first get stewed then come aboard and paint the ship

Above Anon, illustration of a World War I dazzle-camouflaged ship, from The Illustrated War News (AI colorized).

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Frank Ward O’Malley, The Widow’s Mite and the Liberty Loan, in The New York Sun, April 21, 1918, p. 12—

Astern of the gray transport steams another ship, the second vessel crazily camouflaged—as if the skipper had said to a boss painter, “Mike, you and your whole crew go ashore and get stewed to the eyes and then come aboard again and paint this ship as you see fit.”

ambiguous perspective disguises ship's course in wwi

Above is a wonderful page spread from the February 1919 issue of International Marine Engineering. The article, titled "Principles Underlying Ship Camouflage: Complementary Colors Produce Low Visibility—Dazzle System of Ambiguous Perspective Disguises Ship's Course—Special Color Effects," was written and illustrated by Alon Bement, whom we've blogged about before. He taught art education at Columbia University, was a wartime camouflage advisor, and, interestingly, had a pivotal influence on his student, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (as claimed by her). His ship camouflage diagrams are exceptionally helpful (there are more in the full article), as is the text. I think it would be fair to say that this is one of the best WWI-era articles on marine camouflage. I have reprinted the article, in its entirety (text and images), in my anthology of ship camouflage documents, titled SHIP SHAPE: A Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook.

WWI horse striped like a zebra to hoodwink the enemy

Above Photograph from The Illustrated News (London), April 7, 1915, p. 48, with the following caption: STRIPED TO ELUDE THE ENEMY: A PONY DISGUISED AS A ZEBRA, ON THE GERMAN EAST AFRICAN BORDER. This photograph of an officer on active service in East Africa, mounted on a pony which has been dyed with permanganate of potash to resemble a zebra, must surely be the last word in war coloration and the mimicry of natural surroundings, for purposes of invisibility. The tawny tinge of khaki—very much the tint of a lion’s skin, by the way—sufficiently serves for the rider’s concealment amidst the forest shadows. The dying of light-colored and piebald and white horses has become a regulation practice among the cavalry in Europe in particular, as it has been stated, some of the German regiments at the front. In much the same way, heavy artillery guns and wagons are sometimes painted over with broad patches and daubs of the primary colors.

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Roe Fulkerson, “An Old Man in His Dotage” in Crescent Magazine: Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine. Vol 12 No 3 (May 1921), p. 22—

[A Shriner] came into our village the other day…There was no place to take him so I took him to a lunch club I belong to and there we heard a navy man tell the story of what the Navy did in the war. The man was a good talker and he laid particular stress on the wonderful science of camouflgae and how marvelous it was that they had discovered that by painting a war ship in alternating black and white stripes it completely destroyed the form of it and made it invisible at a comparatively short distance. He expatiated at great length on this. Keep that point in mind.

Then as I had no other addresses worthwhile I took my visiting Noble for a ride out to the zoo so he could look at the camels and sympathize with their lack of grace and explain to them how he, too, in other days had established records for going without water.

While we were looking at the camels we looked in the next yard and there were a lot of zebras with those same black and white stripes that the Navy man was just telling us about and we recalled that a zebra lives out on the vast plains of Africa and that the Almighty had for ages been camouflaging him with black and white stripes to break up his form so his enemies could not see him at a distance! Then we went for a ride in the country and passed over a bridge and were stopped by a gate and a bridge at a grade crossing and how do you suppose they had painted that railroad gate and that bridge so I would be sure to see from a distance and not run into them?

They had striped them in black and white like a zebra!

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Below WWI photograph of British soldiers in France. At the right is a captured German sentry box, marked by alternating stripes.