Eric Sloane / how to conceal a small factory in WWII

Above Eric Sloane, illustration of camouflage techniques for a small factory, from his book, Camouflage Simplified. New York: Devin-Adair, 1942.

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Anon, Western Mail (Perth, Western Australia) May 13, 1943, p, 22—

An architect friend of ours who always considered himself a very respectable member of society is now beginning to have his doubts. Trying to do his part, he signed up for a night school course in industrial camouflage. He began to worry when he read the catalog listing lecture subjects: Concealment, Deception, Confusion, Disruption and Distortion.

He's wondering whether his code of ethics will ever be the same.

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 / 

FALSE COLORS: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage

CAMOUPEDIA: A Compendium of Research

on Art, Architecture and Camouflage

SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

highest-paid camouflage expert in England in WWII

Eric Sloane, factory camouflage diagram

PLENTY OF DIZZY PAINTING WHEN CAMOUFLAGERS WORK in Saskatoon Star-Phoenix (Canada), December 23, 1940—

…All through the United Kingdom factories engaged in war work are gradually disappearing from view. More and more they are being heavily camouflaged so they may not be recognized by a person standing on the ground 500 yards away. Landmarks by which they might be readily identified have been given new faces.

In some places entire false avenues have been constructed to change the contours of manufacturing centers. The big foundry, say, with its rambling workshops marking the outskirts of the town, now may be nestled amid rows of framework houses. Or its walls may be hidden from view by weird painted patterns, many of them designed by Lonsdale Hands, who has become Britain’s highest-paid camouflage expert.…

It was only after the war started that Hands became interested in camouflage work. Prior to that he had spent much of his time designing newspaper advertisements for various employers in Fleet Street. One day he got married during his lunch hour, quit his job when refused an increase in pay and suddenly found himself preparing camouflage for one of the largest munition factories in the country.

Since then, his tasks have been increasing, especially since a special committee found many factories were not properly camouflaged and that full use of camouflage was not being taken advantage of by some big plants. Hands and his “Design Unit” have been called on to provide remedies.

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Richard Lonsdale-Hands (also cited as Frederick Richard de Prilleux Lonsdale-Hands) (1913-1969) is usually described as an industrial and package designer, advertising executive, and artist. He was the founder in 1937 of Richard Lonsdale-Hands Associates, which in time became one of the largest industrial and marketing firms in Europe. In a review of his paintings in 2011 in the New York Times, he was described as “an impassioned amateur painter” whose work was dismissed as a “shoo-in” for “bad painting.” The 12-page catalog for that exhibition is The Paintings of Richard Lonsdale-Hands (NY: Hirschi and Adler, 2011). 

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

immense saw teeth and cubistic stripes that were not

Louis Biedermann (1918)

Above I was so pleased to find this. It is a very rare full size two-page illustration spread having to do with World War I ship camouflage. Drawn by a phenomenal (if largely unknown) illustrator named Louis Biedermann (1874-1957), it was published as a center spread in the Los Angeles Evening Express, on Sunday, August 18, 1918, perhaps in an entertainment section. This is not its original color (I've colorized it), since presumably it was printed by a four-color halftone process (more or less equivalent to CMYK). Of the very few copies that may still exist, the colors have most likely faded by now, and the newsprint on which it was printed has degraded.

In an online posting by Geographicus, an antique maps dealer in New York, the Illinois Daily Free Express (no date) is quoted as having said—

[Louis] Biedermann is panoramic. He is panoramic in his thinking. His mental as well as his optical perspective presents a complete and extended view of all directions. The breadth of his understanding is more panoramic, perhaps, than his art.

Too bad this illustration cannot be seen more clearly here. It is fantastic and highly detailed, so does not do well at a very small size. See magnified detail below.

In the bottom left corner of the illustration is an explanatory box that reads—

CAMOUFLAGED! How the Erstwhile Merchant Fleet Looks in Its War Paint.

