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| Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, Self-Portrait |
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Margaret Fitzhugh Browne, TAKING DAZZLE OUT OF DAZZLE PAINTING: Lieutenant Everett L. Warner, an Artist in Charge of the Navy’s Camouflage Designs During the War, Explains Secrets of the Optical Illusions Created, in the Boston Evening Transcript. August 11, 1920, Part 2, Page 5—
Perhaps none of the devices and inventions of science used in the late war has had such a general and pictureque appeal as the subject of camouflage. Certainly the principles of none have been so apparently easy for the public to grasp, as the general acceptance of the term and its useful and established place in the language bear witness. But in spite of this wide understanding of the broad aims of camouflage—namely, to produce an optical illusion—there has been an almost universal misapprehension of its methods and principles. This has been especially the case in marine camouflage and was due to the fact that the many attempts to explain it were made by writers who, because of the close navy censorship, which was maintained even long after the armistice, had access to no reliable information. The result was that an emormous amount of false or misleading material was published even in periodicals of a semi-scientific character.
A most interesting and valuable opportunity to understand the true aims and principles of naval camouflage was afforded in a talk on the subject in Duxbury MA, under the auspices of the Duxbury Art Association, by Lieut. Everett L. Warner, who was in charge of the Section of Design of naval camouflage in Washington during the war.
Lieutenant Warner is an artist of high standing, a member of the artists’ colony at Lyme CT, with a studio in New York in the winter, and was one of the many artists who turned to account their imagination, ingenuity and years of training in the study of things as they appear in this branch of war service. His talk at the Duxbury Yacht Club was delightfully informal, full of interesting anecdotes and illustrated by lantern slides from photographs of ships or models made to demonstrate the camouflage designs.
Land and Marine Camouflage
Lieutenant Warner first emphasized the essential difference between land and marine camouflage, saying that the two had almost nothing in common, either in their methods or their aims. Land camouflage was more obviously a deception of the eye, as it attempted to make things invisible or make them look like something else. Whereas in the navy, though it was desirable to conceal the character or identity of a ship when possible, that was far from being the chief end of camouflage. The early experiments tried for “low visibility,” as it was called, almost exclusively, but it was soon found that the movement of the ship and the constantly changing and infinite variety of light upon her made such deception very uncertain.
Many suggestions along these lines, however, were submitted to the Navy Department throughout the war. One man had an elaborate scheme for painting the ship to look like an island with trees and houses and even a lighthouse on it—a suggestion which would have been only more complete by having the steamer’s smoke issue from the chimney of the lighthouse keeper’s house. Of course an obvious drawback to this plan was that as the ship was not stationary the camouflage would hardly be very convincing.
Another idea was that the ships be covered with mirrors, which it was supposed would reflect the surrounding sky and sea and so make the ship invisible. The originator of the plan, however, while he had realized one of the necessities of “low visibility” camouflage, namely, that it would have to change with every condition of sea and sky to be effective, still was far from a solution, as he did not recognize the fact that the mirrors would only reflect the sky and water behind the submarine, and not behind the ship to which they were applied, and that furthermore, with every roll of the ship, they would flash alternatively light and dark, greatly increasing her visibility; a condition which the Navy had realized and tried to eliminate by giving up entirely the use of any glossy paint or bright surfaces on the ships. Other imaginative minds suggested such things as enveloping the ship in a net to make her look like a cloud on the horizon, or painting a destroyer on her sides so that she would appear to be closely convoyed—a scheme which would, of course, have its only chance of deception when she was exactly broadside on to the submarine.
Low Visibility Abandoned
Doubtless the people who submitted these kindred ideas for “low visibility,” and, in fact, the public at large, have wondered how the crazy zig-zag patterns with which the ships were painted could possibly achieve this result, and it certainly did seem as if the vessels were made more noticeable by them. The truth of the matter was that the designers and experimenters with marine camouflage did not make ships invisible simply because they couldn’t, and the patterns on the ships were not designed with that in view. It was soon discovered that a method of painting which could make a ship less visible on one kind of day made her more visible on another, and that a paint which would look dark on sunny days would appear most white on cloudy days, in contrast with gray skies and seas. Then, too, the microphone, a listening device by which a submerged submarine could hear the engines of a moving vessel at a distance of as much as twelve miles, and could often hear and roughly determine the position of a steamer long before it could be seen, rendered the reduced visibility of ships of doubtful value.
As an illustration of the extreme delicacy of this instrument, Lieutenant Warner told of an experience of the British Q-boat Barranca, while hunting submarines. A German U-boat was located by microphone on the bottom of the sea, where, as it was before the days of depth bombs, she was safe from attack, though the listener at the instrument on the Barranca could plainly hear a phonograph playing German songs on the U-boat below.
The development of this marvelous instrument forced the scientists to come to the conclusion that there was nothing to be done but to evolve a color of the lowest visibility and paint the ships with that without any further attempts at camouflage. But the imagination of the artists had been aroused and they would not give up. The idea of “dazzle painting,” as it was ultimately known, was finally conceived by a British artist, Norman Wilkinson. In the spring of 1917 he presented to the British Admiralty his plan. This was the use of strongly contrasted designs which so distorted the appearance of the ship that it was difficult to determine her course. He argued that though it had not proved possible to paint a vessel so that she was hard to see, it was still possible to paint her so that she would be hard to hit, and that as she could be both seen and heard anyway, a method of painting which rendered her more invisible would lessen her danger from torpedo attack if it distorted her course.
