A rich and substantial archive of fascinating, often surreal photographs documenting an unusual chapter in the history of Los Angeles during WWII - the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and a crew of Hollywood set designers' combined efforts to camouflage entire military facilities and other expansive urban areas.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, U.S. defense officials believed that enemy forces had the potential ability to reach the coast of California. In addition to concerns for public safety, officials believed the Los Angeles coast would be a strategic target, due to the fact that more than half of all American military aircraft were manufactured there.

The War Department put the Army Corp of Engineers in charge of coming up with solutions for “passive defense” for U.S. aircraft plants as well as military installations and other critical facilities. The endeavor was helmed by John Ohmer Jr. and Lt. Col. George Hazenbush (whose name appears on the cover of the album). Both men were WWI veterans and army reserve camouflage officers,. Hazenbush was also, at the time, working in the movie business. Employing Hollywood set designers and other film artists from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Universal Pictures, and Warner Bros., Hazenbush, Ohmer and their team of engineers developed hundreds of methods of disguise and protection. The vast majority of these designs are documented in the present collection, as well as a number of photographically-printed explanatory diagrams.

One technique they devised was to cover entire factories in overhead nets and tactically-colored garlands. The canopies were then topped with decoy homes, cars and dog houses painted on burlap panels and other lightweight material. Fake trees were added as well, made with tin cans or spray-painted chicken feathers, which could replicate the motion of leaves blowing in the wind. The Lockheed plant in Burbank, for example, was covered in a 1,000 acre canopy made to look like a stretch LA suburb. As one employee later recalled, “We were picking chicken feathers out of our airplanes, out of our hair, all at the time we were building airplanes." The dummy town covering a Boeing Plant in Seattle even included mock street signs, Synthetic Street and Burlap Boulevard).

Other designs devised to fake-out attackers and obscure crucial infrastructure included a revolving tree stump, placed over a foxhole and capable of hiding a soldier; a “nest” for machine guns, also with a sliding top; a concealed kitchen and mess hall; a simulated orange orchard, cabbage patch and garden hedge; numerous simulated trees including the Palm, Joshua, Scrub Oak, and Peach; a simulated house and airplane, both painted on the ground; a collapsible house for a three-inch anti-aircraft gun; and much, much more. The team also developed paints that were nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, represented in the album by a fantastic photo of a three-dimensional display board with instructions on how to mix different recipes to simulate earth, soot, dry color and charcoal.

The majority of the photographs in the collection bear manuscript project numbers on their versos, which corresponds with a four page type-sheet titled "Model Laboratory projects." Some of the smaller photographs are affixed to paper, with typed project numbers and / or manuscript notations.

More images available upon request.