speaker 1: Yeah, anyway, but you know, I hesitate to pass judgement.
Speaker 1: I was just curious on you guys. Take we do
Speaker 1: know that regardless of an age difference. Uh, they had
Speaker 1: a good union, right, they seem to get along famously,
Speaker 1: very much in love. Constant changes her name to Veronica Lake.
Speaker 1: She becomes a pin up girl wow for World War Two.
Speaker 1: Quite a looker, that's right.
Speaker 2: She was sort of like that what was at the
Speaker 2: Shawshank Redemption the poster Benny Davis. I think this is
Speaker 2: of that same kind of you know, I I guess
Speaker 2: of you know, massively sex symboly type star. People are
Speaker 2: painting her on plane. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So her husband reports for duty and Seattle around this time.
Speaker 1: He gets pulled by Omer away from Hollywood, and when
Speaker 1: he gets to Seattle, everybody's very concerned about the Japanese
Speaker 1: occupation of those Alaskan islands we mentioned earlier, and they said, look,
Speaker 1: it's only a matter of time before we get attacked
Speaker 1: here in Seattle. We need you to get this plant,
Speaker 1: this Boeing plant camouflage quick fast and in a hurry.
Speaker 1: We need you to camouflage the entirety of twenty six acres.
Speaker 1: Detle's cruise did this with the help of the Seattle
Speaker 1: District of the Army Corps of Engineers, and that was
Speaker 1: helpful because this particular structure was a different kind of
Speaker 1: roof situation than they'd been used to at some of
Speaker 1: the other airplane facilities as well as the Hollywood studios.
Speaker 2: You could picture those right flat roof kind of regularly
Speaker 2: shaped rectangles, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they have to deal with what's called a saw
Speaker 1: toothed roof. I think kind of like stepped down like
Speaker 1: a cigarette. It's an uneven surface varies as much as
Speaker 1: thirty five feet. So to build this you got to
Speaker 1: put in other platforms. You have scaffolding. You also have
Speaker 1: to have a sprinkler system over the entirety of the
Speaker 1: twenty six acres. Overall, this structure is going to weigh
Speaker 1: in with five hundred and fifty five tons of steel
Speaker 1: and half a million feet of wires just support just
Speaker 1: like support wires to make the houses look real.
Speaker 2: That's a really good point, Ben, and I do just
Speaker 2: want to mention that, you know, as brilliant of an
Speaker 2: idea as camouflaging these places as you know, suburban or
Speaker 2: like civilian areas are. It's not like war totally precludes
Speaker 2: the bombing of civilian areas. So there could well have
Speaker 2: been some collateral, you know, damage to these places despite
Speaker 2: maybe they weren't targeting it, but maybe something fell nearby
Speaker 2: and there could have still been a fire, you know,
Speaker 2: in some of these roofing elaborate roofing situations. So that's
Speaker 2: what they had to have.
Speaker 1: That Sprinkquiss and so travel with us to what was
Speaker 1: increasingly being called Wonderland. And because of the variation in
Speaker 1: the height of those structures that they were building on
Speaker 1: top of, there were a lot of very steep hills
Speaker 1: in the area. It's kind of like San Francisco. So
Speaker 1: there were three major streets, major fake streets, There were alleys,
Speaker 1: there were driveways. This was immersive. The even named the streets.
Speaker 1: Why did they name them, I guess it's just for
Speaker 1: morale a bomber pilot's not going to be able to
Speaker 1: read this stuff. But they had names like synthetic Street
Speaker 1: and burlap Boulevard.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's a little bit of a nod, yeah, to
Speaker 2: the craft right of building these things. You know. It
Speaker 2: reminds me a lot of so again, early kind of
Speaker 2: practical effects in movies, like the idea of a matte painting,
Speaker 2: which is like, you know, not incredibly detailed, but it
Speaker 2: has a massive scope to it, so it'll be like
Speaker 2: the background of like a massive space scene. Then they
Speaker 2: super imposed the ships in front of it, or it
Speaker 2: could be like a city scape. If you ever see
Speaker 2: one of those in person and you look up close,
Speaker 2: there will be little signs that have like text on them,
Speaker 2: but if you look up clothes, they're just kind of blurs,
Speaker 2: you know. So this is all about creating the illusion
Speaker 2: from afar, right, Yes, very much is.
Speaker 1: And and they make a bunch of artificial trees too.
Speaker 1: It reminds me of you know what it is. It's
Speaker 1: a life size version of those little towns you build
Speaker 1: around toy trains exactly right. Yeah, it reminds me of
Speaker 1: it reminds me of that scene in Beetle Juice where
Speaker 1: they shrink down.
