jackies removing ship camouflage paint / documented

painting over camouflage at war's end

It is not easy to find historic photographs of ships in the process of having their camouflage applied. They do exist and I have found about ten. But an even greater challenge is to find photographs of ships (at the end of the war) having their wartime camouflage painted over. There cannot be many photographs of that, since it was a far less dramatic event than the application of camouflage. 

Earlier today, when I first put up this blog post, I illustrated it with a newspaper photograph from 1919. But it was of such poor quality that I decided to take it down, and am now replacing it with the above photograph, which shows the overpainting of a ship's camouflage at the end of WWI. I regret that I have not located the source. 

As for the earlier deleted photograph, it was an illustration for a brief article in The Reno Gazette Journal (Reno NV) on April 16, 1919. The headline for that article was TAKING OFF THE WAR PAINT, and the accompanying text was as follows—

When Kaiser Bill told us we should stripe our ships like a barber pole and sail them where he ordered, we said we wouldn't. We put on our war paint instead and jumped into the fight. It's over, and here are the jackies [sailors] removing the camouflage and putting the steel grey and white of peace on the sides of a battle cruiser.

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