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When we practice to deceive

—especially when the web is woven of shuttling ships, and the destined victim of the deception is some U-boat skipper squinting through a hastily protruded periscope and vainly trying to get the range of a moving target from which most of the horizontal and vertical bearing points have been eliminated, while whorls, saw-teeth and triangles of black, white, gray, blue, green and pink blend dizzily into the shifting wave outlines of the seascape. We are well past the practice stage, though, and there are days when the results of ship camouflage turn New York Harbor, for instance, into a floating nightmare. For the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of other readers who never see the waterfront, Mr. Biedermann has indicated here the general effect of the “motley rout,” though purposely avoiding any approach to a portrait of any actual ship.

•••

HOW NEW YORK HARBOR IS PROTECTED FROM U-BOATS: Every Agency of Naval War Seen: Painted Ships and Weird Effects on Every Hand, but the Business of Getting Men and Supplies “Over There” Goes on as Though There Were No New Menace at Hand, in St Louis Post Dispatch (St Louis MO), January 23, 1918 [from an article published earlier in the Springfield Republican (Springfield MA), no date]—

It was in the lower harbor, below the Liberty Statue, that New York began to show as a port on a war basis. Here were the camouflaged ships at anchor. There were hundreds of them, steamers, schooners, tankers, all ages, shape and sizes. Blue, black and white, all shades of gray, occasionally green, the stripes ran up and down their sides. There were wildly zig-zagging stripes, stripes that spread outward and upward from the center of the ship’s side like a fan, stripes that curved upward, terminating in a superstructure of the bridge in lines like those of the bow; horizontal stripes jagged on their upper edge with immense saw teeth; cubistic stripes that were not, strictly speaking, stripes at all, but like the patterns of a crazy quilt.

But camouflage does not show to best advantage on gray mornings. It does not dazzle at near view, and at the first sight of the ships, coming among them suddenly from around the end of Governor’s Island, the definiteness of outline was a mild shock to preconceived notions. Nevertheless, the purring of the airplane motor overhead was not plainly audible. To the right of the course, off Staten Island, lay a group of old warships at anchor, but with steam up, lookouts posted and guns trained. Far down the harbor, between the anchored shipping and the Narrows, a squadron of patrol boats, lean of bow, square of stern and built for speed, passed leisurely back and forth across the water, one of them dragging with it a captive balloon of the sausage type which perked along with peculiar and rather ridiculous motions, as though resenting each tug of the rope. On nearer view the lookouts on these smaller craft were also seen to be posted, and at their neat little three-inch stern guns, a group of husky sailors invariably “stood by.” Whatever camouflage might be worth at that short range, it was plain that other precautions were all being taken.

A Hole in the Ship
By the time these details of the protecting fleet were visible, the virtue of the camouflage was apparent also. First a ship with a broad blue-gray band zig-zagging up its center through the smokestack seemed suddenly, at a range of perhaps half a mile, to have developed a hole in its middle. One seemed to be looking through it at sky, and, to ocular appearances, except under the closest scrutiny, it ceased to be a ship at all, but some naval monstrosity split in two. At about the same distance another ship which lay with its bow pointed toward us, suddenly appeared to have turned about and to confront us with its stern. So marked was the illusion in this case that no among of scrutiny could separate the real from the illusion. This was the case, too, of another ship whose stern suddenly began to appear as a broadside.

The ship with the bow curve painted on the superstructure demonstrated a unique merit. Instead of one big ship. it gave the illusion of being two smaller ones, the bow of the first—the real one—seeming to be crossing the bow of the second—a fake one—at a narrow angle. Across even this slightly choppy water the saw-tooth design seemed to sink the ship in the wave motion until only the masts and the superstructure had anything like definite form. Only the fan-shaped camouflage and the distinctly cubist patterns retained at a mile, still a very fair torpedo range—anything like their actual outline, and it was easy to believe that with the fan it would be different when the spray was flying, that the crazy-quilt pattern would puzzle the eye of the keenest observer when the sea was a dazzle of bright sunlight and wave shadows. On the whole, right in the harbor, lying at anchor, these ships would form no perfect target at anything like a sportsman’s range.

a sea-serpent with red and yellow camouflage stripes

SEEING SEA-SERPENTS in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (Oahu, Hawaii) June 29, 1928—

Not one hawk-eyed person has seen a sea-serpent off the shore of any Hawaiian island for so long that we've forgotten just when the last time was whereas they're seeing them daily up and down the Atlantic coast.

