How to Hide an Aircraft 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 trompe l’oeil to make it look like a rural subdivision from the air.

This is incredible!!!

http://thinkorthwim.com/2007/08/19/1034/

This book is scheduled for publication next month.

It details the 26th infantry's assignment to Coastal Patrol duty for the New England

Coast and the entire Eastern Seaboard after Pearl Harbor.

The military was concerned about German invasions and the 26th ID became sort

of a "Homeland Security" - if you will.

http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-3142-7

Restoration of the Enola Gay

http://www.nasm.si.edu/museum/garber/enola/enola.htm

A product with legs

By Carl Zebrowski

For a woman of the 1940s, stockings were just as essential to dressing up as a dress. Sheer hosiery enhanced the appearance of the leg and provided a neat, finished look to outfits for wear at the office, at church, or for dinner out.

Silk was the preferred material for stockings, because of its luxurious look and feel. But silk stockings were expensive and anything but durable. Women sometimes opted for cotton and wool, but those didn’t look dressy. Stockings created from manmade rayon were another possibility, but they didn’t fit well, tending to sag and form "knees" of their own that didn’t line up for long with those of the wearer. Women needed a better alternative.

Science came to the rescue. The chemical company DuPont launched an effort to produce synthetic silk in the 1920s. Working with a team of scientists for a decade, Julian Hill pulled a heated rod out of a solution of coal tar, water, and alcohol one day to find a sheer filament stretched between the rod and the solution. At room temperature, the filament looked and felt like silk. The new material made its debut at the 1939 New York World’s Fair as "nylon," from the abbreviation NY.

Nylon first hit the market as toothbrush bristles, fishing line, and surgical stitching. But on May 15, 1940, nylon stockings hit the shelves of New York City. By the end of the day, some 780,000 pairs had been sold. Soon the material and the hosiery made from it were synonymous, and stockings, regardless of what they were made of, became "nylons."

Because nylon didn’t stretch, the original nylons had to be manufactured in numerous different sizes. The material was knitted flat in various shapes and lengths and then sewn at the back so a finished stocking more or less followed the form of the leg—narrower above and below the calf and wider at the thigh. The tailoring was known as "fully fashioned" (not to be confused with well fitting).

By the end of 1940, 64 million pairs of nylons had been sold. But before the next year ended, war came, and the three most common sheer stocking materials—silk, nylon, and rayon—were all but lost to the war effort. Much of what little silk was available to the United States was used to make powder sacks for the military, because it left no residue inside gun barrels. "When anyone got word that the local Five and Dime store had received a shipment [of silk stockings], lines would form through the store and around the block," Mary E. Mazzei of Cleveland, Ohio, wrote at hbo.com. Nylon was most useful to the military, going into parachutes, tents, ropes, and tires. Known as the "miracle fiber," it was so critical to the war effort that drives were held to collect worn-out nylons to be recycled for military use. Rayon had some of the same military uses as nylon, yet it remained the most widely available type of sheer stocking.

One solution to the stocking shortage was for women simply to wear cotton socks. The socks were short and worn folded over at the top of the ankle. Another popular option was to apply makeup to the leg, a tedious procedure that could include painting a black line up the back of the leg to complete the illusion. "When we could not get silk stockings we painted our legs with pancake makeup—used eyebrow pencils to make ‘seams,’" Marie R. Albig of Bergenfield, New Jersey, wrote at hbo.com; "but if we got caught in the rain, our leg makeup washed off."

The most reliable way for a woman to obtain nylons during the war was to live in a country where US troops were stationed. GIs earned a decent income relative to the war-ravaged economies overseas, so they often could afford to spend some of their disposable income out on the town and still have money left over to buy things. The post exchanges, or PXs, on their bases typically offered nylons, as well as chocolate and cigarettes, at low prices. Many of the men purchased these small luxuries to give as gifts to female friends.

With the dawning of peace, the stocking situation improved in the States, but not overnight. "I remembered...after the war was over and we heard that Penny’s had nylon stockings," wrote Helen Beaubier at kaccdouglassclan.com. "I ran out of the house and was going to run down to the store and get nylons and I got a pair and they were thick and they wouldn’t stay up; they were terrible; they were...just awful those first nylons that came."

Stockings survived for another two decades before they virtually disappeared. By then, DuPont had invented Lycra, which was added to hosiery to allow it to stretch to fit. Now, stockings could be made to fit snugly all the way up the leg and, in the form of pantyhose, continue over the hip. As skirt lengths rose higher and higher, stockings became obsolete. Pantyhose took over, relegating stocking sales once and for all to the likes of Victoria’s Secret.

