I came across this article entitled, "
How To Hide An Airplane Factory."
During World War II the Army Corps of Engineers needed to hide the Lockheed Burbank Aircraft Plant to protect it from a Japanese air attack. They covered it with camouflage netting and to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.
Check out the site, the photos are quite remarkable.
This reminds me of the video game Red Alert, which is a real-time strategy game dealing with the Allied Forces VS The Soviet Union. One of the Allied abilities was creating fake buildings, so enemy forces would waste time attacking fake targets. Looks like the Allies were pretty good at disguising high value military targets as well.
I'm going off on a slight tangent now, but one of the most successful Allied deceptions was
Operation Fortitude.
Operation Fortitude was the codename for the deception operations used by the Allied forces during World War II in connection with the Normandy landings (Operation Overlord). It was divided into Fortitude North, a threat to invade Norway, and Fortitude South, designed to induce the Germans to believe that the main invasion of France would occur in the Pas de Calais rather than Normandy. Fortitude was one of the most successful deception operations of the war and arguably the most important. Both Fortitude North and Fortitude South were related to a wider deception plan called Operation Bodyguard.
[...]
It was initially envisioned that deception would occur through five main channels:
- Physical deception: the creation in the mind of the enemy of non-existent units through fake infrastructure and equipment, such as inflatable rubber tanks and plywood artillery.
- Controlled leaks of information through diplomatic channels, which might be passed on via neutral countries to the Germans.
- Wireless traffic: the creation of non-existent units through simulation of the wireless traffic that such units would generate, which would be detected by the enemy
- Use of German agents controlled by the Allies through the Double Cross System to send false information to the German intelligence services
- Public presence of notable staff associated with phantom groups, such as FUSAG (First U.S. Army Group), most notably George S. Patton, the best known senior Allied combat commander.
During the course of Fortitude the almost complete lack of German aerial reconnaissance, together with the absence of uncontrolled German agents in Britain, came to make physical deception almost irrelevant. The unreliability of the "diplomatic leaks" resulted in their discontinuance. The majority of deception was carried out by means of false wireless traffic and through German double agents. The latter proved to be by far the most significant.
In fact, Fortitude was so successful that Hitler regarded the Normandy invasion as a feint: he kept his Panzer units where he expected an attack and away from Normandy, until the battle was decided—in Normandy.[1] Although Fortitude was controlled from SHAEF, London Controlling Section retained responsibility for what was called "Special Means": the use of diplomatic channels and double-agents.
History is pretty awesome.
