ship camouflage artist remembers Norman Wilkinson

Rogers' ship camouflage proposal

Good news!  A long-lost camoufleur has now been rediscovered. I have only now unearthed a British-American writer and illustrator, named Stanley R.H. Rogers (1887-1961), who wrote about thirty books (a differing source says fifty), many of which are his illustrated accounts of maritime history and exploration. 

Of further interest is the fact that he contributed to ship camouflage, American and British, in both world wars. I discovered this in one of his books, Freak Ships (New York: Greenberg Publishers, 1936), a book about odd aspects of maritime history. In that book, he includes three of his drawings of WWI-era ship camouflage, as reproduced in this blog post.

In the first drawing, he shows a plan for ship camouflage (above) that he himself submitted to the US Navy Department, early in the war (c1917-18). His proposal was turned down—he says thankfully—as being ineffective.

I was not sorry my designs were rejected [he states, because] they were based on the general rule that vessels show dark against the skyline, and by painting them in wavy horizontal dazzle bands of pale hues, the bands near the water being darker than those on the superstructure which tried to effect a compromise with the tone of the sky. Obviously a compromise, since the changing light of the sky makes it impossible for a ship to meet every condition. Thus a pearl-gray ship against a hazy bright sky would be practically invisible, but with a dark cloud behind her she would stand out a clear white silhouette. Likewise a dark gray hull against a black storm cloud is practically invisible, but against the skyline of a normal day her presence would be advertised for twenty miles. Youthfully, and erroneously, I thought a working compromise could be reached. The initial mistake was to imagine that a vessel could be made invisible or nearly so under most conditions.

Wilkinson's ship camouflage proposal (approximate)

Instead, the American Navy adopted an approach to ship camouflage that had earlier been proposed by a British artist, Lieutenant Commander Norman Wikinson, called “dazzle-painting,” as portrayed (if not exactly) in Rogers’ second and third illustrations. The second is the profile of the starboard side of a Wilkinson dazzle-style design; while the third is a very rough rendering of the camouflaged ship’s appearance through a U-boat periscope. Wilkinson saw how futile it was, Rogers notes, to stress low visibility, 

and concerned himself with perfecting a camouflage that, while making no claim to rendering a ship invisible, did however so break up its familiar shape that a distant observer, especially at the eye-piece of a submarine’s periscope, could not accurately estimate its course or speed. 

He goes on to say quite a bit more about the development of ship camouflage, especially during WWI, when the dazzle system was first adapted—

Naval camouflage was not new in 1914…In 1917 when the German submarine menace made it imperative to find more efficient protection to British shipping, both naval and mercantile, Norman Wilkinson, the famous marine painter, with temporary quarter-deck rank in the RNVR, put forward a set of designs for ship camouflage that was later adopted by all the Allied navies. I have already indicated the nature of this plan. The scheme was something entirely new and became known to the public as camouflage and to the Admiralty as dazzle painting. The inventor’s sole claim was to distort the shape of a vessel sufficiently to confuse the enemy as to her course, though it also disguised her type and size to a great extent. A submarine commander, peering through the watery lens of a periscope, found it almost impossible to judge the victim’s course accurately enough to justify his risking a costly torpedo on her. The illustration is handicapped by the limitations of black and white, but may convey an idea of how this deception was achieved. It will be noticed that the violently contrasting patterns and colors immediately break up the lines of the vessel, making it difficult, even in a drawing, to decide exactly the ship’s orientation. The laws of perspective are set at naught. As soon as the virtues of the artist’s scheme were thoroughly grasped by some of its more conservative objectors in the Admiralty an emergency act was passed making it obligatory for all British ships to be so painted.

Rogers' drawing of periscope view

There was nothing haphazard about the plan or the method of carrying out the dazzle-painting. For purposes of camouflage, merchant ships were divided into thirty-seven different types, and a model of each type was studied through a periscope set up in a prepared workshop. Each model was set up on a turntable and revolved again painted sky backgrounds, while the artist studied them to decide on the maximum design for distortion. The Admiralty, from lukewarm indifference, came to regard dazzle-painting sufficiently important to send representatives to all the principal ports to instruct the American, French, Belgian, Italian and Japanese admiralities on this new art of dazzle-painting, to so disguise 4,000 merchant steamers and nearly 400 warships and spend over two and a half million pounds carrying it out.

A dazzle-painted ship looked like nothing on sea or land. The distortion, a better word than disguise, was almost perfect. To a new arrival from another world the sight of a dazzle-painted ship would give him reason to think terrestrial folk were crazy. For the essence of dazzle-painting is to follow no logical lines of pattern. Dazzle-painting, while being profoundly logical, owed its value to its apparently senseless chaos of lines. The art is to conceal the art. The adage might have been written especially for dazzle-painting.

title page of Rogers' book (1936)

Stanley R.H. Rogers was born in Nottingham, England, but his family moved to Olympia WA, when he was still an infant. He returned to England in advance of WWI, and studied art in London at Goldsmith’s College. At school he met his future wife, also an illustrator, named Franke (née Woodhouse) Rogers, who illustrated about 50 children’s books in her lifetime. The couple resided in England from 1920-1945, and during WWII, Stanley Rogers served as a Royal Navy camoufleur, as a civilian. After the war, the couple lived in the vicinity of New York, where Rogers died in 1916.

Also see this earlier post, in which Norman Wilkinson's granddaughter, British architect Camilla Wilkinson, is interviewed about ship camouflage.