camouflage as a less hazardous wartime assignment

US wartime camouflage in France, 1918

It is no surprise to learn that, in both world wars, draft eligible men in the US were apprehensive about the hazards of serving. A good number of them, maybe most, made an effort to be assigned to service roles that were less hazardous than serving as infantry in the trenches. Others, who had worked in civilian life in specialized vocations, were well-advised to look for ways to serve in the military equivalent of those same vocations.

Understandably, in World War I, when the formation was announced of an American Camouflage Corps, and artists were encouraged to apply, applications flooded in. 

We thought about this recently when we ran across a reference in the preface (by Anne Wintermute Lane) to The Letters of Franklin K. Lane (1864-1921) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1922), who served in the US Government when Woodrow Wilson was in office. In the preface, the author recalls that an initial difficulty in editing Lane's correspondence was that it took weeks to find and set aside "just the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports, appointments as chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who desired to work on camouflage…[and so on]."

RELATED LINKS 

Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work? /  Nature, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage /  Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage / Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage /  Optical science meets visual art /  Disruption versus dazzle / Chicanery and conspicuousness /  Under the big top at Sims' circus