Such a situation has no reason for being. As one of the most important pleasure resorts on earth, and growing more so, we can't afford to neglect the thrill of real old-fashioned sea-serpents.

In Florida, for instance, there are many persons who can see ocean monsters practically at will, and recently passengers on the liner Laconia, docking at Boston, declared they had glimpsed one with green eyes and a coarse, flowing mane.
 
To be sure, there was a fellow at Waikiki the other day who reported seeing a giraffe marked with red and yellow zig-zag camouflage stripes against a base color of bright green, wearing a little gold bell tied with a pink ribbon about its neck, but there were reasons in this case for doubting the substance of the vision, while reporters describing the spectacle of the Laconia passengers averred earnestly that all of them were apparently sober.

We can't afford to have the ancient custom of seeing sea-serpents done away with here, especially if visitors to Atlantic resorts persist in keeping it up.

Our sea-serpents are every bit as good as those on the east coast, if we will only buckle down to the job of seeing them.

Bud Fisher, Mutt and Jeff (October 14, 1953)

 

Chicago Skyline Camouflage | Merchandise Mart

Camouflaged Merchandise Mart (c1943), Chicago

In its May 23, 1943 issue, The Milwaukee Sentinel included an illustrated article on the “Newest Tricks of Camouflage” (p. 41). Among the featured topics was the application of disruptive patterns to buildings in urban centers like Chicago, to make it more difficult for enemy aircraft to recognize conspicuous landmarks. The article included the above image, a “doctored” aerial photograph of that city’s Merchanise Mart (which had been at one time the world’s largest building) to show the effects of disruption.

The caption with the photograph reads—

The Merchandise Mart in Chicago as it would appear after camouflaging by the Army’s hocus pocus artists. Through a Nazi’s bombsight the single large object would seem a number of smaller innocuous ones—all by the ingenious use of paint.

In the accompanying article, the following paragraph also appears—

If and when Nazis fly over an American city, say Chicago, our camouflage artists are ready for them, along with our anti-aircraft crews. Every large building, such as the Merchanise Mart, will be so camouflaged that even with binoculars from on high the Nazis will see only a crazy quilt confusion that will give their bombardiers trouble in distinguishing steel and concrete from mere razzle-dazzle.

Experiments in building camouflage had been used earlier in World War I, as seen in the camouflage pattern applied to the Victoria Hospital in the UK (shown below). The WWII proposal to camouflage the Merchandise Mart may have originated with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (founder and head of the New Bauhaus in Chicago) and Hungarian designer György Kepes (who taught camouflage at the same school). In 1969, Moholy’s widow, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, recalled the following in her book, Moholy Nagy: Experiment in Totality (pp. 183-184)—

On December 19, 1942, Moholy was appointed to the Mayor’s personal staff in charge of camouflage activites in the Chicago area.…[in the course of which] he pondered how to conceal the vastness of Lake Michigan with a simulated shore line and floating islands…As head of the Camouflage Workshop, György Kepes produced a wider range of new techniques and concepts. When they were displayed for the first time in 1943, they aroused wide attention.