Speaker 2: It's really cool. Yeah. Beetlejuice, man, Oh, it's good. I
Speaker 2: hope the sequels good because Tim Burton really hasn't had
Speaker 2: a banger in sometimes.
Speaker 1: You know. The first sequel idea was Beetlejuice at the Beach. Interesting,
Speaker 1: it's definitely a choice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he does have the street you know, when I
Speaker 2: think of his outfit, does kind of remind me of
Speaker 2: the stripey short pants that like you'd see beach goers wearing,
Speaker 2: like in the twenties or whatever. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: But in any case, there's a lot of set building
Speaker 2: kind of you know, methods and that come into play
Speaker 2: to create the illusion from Afar that we're talking about
Speaker 2: something called tar and feather feathering, I guess, which is
Speaker 2: something that was used to make the texture of like
Speaker 2: trees for example. You know where again from Afar you
Speaker 2: would never be able to tell the difference because it
Speaker 2: has that look and quality, but up close you would
Speaker 2: definitely be able to tell her this. It's the same
Speaker 2: with stage stuff. You know, if you ever examine stage
Speaker 2: sets up close, there's a lot of rough edges. There's
Speaker 2: a lot of things that wouldn't really read if you
Speaker 2: were up close, but from the audience it looks great. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and in this case, the audience is five thousand feet
Speaker 2: up in the air, right.
Speaker 1: They're thousands of feet away. They're playing big, right, just
Speaker 1: like stage acting. And a lot of these things, these homes,
Speaker 1: these garages, these greenhouses, and even the gas station, a
Speaker 1: lot of them are only about four foot high at
Speaker 1: the eaves and so there. So, like you said, up close,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make sense. If you go inside, you're going
Speaker 1: to see that they just have that sprinkler system.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, big buildings all over again, you know, except
Speaker 2: this infrastructure is literally designed to protect the fake building exactly.
Speaker 1: And so at least two of these homes were going
Speaker 1: to be occupied by real people sort of.
Speaker 2: Because kind of stand ins, I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Well they had guys who ran anti aircraft
Speaker 1: guns and they were stationed in little fake houses on
Speaker 1: the rooftop.
Speaker 2: Armed stand ins. Yes, yeah, yeah yeah, armed. Yeah. No,
Speaker 2: that's cool. So they had to have all these elaborate
Speaker 2: catwalk systems that would allow people to kind of move
Speaker 2: between the different spaces for various reasons, for maintenance, et cetera. Man,
Speaker 2: that is so cool. The people occupying it that doesn't
Speaker 2: make sense. You would need some anti aircraft support, you know,
Speaker 2: in the event that your little subterfuge didn't quite work. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you don't want to just leave it all up to
Speaker 2: them being fooled, you know, you got to have some
Speaker 2: back up personnel in place.
Speaker 1: And that feels like a cool job, doesn't I've got
Speaker 1: to wake up and go to my fake house exactly,
Speaker 1: and I might have to shoot something.
Speaker 2: Super secret spy stuff, right.
Speaker 1: And they also realized you can't just make a town.
Speaker 1: It has to have ye all them trappings of life
Speaker 1: can't look abandoned, you know.
Speaker 2: They have to make cars on the road parked, accurate
Speaker 2: looking that would read. So they built some of these cars,
Speaker 2: parked them made out of rubber. And because they had
Speaker 2: to kind of again with the rough edge approach and
Speaker 2: the boxiness of making these fake cars out of wood
Speaker 2: and rubber, they started looking more again. Bill points this out.
Speaker 2: Bill why again? Yeah? Why interchangeably there points out that
Speaker 2: they really kind of looked a little more like the
Speaker 2: cars of the seventies. Yeah, those kind of boxy station
Speaker 2: wagony type cars or like a Gremlin I think maybe
Speaker 2: mm hmm, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And then there was even this legend or tall tail
Speaker 1: that said they let a cow loose to roam around
Speaker 1: on the rooftop, which is clever because that does look like,
Speaker 1: I guess, like an active town. But also, when's the
Speaker 1: last time you were on a city street and you
Speaker 1: just saw a random cow? Well?
Speaker 2: Yeah, because I'm picturing the scale of this and it
Speaker 2: isn't smaller scale. It's got these are like built to scale,
Speaker 2: so everything would be roughly the size of the real thing.
Speaker 2: So like a cow roaming around, it would be able
Speaker 2: to roam around the streets, but it would be a
Speaker 2: little odd. Why'd they do that, Ben, when'd they do that?
