Camouflage at Kennedy Park

Facts

Headquarters disguised as Spanish Bungalow

Camouflage:

• The buildings were designed to resemble civilian houses and give the impression of a housing estate.
  
  
• The battery command post was designed to look like a modern style beach house or kiosk and included a false wood and tile roof to hide the reinforced concrete roof of what was in fact a bunker.
  
  
• The gun emplacements were also fitted with false roofs and chimneys.
  
  
• They had false paint on windows to have effect. 
  
  
  

Precautions

• There were about four rows of barbed wire on the beaches to prevent fast action up the cliffs from the Japanese.
  
• On Beach Road (The road that Kennedy Park is off) tank traps were erected of pine trunks standing beside the road, with other heavy trunks ready to be dropped across the road.
  
  
• Old men and boys who didn’t go overseas to help, joined the home-guard. This later became compulsory.
  
  
• All school boys drilled and learnt to shoot in their school cadet groups.
  
  
• Other men and women joined the emergency precaution scheme which supervised the blackout, air-raid shelters, provision of sand bucket and stirrup pumps, against the risk of fire.
  
  
• Campbells Bay School fathers volunteered and dug shelters for the children, where the swimming pool is now. The classrooms all had blackout curtains and the windows were left open at night, so that the glass wouldn't shatter from the practice shooting of the guns.
  
  
• To prevent light tanks and infantry landing, four rows of barbed wire were installed along the beach.
  
  
• They had many lookouts, some of which still exist.