Camouflaged Victoria Hospital (c1918)

Dazzle Camouflage Effect at San Diego Airport

Backchannel Article (2017)

Marty Graham, How Cubism Protected Warships in World War I in Backchannel (Wired Magazine online post)—

If you're stuck in traffic along the I-5 San Diego International Airport, and your attention wanders from the brake lights in front of you, your eyes might land on a low-slung leviathan of a building, a third of a mile long, resembling the upper deck of a buried cruise ship peeking above ground. Keep your gaze there long enough, and you will notice that the geometric black-and-white patterns on the northeast side of the structure keeps changing. More>>>

Inept Trompe l'Oeil Camouflage in WWI

Camp Sherman, Chillicothe OH, building camouflage (1919)

Distant view of same building (1919)

Surely, some of the least persuasive camouflage of World War I was illusionistic building camouflage, devised by Allied infantry camoufleurs. Sometimes it was designed by artists who were assumed to be experts because, as civilians, they had worked or studied as artists. Too often, apparently, they may not have been sufficiently skilled as painters, nor did they genuinely understand the conditions that contribute to effective camouflage. There is ample indication of that in wartime vintage photographs of the use of quaint pictorial scenes (inept trompe l'oeil realism) on the sides of buildings, which can't have fooled anyone. Show here (above and below) are various examples of that from government photographs from WWI.

As was featured in an earlier post, it was common to use perspective illusions in setting up phony pictorial scenes.

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Henry Berry [American artist, writer and WWI camoufleur], Make the Kaiser Dance. NY: Doubleday, 1978, p. 206—

None of us, including the captain, knew a goddamn thing about camouflage, but it got us out of all the drilling and what have you.

309th Engineers, Camp Taylor KY (1918)

European building camouflage (c1918)

Ambulances painted on building, Camp Taylor KY (1918)

Camouflaged Naval Air Station in FL (c1919)

Concealing the Land: Camouflage from Above

Above Cover of Sonja Dümpelmann, Flights of Imagination: Aviation | Landscape | Design. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Camouflage, landmark alteration, and aerial disorientation in both World Wars are examined throughout, but also featured is an extensive 50-page section on "Concealing the Land: Creating Invisible Landscapes of War and Peace" with subsections on "Camouflage as Art-Science," "Camouflage as Regional Planning," "Camouflage as Urban Design," "Camouflage as Landscape Architecture," "Living Camouflage," and "Camouflage for Peacetime."

Duplicitous Roadsters Camouflaged and Otherwise

Advertising auto (c1919), Conover T. Silver

Above and below Views of World War I-era cleverly modified roadsters  designed by Conover T. Silver (C.T. Silver Motor Company, New York), for patriotic postcard use (below), and later, during Prohibition, as promotional advertising for “near beer” made by Anheuser-Busch (above).

Anon, AUTO THIEVES BUSY IN WEST: Iowa Suffering Worse Affliction Than in 1917 Through Camouflage Bandits, in The Standard (Springfield MO), July 6, 1918, p. 19—

Auto thieves are reaping a bountiful harvest all over the middle west this year. Over 2,000 cars were stolen in Iowa alone during 1917, and the operations of card bandits during the first half of this year indicate that their total steal for 1918 will far exceed last year’s record.…

According to the authorities, there are today half a dozen clever gangs operating in Iowa for the sole purpose of stealing autos. Their ingenuity in making away with machines, and then disguising them so that they cannot be recognized, is said to be almost beyond belief.

One pair of bandits, still at large, has a trick of getting away with a car that is real camouflage. The pair drive up in greasy mechanics' overalls, approach a car, parked in front of a building or garage, and commence to tinker with the engine. For several minutes they work industriously at their apparent task. Then they jump in the machine and ride away. Even the most suspicious person would mistake the pair for a couple of mechanics assigned to look over the auto in question.

…After the pair get out of town with the machine they usually take it some place to have it repainted. The license number is changed, and the stenciled number on the engine block ground off, and a new number put on.