Speaker 2: That never happened?
Speaker 1: I actually didn't, okay, which it was sinse Yeah, people
Speaker 1: just I think the stories that just kind of spread. Also,
Speaker 1: I think that's too too realistic. And I want to
Speaker 1: point this out because we're an audio podcast. There was
Speaker 1: a moment where I asked you about seeing a cow
Speaker 1: in the street and paused, and for a second I
Speaker 1: thought you were going to be like December thirteenth, twenty fourteen, Augusta, Georgia.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that'd be cool, now, not a cow. I've seen
Speaker 2: random horses. Yeah, Oh, and crap dude, So I meant
Speaker 2: to mention this. I was just in Boston for Funzies
Speaker 2: and my buddy Frank, Big friend of the show, went
Speaker 2: to a movie theater in near Harvard and were running
Speaker 2: around Harvard campus and guess what we were nearly accosted
Speaker 2: by turkeys. Yes, yeah, told man, they suck. I did
Speaker 2: not realize that. And you know, I believe in the past,
Speaker 2: on one show or the other, we've talked about like
Speaker 2: turkey attacks in the Boston area because there are these
Speaker 2: wild turkeys that just roam free. If this part of
Speaker 2: the country had a reputation for free roaming cows, that
Speaker 2: might have been a smart move. But outside of that,
Speaker 2: probably would have given away the game a little bit.
Speaker 1: As a friend to all animals, even unto the naked
Speaker 1: mole rat folks, I assure you turkeys are terrible or scary.
Speaker 1: If turkeys were people, they would be criminals. I agree,
Speaker 1: And they gang up on you. They show weakness.
Speaker 2: I googled it when I got back to the Airbnb,
Speaker 2: and I found a story from very recently about a Cambridge,
Speaker 2: US postal worker who was attacked by a gang of
Speaker 2: turkeys with such ferocity that he fell over and broke
Speaker 2: his hip and had to have a hip replacement. They'll
Speaker 2: also just fall out of trees at you, and they
Speaker 2: get mad at whomever is around at you, dude. You know,
Speaker 2: you know that would be my waking nightmare.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you feel the way you feel about turkeys is
Speaker 1: the way the US feels about Japanese invasions.
Speaker 2: That's fair. You're like that at every moment, the other
Speaker 2: shoe is gonna drop.
Speaker 1: Bro.
Speaker 2: If I was standing on that beach waiting for that
Speaker 2: shoe to drop, looking for something coming at me on
Speaker 2: the horizon, my like the traveler moment in Ghostbusters, where
Speaker 2: I'm picturing, you know, whatever the thing is it comes
Speaker 2: for me. It would be turkeys. But yeah, the goal
Speaker 2: would be not to picture anything, but what it would
Speaker 2: come into my head that would terrify me would be
Speaker 2: a giant Turkey's.
Speaker 1: Just absolute pieces of trash. So wow, that's a hot take.
Speaker 1: I didn't see coming today. They actually did a lot
Speaker 1: more work than just than just what we've described, which
Speaker 1: is already a big deal. The folks who built and
Speaker 1: maintained this project at plant too. They also stayed acted
Speaker 1: doing other stuff during the war, and there is a
Speaker 1: monograph like a piece of short writing by Leroy Leroy
Speaker 1: Robert Hanson Leroy, but I like Leroy.
Speaker 2: But the way it's spelled though is L lowercase E
Speaker 2: capitol roy, So I don't know.
Speaker 1: It might be Leroy Leroy sounds more intriguing than.
Speaker 2: Le le Roy. Robert Hanson. He was the chief of
Speaker 2: the agronomy section and also involves in the Boeing projects.
Speaker 2: And I believe you mentioned the monograph right nineteen forty three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's got a super sexy title. Everybody's settle in
Speaker 1: and be comfortable. The use of grasses and lagoons were
Speaker 1: camouflage and dust control on air fields with a Seattle
Speaker 1: date line.
Speaker 2: What I know, right, just the tension. But the funny
Speaker 2: thing about that too is the idea of grasses and
Speaker 2: legumes and using different material. That's another thing that you
Speaker 2: can kind of see in the fabrication of like Disney World,
Speaker 2: you know, and like the fake mosses and things to
Speaker 2: achieve texture, like in the Avatar ride queue. That all
Speaker 2: this stuff that goes hand in hand. That's so fascinating
Speaker 2: to me. The intersection between entertainment and warfare, you know.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and we know that they had to surmount a
Speaker 1: couple of different challenges. One of the big things was
Speaker 1: camouflage paint. They had to get a texture that paint
Speaker 1: would adhere to, but that would also not interfere with
Speaker 1: air traffic, and so eventually going to the point that
Speaker 1: things looking kind of rough up close, they eventually they said,
Speaker 1: we're going to use a crushed rock surface and we're
Speaker 1: going to roll it with an adhesive material. For paved areas,
Speaker 1: we'll use wood chips with cement for non traffic areas.
