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Detlie went to work on a major assignment: disguising the massive Boeing plant so that it would not be spotted by aerial surveillance and kept safe from potential bombing raids. Boeing was turning out nearly a third of the new planes used in the war. It had to be protected.
The Army engineers’ creation had to be more sophisticated than tricking the eye with color blotches. They came up with a solution: Build a new neighborhood on Boeing Plant 2’s roof, one that would blend in with the civilian surroundings — a nice suburban kind of place. So they made streets of burlap and trees of chicken wire and feathers painted to look natural. They built squat houses on a contoured landscape — roofscape? — 53 of them in all.
They were mostly not full-sized houses when seen from the ground, but when photographed from thousands of feet up, they’d pass the smell test. They built automobiles that looked like they’d been flattened by steamrollers, shaped to trick any cameras aloft. Photographs from up there made everything look flat as pancakes anyway. But the angles and shading had to be just right. The Army was involved in camouflaging important aircraft plants in Southern California too, with plenty of Hollywood recruits to design them.
The deception spilled over from the Boeing plant’s roof. The Boeing Wonderland’s fake roads were extended across next-door Boeing Field and up a swath of the Beacon Hill greenbelt to make it look as though the roads extended there. Detlie’s team also considered building an entirely new fake airfield to fool the enemy.
In Seattle the new nabe was an open secret, but no one spilled the beans. It wasn’t until near the end of the war in the Pacific in the summer of 1945 that the public was informed about the project. Boeing employees posed in their fake Wonderland subdivision, newsreels spread the story and people were amazed at the elaborate hoax.