Patriotic postcard (c1917), Conover T. Silver

Anon, AUTO THIEVES WORK BOLDLY, in Wichita Daily Eagle (Wichita KS), December 9, 1918—

The up-to-date [auto] thieves operating in Rochester NY drive their loot out into unfrequented parts of the country, run the car in a field and camouflage it to resemble a broken down shed, hay stack or pile of brush. The police have recovered a number of these camouflaged cars since the scheme was discovered through a confession.…

John G. Williams, an Omaha NE pioneer, at a meeting of the Nebraska Roads Association, called to discuss the passage of the anti-auto-theft law, “with teeth in it,” recommended hanging as a punishment for auto stealing. “If we string up a few of them it will discourage the others,” he said. “It discouraged the horse thieves in the old days,” he said.

Camouflage Artist | J. Clinton Shepherd

American artist J. Clinton Shepherd

J[oy] Clinton Shepherd (1888-1975), an American muralist, illustrator and sculptor, is typically referred to as a “pulp artist” because of the illustrations he made for lowbrow publications. There is a biographical article about him on Wikipedia as well as on the website called Field Guide to Wild American Pulp Artists (including work examples). Less widely known is his involvement with camouflage, during both World Wars.

Shepherd was born in Des Moines IA, where his father was a men’s clothing salesman. After graduating from high school in 1906, he enrolled at the University of Missouri in Kansas City. He dropped out in 1909, at which time he and a younger brother traveled to the Northwest, apparently looking for adventure. According to some sources, they ended up living briefly with the Crow Indians.

By 1910, he had returned to the Midwest, where he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago until 1914, and thereafter worked as an artist. Prior to World War I, he served as a bugler in the Illinois National Reserve (despite an apparent hearing defect). After the US entered the war, it appears that he served in the Air Corps from 1917-1919. According to an article by Helen Van Hoy Smith, titled TROOPS, CIVILIANS LEARN CAMOUFLAGE ART, The Miami News (September 13, 1942), it was during his war service that Shepard gained “practical knowledge of it [camouflage].”

In 1919, Shepherd and his artist wife (née Gail English, also a graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago) moved to New York, with the hope that he would flourish as a professional illustrator. During the next decade, he enjoyed considerable success as a magazine illustrator for Collier’s, Saturday Evening Post, Woman’s World, and other newsstand magazines. From 1925 until 1938, he lived in Westport CT, where, following the decline of more prestigious publications, he turned to making a living by painting covers for cheap pulp publications. He also returned to his interest in Western subject matter, and produced a series of bronze sculptures, not unlike those of Frederic Remington.

J. Clinton Shepherd (left) and Gail Shepherd, completing mural

From 1938, Shepherd lived and worked in Palm Beach FL. There, he taught at Barry College (now Barry University) in Miami, and served as the director of the Norton Gallery School of Art. As is documented in the news article cited earlier (supplemented by two press photographs), during the summer of 1942, he offered a free class for soldiers and civilians on how to design camouflage based on his own WWI military experience and “a working knowledge of camouflage as an artist.” The class consisted of “building and camouflaging a model town but which contains certain military structures.”

The article goes on to say that “Mr. Shepherd accompanied the lessons in camouflage with lectures and drawings. The camouflaged town represented several different methods of camouflage.” He also “called attention to the fact that nature provides the best examples for the camoufleur…Since time immemorial, men in wars have emulated nature in their recourse to camouflage.”

J. Clinton Shepherd, Self-Portrait (1946)

From 1947 until his death in 1975 (at age 86), Shepherd continued to work as a portrait artist and muralist in Palm Beach.

Eric Sloane | Camouflage and Comic Books

Eric Sloane (1942), Camouflage Simplified

We've talked about American artist Eric Sloane (1905-1985) in an earlier blog, specifically in reference to a 60-page Illustrated guidebook called Camouflage Simplified, published in 1942. It's easily our all-time favorite comic-style overview of the subject. It's a delight just to look at the drawings, such as the examples above and below. It turns out that, according to the Hathi Trust Digital Library, the book is now in public domain, and is available in full online. Take a look at it; it's a pleasurable way to spend some time.

Eric Sloane (1942), Camouflage Simplified