Speaker 1: And then for the parts of the complex they're between
Speaker 1: or past the runways, the houses get increasingly less realistic, right,
Speaker 1: they turn into like this concrete slab. Yeah, yeah, because
Speaker 1: you can't have a plane hit it.
Speaker 2: And again, you know, keeping with our whole, like this
Speaker 2: is meant for an audience of five thousand feet. The
Speaker 2: things that would be farther away from you know, what
Speaker 2: would be perceived would be less important, sort of like
Speaker 2: some of the you know, details on those matte paintings.
Speaker 2: I was talking exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And you know, speaking of matte painting, I've
Speaker 1: got to just shout this out. I rewatched a film
Speaker 1: that captivated me for a long time from Dustill Dawn
Speaker 1: sure not the not the Japanese crime bar vampire that
Speaker 1: I hang out with, Yeah, yeah, or that I hang
Speaker 1: out at Yeah. Dustill Down has this great mate painting
Speaker 1: at the very end. Do you remember this moment where
Speaker 1: they spoilers by the way, three to one spoilers. It's dawn,
Speaker 1: they're leaving the bar. Presumably the film begins at dusk.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well you remember the film.
Speaker 4: Now, I'm just saying the movie is now its yeah,
Speaker 4: and uh the bar is named Teddy Twister, And so
Speaker 4: as they're pulling away, that's so cool.
Speaker 1: The camera pans out and it's that big matte painting
Speaker 1: and you see the bar is just the top of
Speaker 1: an ancient Meso American temple.
Speaker 2: That's right, that's so good. Okay, now you got me
Speaker 2: one to watch that again. Sequels I think probably paying
Speaker 2: less dividends. First time. I've only seen clips, but they
Speaker 2: don't look very good. But the first one is schlocky
Speaker 2: by design and a hell of a lot of fun. Agreed.
Speaker 1: And uh, And we're bringing that up because you if
Speaker 1: you see Matt paintings like you're saying in film, then
Speaker 1: you'll notice if you look closely that the detail does
Speaker 1: decrease the further into the quote unquote background you get,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of what they're doing here with Boeing Wonderland.
Speaker 2: But to the title of that, the absolutely the captivating
Speaker 2: title of that monograph. We talked about they would decorate
Speaker 2: these quote unquote lawn areas and vacant lots with actual
Speaker 2: grasses and weeds designed by the members of le Roy
Speaker 2: Hanson's agronomy team.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we're following into it. We're calling them le Roy No, yeah,
Speaker 1: we have to. It's it's like the Roy Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like.
Speaker 2: You know, the Rob Roy so Debtly and his team
Speaker 2: are really knocking out of the park with this camouflage.
Speaker 2: This Bill Why describes it as passive defense, which I
Speaker 2: think that's smart because it is not. You know. I mean,
Speaker 2: there's the there are the gunners there in case of
Speaker 2: an emergency, but this is pure subterfuge, you know. And
Speaker 2: it seems like it's they're putting so much thought into it,
Speaker 2: how could it fail. There were other initiatives in place
Speaker 2: planning active defense, such as the execution of fire and
Speaker 2: air raid drills and the installation of some air raid shelters,
Speaker 2: and that was handled by a guy by the name
Speaker 2: of Glen V. Dearst, among other commanders that were in
Speaker 2: charge of these other kind of aspects of the whole deal.
Speaker 2: Another news release from the Boeing News Bureau that came
Speaker 2: out in nineteen forty three said that all of the
Speaker 2: plant personnel would be able to reach those sheltering spots,
Speaker 2: those bunkers in less than twelve minutes, so you know,
Speaker 2: the safety of the employees, it would appear, was also
Speaker 2: pretty paramount. Yeah, let's not have any illusions. That was
Speaker 2: all for humanitarian reasons.
Speaker 1: They need the workers to get the job done well,
Speaker 1: because they also wanted to build war machines.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fifty thousand something.
Speaker 1: And it's strange because Seattle was, as we established, a
Speaker 1: unique problem for a couple of different reasons. If you
Speaker 1: have ever looked at the ground from an airplane, you
Speaker 1: notice that it's very easy to identify things through seeing
Speaker 1: the shape of the shore, like where land and water meet.