Spoiling the Torpedoes’ Aim
From then on the basic idea of marine camouflage was, not to make a ship difficult to see or to change her character, but to make it difficult for a submarine to determine the course which she was traveling. The submarine, after locating her prey, tries to reach a good position for firing by keeping submerged and thrusting up her periscope at as long intervals and for as short periods as possible. A ship whose course was puzzling would force the submarine to keep her periscope up longer, and the chances were that she would be seen and her quarry make its escape before she put up her periscope to locate it again. Furthermore, as the ships cannot be fired at point blank, owing to the slow rate of speed at which a torpedo travels, the range must be determined with the greatest accuracy, and the torpedo aimed so as to meet the ship at a given point on her course. The slightest mistake in the estimation of her course would send the torpedo harmlessly ahead or astern of her, and “dazzle painting,” by distorting the course, frequently caused the U-boats to take up the wrong position, and spoiled the accuracy of their long shots.
That the Germans fully realized the importance of determing the true course of a ship is shown by a quotation which Lieutenant Warner gave from the confidential manual issued for the instruction of German submarine officers at Kiel. A copy of this was secured by the British Secret Service and passed on to us through the office of Naval Intelligence. In this manual it was stated that “the determination of the track angle of the enemy’s course is the foundation of the whole art of firing submerged.”
Now that the importance and value of course distortion was generally accepted, the next step was the principles of design and pattern which would produce this result. At first the work was carried on by means of countless experiments with one pattern after another, and the English evolved some very successful designs in this way. Lieutenant Commander Wilkinson, the originator of the idea, came to this country for a month and gave our navy the benefit of the British experience in ship camouflage. Lieutenant Warner worked with him and many of the devices and patterns which the English had found resulted in “course distortion” were adopted by our Navy, but it was not until some time afterwards that the principles underlying these results were understood and the general law governing the effect produced was discovered.
Working with Models
As everyone knows, teaching a subject involves reducing it to its basic principles and putting the principles in a clear and easily understood form, and it was largely through explaining the “dazzle painting” to the camoufleurs of the Shipping Board, whose duty it was to apply the navy designs to the ships, that the subject was put upon a practical basis of procedure, having a logical certainty of result. To secure more complete cooperation and that they might better understand the principles underlying the designs, three of the camoufleurs came to Washington each week for an intensive course given by the camouflage designers.There, in the Navy Department’s camouflage theatre, they were shown the little models of the different types of ships, carefully made to scale, with which the camouflage designers made their experiments. The ships were painted with different dazzle designs, placed upon the turntable and viewed through a periscope to determine whether the camouflage gave the necessary course distortion before the designs were approved and issued for use.
In order that the camoufleurs might be more familiar with the basic construction of the patterns, Lieutenant Warner had made a number of wooden blocks of different geometric shapes, which could be arranged in imitation of the patterns applied to the ships, and it was gradually discovered that every successful pattern, whether based on geometric or any other form, was capable of explanation along the same lines, and was governed by the laws of perspective.
One of the most successful methods of producng course distortion was that of projecting upon the ship’s sides a pattern consisting of a series of forms which apparently turned towards or away from the observer, according to the way in which they were drawn, with the result that the ship appeared to be steering in the direction indicated by the pattern.
Illusion of this sort is familiar to everyone in scene painting, or, in fact, any pictorial representation, and Lieutenant Warner gave an illustration which should make the principle clear, even to those not accustomed, like the painter, architect or sculptor, to realize the changes in the appearance of objects seen at different angles, and of course explainable by the laws of perspective. For instance, a row of bathhouses along a curving beach painted upon the backdrop of a stage would look equally convincing if that backdrop were erected upon an actual beach. The beach and houses would appear to be curving away, though in reality painted upon a flat surface. The same principles of perspective applied to a pattern made up of geometric forms painted upon a ship’s sides would make her appear to be turning away from the observer when she was actually broadside on.
Other methods of producing an optical illusion were also used such as parallel, vertical bands to make a ship look taller and to conceal smokestacks or confuse her construction, and so make it difficult to fix upon a point in calculating the range. Broad bands were sometimes painted upon her sides at such angles as to create the illusion of a bow in advance of her real bow, and the lights and darks cause by her actual construction were confused by the application of fictitious structural shadows painted upon her.
The matter of color was not of importance in “dazzle painting,” dealing as it did with the distortion of form, and though many experiments with color were tried especially in the earlier attempts for “low visibility,” it was finally demonstrated that values or degrees of light and dark were of more importance, and some of the best results were obtained with only blacks and grays, though blue was frequently used, in the hope that it might on certain days blend with the sea or sky and so add to the distortion of the form of the ship and obscure the direction of the course upon which she was traveling.
The success of camouflage cannot, of course, be definitely demonstrated, owing to all the other factors which enter into the matter of a ship’s safety, but the navy statistics in comparing the losses among the camouflage and un-camouflaged ships are so greatly in favor of the former as practically to prove its success. Its future is, of course, problematical. In the event of another war it would, without doubt, be carried even further and its field widened. There may be a future for it in peace, however, for if ships can be painted so as to distort their course they could be made to show more clearly the direction in which they are traveling and so lessen the chances of collision and miscalculation.
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See also
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Fitzhugh_Browne>
Nature, Art, and Camouflage (35 min. video talk)
Art, Women’s Rights, and Camouflage (29 min. video talk)
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage (26 min. video talk)
Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage (28 min. video talk)
