The 1st Special Service Force — the "Devil's Brigade" — was a joint American-Canadian commando unit. In the Pacific, they used a unique weapon: Hollywood.\n\nSpecial effects artists recruited from Los Angeles movie studios built fake beach fortifications, complete with wooden guns that fired smoke canisters, fake tanks with Ford engines, and entire mock military installations visible only from the air.\n\nThey built fake landing craft out of plywood that looked convincing from aerial reconnaissance. They constructed a false runway on a Pacific island that Japanese planes bombed repeatedly, wasting valuable ordnance on a target that was entirely fictional — the runway was made of painted canvas over sand.\n\nOne of their most creative deceptions was "Operation Longhorn," where they made a single battalion appear to be a full division by having each soldier carry multiple backpacks and cook multiple campfires. They rotated troops between positions and used truck convoys that circled back and passed the same observation points repeatedly.\n\nThe special effects crew included set designers, model makers, and a man who had worked on "The Wizard of Oz." They understood that a deception is only convincing from one angle — so they built everything to be convincing from exactly the angle a Japanese recon plane would see it.\n\nSome of the fake aircraft used actual engines burning smoke-producing fuel, so even engine exhaust was visible from above. The pilots never flew the planes — they just sat in them running the engines while cameras shot film for intelligence.\n\nThe Devil's Brigade earned the nickname because of their fighting prowess — but their biggest victories were fought with paint and plywood.