Speaker 1: So New York and San Francisco are very easy to
Speaker 1: recognize because of their shorelines. Des Moines or Topeka is
Speaker 1: different because their appearance is defined by rivers and bays,
Speaker 1: and Seattle is between Lake Washington and the Puget sound.
Speaker 1: So it's very easy to find landmarks if you know
Speaker 1: what you're looking for. And for this reason, our buddy
Speaker 1: deadly says, we're gonna have to do some more stuff
Speaker 1: with this Boeing project. We're gonna camouflage the employee parking lots.
Speaker 1: They're just too big and too obvious. We're also gonna
Speaker 1: cover sections of other adjacent land and we might need
Speaker 1: to make a fake river.
Speaker 2: Yeah, to your point, you know, this is a feature
Speaker 2: that would be necessary to sell the illusion. You know,
Speaker 2: I mean, not necessarily. The Japanese years were intimately familiar
Speaker 2: with the geography of the United States. But you know,
Speaker 2: to make it ring true, you know, to make it
Speaker 2: read as a successful illusion. You know, the way that
Speaker 2: stuff's laid out is really really important.
Speaker 1: Yeah, agreed, right, they and again lives are on the
Speaker 1: line here. The future of the world actually depends on
Speaker 1: this camouflage plan, even if it sounds silly. So he
Speaker 1: has this plan, He's going to reroot the Duwamish River.
Speaker 1: They never actually do this because here's here's the pickle,
Speaker 1: and Max we were all talking about this off air too, man,
Speaker 1: here's the pickle. There were not any further camouflage projects
Speaker 1: after nineteen forty three, because by the time they built
Speaker 1: this stuff out, the course of the war had shifted.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's kind of like when you are it's like
Speaker 5: a magic We both love cooking projects.
Speaker 1: Imagine cooking something really evolved that takes hours and right
Speaker 1: is your ribs. Right as you're about to pull those
Speaker 1: beautiful slow cooked ribs out of the oven, your partners
Speaker 1: or your friends show up and they brought takeout.
Speaker 2: Yeah, KFC. Right in Japan, I tried. Right. Well, that's
Speaker 2: the thing though, too, where we almost don't have any
Speaker 2: way of knowing exactly how effective this stuff was at
Speaker 2: because it yeah, because of exactly what you say. When
Speaker 2: we say the wars shifted, does that mean it became
Speaker 2: more of a ground offensive or it just the what
Speaker 2: happened now? Obviously not and I wouldn't say that, what right,
Speaker 2: But what was that about the tactics to change?
Speaker 1: Well, by that point, Japanese forces have been driven from
Speaker 1: those Aleutian islands and they were increasingly on their heels,
Speaker 1: so they were much less likely to take an offensive
Speaker 1: posture or to be able to do so.
Speaker 3: Right, and check my days, Guadalcanal was like forty three, correct.
Speaker 2: I believe that's correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was the first really big offensive because by
Speaker 3: this point of the war, Japanese weren't really bringing the
Speaker 3: fight to the United States.
Speaker 2: The United States were bringing the fight to them because.
Speaker 1: Right the islands hopping and stuff. So the fear, the
Speaker 1: overwhelming paranoia of nineteen forty two starts to fade. People
Speaker 1: are feeling a little now, they're just safer, is nervous.
Speaker 1: But then eventually that fades too, and they say, Okay,
Speaker 1: that was a.
Speaker 2: Crazy couple of years. Huh.
Speaker 1: And they go to the Japanese American population of the
Speaker 1: US and they say, sorry, we laughed up and they're
Speaker 1: like it's not cool. They're like, are bad.
Speaker 2: Well, it's like, you know, I recently watched the Aviator
Speaker 2: for the first time, and you know, during the height
Speaker 2: of these wars, when production was so important and innovation
Speaker 2: was so important, you didn't you kind of spent the
Speaker 2: money and asked the questions later, despite what we said
Speaker 2: about having to convinced, you know, the brass that these
Speaker 2: camouflage ideas were good. You know, a lot of times
Speaker 2: just happened. They'd make tons of planes, or they'd do
Speaker 2: a project, and then things would end or change, and
Speaker 2: you would basically have spent all this money for nothing.
Speaker 2: But that's just part of the nature of you know,
Speaker 2: being prepared, like the boy Scout Code of Ethics. Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Henry Kissinger would later go on to say,
Speaker 1: just get it done and then we'll make it right later.
