WW2 Airfields Archive Profile picture
Aug 2, 2023 ā€¢ 7 tweets ā€¢ 3 min read ā€¢ Read on X
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This isn't a real town.

It's "Boeing Wonderland", a fake town built on top of the roof of Boeing Plant 2, a factory building B-17 Flying Fortress in the USA.

As far as wartime decoys and deception goes, I think this has to be the most inventive I've seen.

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If you were on the ground, it might not be obvious. It looks like an aircraft factory.

But spot what's painted on the walls of the hangar... camouflage and houses.

It's from above things get really interesting.

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To hide the factory from possible aerial attack, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built houses of plywood and fabric and installed fake streets to camouflage the roof.

The idea was to blend the facility into the surrounding neighborhood across the river.

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The houses weren't quite the same size you might expect in a real town.

But that's ok, because from the air, it looks like a town, regardless of how big the houses are (or aren't).

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Here's a bird's eye view of the factory roof and fake town.

Cunning.

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Here's another view from the ground, showing factory workers beneath the fake town.

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All designed to help disguise this...

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Here's a (rather niche and short) thread of aircraft that crash landed in Switzerland during the Second World War.

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