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Boeing Wonderland: The Fake Cities on America's West Coast (2013)

Through Boeing Wonderland's clever visual trickery, vital West Coast warplane plants were made invisible to prying enemy aerial eyes.

Warner Brothers executives later insisted that their own lot receive the “Kelley Treatment.” They decided that their sound stages looked too much like aircraft hangers from the air, and feared that Japanese bombardiers, fooled by the Clover Field camouflage—or by Lockheed’s, only three miles to the north—would bomb their studio instead! While my father was welding superstructures for Fletcher-class destroyers, John Detlie was a few miles away, working with Washington State Camouflage Director William James Bain and the Seattle architectural firm of Young and Richardson to hide Boeing from Japanese aircraft. As he told me, “with nearly one hundred years of great airplanes, one would think that the most frequently asked questions directed to the Boeing history office would be about the B-17, the 314 Clipper, the 707, or 747, but hands down the most popular subject is the ‘neighborhood on top of Plant 2.’ To this day, the size, scope, and imagination of that project still captivate and amaze the public and employees.”

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