Speaker 2: That's exactly right.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Also he is sort of like if a turkey was
Speaker 1: a person.
Speaker 2: So how do you really feel about.
Speaker 1: Yes, we can finally say that that's true, that's true.
Speaker 1: I've got a lot of text messages about that one.
Speaker 2: You know, I was a little freaked out.
Speaker 1: I was like, I don't know if I want you
Speaker 1: congratulating me on my phone, guys. But but yes, So
Speaker 1: now that we walked down the street to take an
Speaker 1: unprompted shot at a dead man, we do have to
Speaker 1: tell you the these rooftop camouflage fake town things. Like
Speaker 1: you said, there was secrecy involved, but it's tough to
Speaker 1: keep that stuff secret. Like if you lived in the town,
Speaker 1: you would know something weird was up. It looked like
Speaker 1: somebody's built a mini golf course or a putt putt
Speaker 1: course on top of the airplane plan.
Speaker 2: Well, and to our earlier point. You know, this stuff
Speaker 2: at the time would have been completely off limits to
Speaker 2: any civilians, highly guarded you know, classify. Wouldn't have been
Speaker 2: any chatter about it on the you know, the radios
Speaker 2: or what have you, and any communication that wasn't encrypted.
Speaker 2: But now the were left with these sort of weird
Speaker 2: kind of tourist attractions that are built on top of
Speaker 2: these you know, these these airplane manufacturing facilities that are
Speaker 2: making these weapons of war. And like you said, people
Speaker 2: that lived near there, they know what's going on. You
Speaker 2: see the stuff being built, you know, So how do
Speaker 2: they do They kind of spin it as like a
Speaker 2: like a public like an active good will to the public, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Hey guys, we were thinking.
Speaker 5: Of you.
Speaker 2: Psych just for your kids.
Speaker 1: Exactly on July seventeenth, about a month before, around a
Speaker 1: month before the Japanese government officially announces unconditional surrender, the
Speaker 1: Army Corps of Engineers says, look, we've already sent out
Speaker 1: some contracts to private entities. They're going to dismantle these
Speaker 1: fake towns. We're not going to keep these around two
Speaker 1: too long. They are no longer relevant. So, for instance,
Speaker 1: like a company out of la called LB Cotton Company.
Speaker 1: They got paid a little less than two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars to take apart the Boeing Wonderland within
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty days. So all told, we're looking
Speaker 1: at a cost of two million dollars, right, two to
Speaker 1: three million dollars.
Speaker 2: Did we mention that like setting foot on these fake
Speaker 2: roof you know, top attractions prior to this would have
Speaker 2: been a serious crime. Oh we didn't. Yeah, sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, you know, again because of the levels of
Speaker 2: classification and the secrecy around it, and you know, the
Speaker 2: fact that you could accidentally get yourself probably blown up
Speaker 2: by a you know, a gunner. Yeah, this would have
Speaker 2: been a big deal. And then within the course of
Speaker 2: a couple of months that the tide turned and now
Speaker 2: it's like this almost tourist attraction and it goes from
Speaker 2: that to being the very little memory of it, you know,
Speaker 2: ever having existed. Were you able to find any photos
Speaker 2: from this brief period of a photo op time?
Speaker 1: We have just a few if you go to and
Speaker 1: we mentioned this part one, if you go to Rare
Speaker 1: Historical Photos.
Speaker 2: That's right, I remember that all Chestnut.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, we went we went long. We went
Speaker 1: deep on this one. But if you go to Rare
Speaker 1: Historical Photos and shout out to Max for finding this,
Speaker 1: you'll see a couple of different still photographs where you
Speaker 1: can kind of see the edge over roof with the
Speaker 1: fake trees and the planes beneath. And then you can
Speaker 1: see one guy walking around this uncanny valley tower.
Speaker 2: Trees look weird. The trees look like they're made of
Speaker 2: polygons or something like a bad nineties sim game. This
Speaker 2: is like a Sega Saturn version of a town. But
Speaker 2: again from a distance. From a distance, these would have
Speaker 2: looked like trees, you know. I mean they knew what
Speaker 2: they were doing. Man, this is super interesting stuff. The
Speaker 2: grass looks like grass. The snosberries taste like Stosberry's, you know.
Speaker 1: And then you really, folks to get a sense of this,
Speaker 1: both the size of it and the weird scale of
Speaker 1: the buildings, check out this article. You can see you
Speaker 1: could see a couple standing next to the plywood paneled
Speaker 1: house and a little scale kind of yees see how
Speaker 1: short the houses are. You can see those hills we
Speaker 1: talk about because of the uneven sawtoothed roof.
