Itchy Camouflage

One of the more prominent landmarks along I-5 as you pass Old Town heading south toward downtown San Diego is the jagged-roofed complex that now houses the Navy’s SpaWar (Space and Naval Warfare) center. Today the Navy works on tactical and non-tactical information technology within these buildings, but during World War II this was where the Consolidated Aircraft Company (Convair) assembled some of America’s most powerful war machines.  At a San Diego Professional Tour Guide Association meeting the other night, Mike Ryan (a former SDPTGA president and local writer who served in the Navy during the Vietnam War), talked about San Diego’s military history and included a tidbit about the plant’s wartime operation I’ll probably think of every time I drive past.

Ryan mentioned that the locals were so concerned about the possibility of a Japanese air strike against the aircraft factory that workers hung acres of chicken wire over the building roofs. Then they glued chicken feathers to the wire for camouflage. Neither Ryan nor Lucinda Eddy, the local historian who in 1993 wrote a detailed article for the Journal of San Diego History about the war years, mentioned what the chicken feathers were supposed to simulate. (Why not use burlap?) And indeed the feathers proved problematic, harboring fleas and lice that infested the workers below, until delousing and insecticidal spraying ended the infestations.

Far more impressive was the staggering productivity achieved by the Convair workers under their feathery cover. By the beginning of 1944, they were cranking out 11 B-24 “Liberator” bombers every day, ultimately building 6,724 of them at the San Diego plant. (A significant number of the assembly-line workers were women.)