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Carl Zebrowski, a former daily newspaper editor and managing editor of Civil War Times and Columbiad magazines, and the author of the book Walking to Cold Mountain: A Journey through Civil War America, is the managing editor and website editor of America in WWII. This article originally appeared in the August 2005 issue of America in WWII.

http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/productwithlegs.htm

Fun at the pictures

by Carl Zebrowski

Before the age of television, movies ruled the media. Film had an almost mystical power, a quality that transcended a picture being worth a thousand words. Nearly 100 million people went to the movies weekly during World War II. That was three out of every four men, women, and children in the country. Movie studio revenues reached all-time highs of well over $1 billion a year.

Though ticket prices rose 33 percent, a movie outing remained a good value for wartime Americans who, thanks to war-related jobs, had more disposable income than during the Depression. “It only cost 25 cents to go to the movies then,†remembered Barbara Kiser of Chicago at www. nhs.needham.k12.ma.us. “It cost 5 cents each way on the streetcar, 10 cents for the movie, with 5 cents left over to buy candy.†And besides the feature film, theater-goers got to see a newsreel, the forerunner of TV news, and a short or two. A Three Stooges episode was a possibility. So was an installment of a serial adventure that ended with the hero on the verge of disaster, a cliffhanger designed to bring the viewer back the following week.

Well aware of how many people flocked to the silver screen to worship the likes of Bing Crosby, Betty Grable, and Gary Cooper, and of the mesmerizing influence the superstars had, the government positioned itself to take advantage of the captive audience. The Office of War Information (OWI), established in June 1942 to promote the war effort, distributed a manual to advise film studios what to put in their movies. The manual’s message boiled down to “Will this picture help win the war?†Lest there be any confusion, the OWI answered that question for the studios, reviewing screenplays and offering rewrite suggestions. Though the OWI had no power to censor films, it leveraged all the clout it needed by working with the Office of Censorship, which controlled what movies the studios could ship to the lucrative foreign markets.

So, due in part to what interested a people at war and in part to the strong-arming of the OWI, movies of the early 1940s focused on fostering a patriotic atmosphere that encouraged people to make sacrifices for the war effort. About 30 percent of movies released during this time related directly to the war. “That was very important to people who had someone overseas…,†recalled actress Kitty Carlisle Hart in an interview published at www.pbs.org. “Everyone cared about those war movies.â€

At the OWI’s insistence, movies presented an idealized war. “In the movies we would always win the war,†recalled Carolina San Angelo of Naugatuck, Con-necticut, at www.vm.uconn.edu. Germans were painstakingly distinguished from the sinister Nazis among them. The Japanese were not so generously treated. They were unfailingly depicted as myopic devotees of a warmongering emperor. “The Hollywood war movies…always depicted the enemy as sneering and sadistic barbarians,†recalled Robert F. Gallagher of Chicago at www.gallagher.com. “We began to really hate the people of the enemy countries, not just their leaders….†At the same time, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was made to appear not nearly so brutal as his prewar résumé suggested. And the British seemed eager to eliminate their class system that so annoyed Americans.

America herself was presented at her finest. Since You Went Away was the epitome of the utopian wartime film. Producer David O. Selznick, who had produced Gone with the Wind in 1939, loaded the movie with stars—Shirley Temple, Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotton, and Lionel Barrymore—and with every conceivable wartime cliché, from dad joining the military, mom taking a job in a war-production factory, and black maid working overtime for the family for no extra pay, to dad coming home on a snowy Christmas Eve and everything returning to normal, only better, after the war. Contrived as it was, the movie earned nine Academy Award nominations.

Three years into America’s involvement in the global conflict, the public had tired of thinking about the war all the time. Hollywood responded and its films began to lean more toward what has always been its forte: pure escapism. When war was depicted, grim realism rather than rosy optimism became the norm, as in The Story of GI Joe, based on the firmly grounded writings of war correspondent Ernie Pyle.

By war’s end Hollywood could boast that it built morale, supplied an essential escape, and still managed to produce some classics, including the masterpiece Casablanca. And all the while it posted record profits. Not bad for a town of celluloid heroes.

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Carl Zebrowski is the managing editor and website editor of America in WWII. This article originally appeared in the April 2006 issue of America in WWII.

http://www.americainwwii.com/stories/funatthepictures.htm