Speaker 2: Okay, so I had said something earlier about how everything
Speaker 2: was kind of scale and I think maybe we buried
Speaker 2: the lead on this. I'm sure we mentioned it, but yeah,
Speaker 2: they're like squat looking, you know, because again, from from
Speaker 2: a height could you wouldn't be able to tell as
Speaker 2: long as they were wide enough, you wouldn't be able
Speaker 2: to tell how tall the houses were because all you're
Speaker 2: seeing is the flat parts or the parts that are
Speaker 2: you know, peaked. So it's brilliant. As long as the
Speaker 2: scale of the width and the length were right, the
Speaker 2: height didn't really matter. So that these funny little kind
Speaker 2: of dwarf houses exactly like Chick fil a. Oh man,
Speaker 2: that was a cool thing.
Speaker 3: So here's the photo that I saw that I actually
Speaker 3: I did not even think about this until right now,
Speaker 3: but I'll stroll through the photos and it's the people
Speaker 3: walking outside of a building going to another building, and
Speaker 3: above them is still the town because of course you
Speaker 3: have to have the town going over all of it.
Speaker 3: I'm like, it's like it's not just like one big building,
Speaker 3: it's a giant campus.
Speaker 2: One thing.
Speaker 3: I you know, I was in Seattle late last year
Speaker 3: and my buddy and I we kind of did like
Speaker 3: a loop and went as merce Island and stuff like that,
Speaker 3: and came down and we came up, like you know,
Speaker 3: through the south side of like Lake Washington, and that's
Speaker 3: where a lot of the you know, aviation stuff in
Speaker 3: Seattle was built and where it is still today.
Speaker 2: And I was going there, I'm like, this is like
Speaker 2: we didn't have enough time.
Speaker 3: It was very like short trip there, but I'm like, man,
Speaker 3: next time we're here, I want to go check out
Speaker 3: all the bowing stuff here.
Speaker 2: Sure, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is also, uh, this is where we see
Speaker 1: a really strange and neat thing. So it's an open secret.
Speaker 1: People aren't allowed around these mystery towns. But now that
Speaker 1: they are irrelevant and people have worked so hard on it,
Speaker 1: we get the sense that a lot of people said, well,
Speaker 1: we should at least let people no, we did something,
Speaker 1: that's right, guys. We worked so hard on our art project.
Speaker 2: Who knows there might be another World war coming right
Speaker 2: down the line where we need to do this again.
Speaker 2: We need to sort of patent our idea at the
Speaker 2: very least in the court of public opinion.
Speaker 1: So boeing As and Douglas Aircraft are like, Okay, we're
Speaker 1: gonna at least do some photos. Guys, we built out
Speaker 1: these elaborate sets. So they got a bunch of female
Speaker 1: employees and said, get to the rooftop, stroll around. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just what we're looking at, right, Yeah, just act like
Speaker 1: you're in a regular American suburb. And then these get
Speaker 1: these pictures get published in Boeing News and Douglas Airview
Speaker 1: and Boeing Magazine, and they get published right as yeah,
Speaker 1: right as this stuff is being torn down, and within
Speaker 1: a few months, it's back to a regular rooftop. Also,
Speaker 1: by the way, John Stewart Dettley, the creator of Boeing Wonderland.
Speaker 2: He is Hollywood big wig art director, husband to the stars.
Speaker 2: He's starting to have a tough time, right Yeah. The
Speaker 2: star in question Veronica Lake, Sex symbol Icon movie star.
Speaker 2: There were relationship began to disintegrate and it actually ended
Speaker 2: three months after she had an unfortunately terminated pregnancy. She actually,
Speaker 2: I believe, took a tumble and you know, while filming,
Speaker 2: and that led to a miscarriage and Debtly, you know,
Speaker 2: he kind of had peaked. It would seem he was
Speaker 2: never able to kind of re establish himself in the
Speaker 2: film industry and didn't go back to California for twenty years.
Speaker 2: And then he married another woman named Virginia Crowell. And
Speaker 2: you know, let's not forget he did have a background
Speaker 2: in architecture after all. So he did become a pretty
Speaker 2: well regarded architect in Seattle.
Speaker 1: And eventually, unfortunately he loses a second young child. Their
Speaker 1: three year old passes away. They leave Seattle. After that point,
Speaker 1: they spend time in Hawaii and Baltimore before settling in
Speaker 1: southern California. This is happening. The blackout paint is being
Speaker 1: stripped from the factories all up and down the coast.
Speaker 1: And even John Francis Omer, the magician and camouflage enthusiast.
Speaker 2: Has retired. This end of an era.
Speaker 1: End of an era indeed, and you can find people
Speaker 1: who still study this, like Billion Yena. You can also
Speaker 1: find folks like Mike Lombardi, who has an amazing job.
Speaker 1: I can't remember who I was. I was talking with
Speaker 1: my one of my sketch comedy buddies, Simon about this.
Speaker 1: A lot of big companies have a corporate historian, and
Speaker 1: your job is just to be the nerd who knows
Speaker 1: about stuff.
Speaker 2: I would love.
Speaker 1: That job depends on the company, though, right, Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: a candy factory, a walk a thing. That'd be nice.
Speaker 2: Unless the background involves, you know, the appropriation and abuse
Speaker 2: of indigenous people. Yeah, did you read the original book,
Speaker 2: the rold All Books. It's a little problematic the way addressed. Yeah,
Speaker 2: because they're like basically like Pigmy, like Zack African, you know,
Speaker 2: indigenous people.
Speaker 1: Also, if you want to learn more about Rule Dahl's
Speaker 1: Dark Side, I highly recommend this book, George's Marvelous Medicine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have read that one. It's a shorter one.
Speaker 2: It's it's a quick read, but it's pretty dark. Yeah.
Speaker 2: He has a handful of a sort of more young
Speaker 2: adult kind of ones.
Speaker 1: It's it's a book where just so you know, folks,
Speaker 1: if you want to if you want to be like
Speaker 1: the cool parent or the cool like uncle or aunt
Speaker 1: or something when the kids old enough, introduce them to
Speaker 1: stuff like Edward Gory and uh, George's Marvelous Medicine. This
Speaker 1: kid his parents leave to go shopping or something, and
Speaker 1: he decides that he's going to kill his grandmother.
Speaker 2: Okay, you need to say no more. Also, I remember
Speaker 2: one that probably did not age well is called The Twits.
Speaker 2: Oh gosh, I forgot. That's a pretty rough one in
Speaker 2: terms of it's uh, let's just say lampooning of what
Speaker 2: today would be considered mental health concerns. Yes, yeah, absolutely,
Speaker 2: But we also have an episode about Roll Dahl and
Speaker 2: his time as a fighter pilot himself and how it
Speaker 2: is entirely possible that his good friend Ian Fleming based
Speaker 2: a lot of the aspects of the James Bond character
Speaker 2: on Roll Dahll.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and our corporate historian for Boeing, Mike Lombardi, he
Speaker 1: remains amazed in interviews. He's saying, look, we've got almost
Speaker 1: a century's worth making great airplanes. You would think that
Speaker 1: most people asking us about the history of Boeing would
Speaker 1: ask about things like the B seventeen or the seven
Speaker 1: forty seven, but nope, the most popular subject is the
Speaker 1: neighborhood on top of Plant two. Everybody still is captivated
Speaker 1: by this, as are we, and I think we've got
Speaker 1: a lot of directions in this series, and we appreciate
Speaker 1: you as always folks for tuning in. We love weird
Speaker 1: obscure World War two history, as you can tell from
Speaker 1: our past episodes. Shout out to our super producer research
Speaker 1: associate for this, Max Williams, throwing some semaphore out there
Speaker 1: helping us land the plane hollah.
Speaker 2: Orrah and Husky. Yes, indeed, and thanks to Nathan Toski
Speaker 2: for keeping our marketing ducks in a row.
Speaker 1: Yes, podcasts Yes, And thanks to Jonathan Strickland a k a. L. Quizz,
Speaker 1: Thanks to aj Jacobs aka the Puzzler.
Speaker 2: And thanks to Let's see who else who else? Oh,
Speaker 2: Alex Williams. Alex Williams composed our name Chris Frostiotos and
Speaker 2: his wizard Beard He's Jeff Coats, both of them here
Speaker 2: in spirit. And thanks to you, Ben for allowing us
Speaker 2: to be each other's wingman. And also, can I be
Speaker 2: the Iceman? I thought you wanted to be the bag man?
Speaker 2: Well spent in our in our top gun kind of Okay,
Speaker 2: I've never seen top gun. I don't know either. I
Speaker 2: just know there's a character named the Iceman character. You're
Speaker 2: You're always my hunckle Beart is such a cruel life
Speaker 2: pie not thin. I think we uh, I think we
Speaker 2: got them. I think we do. We'll see you next time, folks.
Speaker 2: For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 2: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.