Hollywood camoufleur | Shotgun wedding in reverse

Poster for Tummell's award-winning film (1933)

William F. Tummell (1892-1977) was an award-winning Hollywood film director, who served as a camouflage artist during World War I.

Born in Kansas City MO, he grew up there, and in Muskogee OK. He attended Muskogee Central High School, where one of his classmates was Viola Kobler. Around 1913, they eloped and were married without her parents’ consent in Wagoner OK.

When they returned to Muskogee, they were confronted by the bride’s father, who “took the bride home with him and made her stay there and warned the youthful husband away with a shotgun.” Following unsuccessful “attempts at reconciliation,” the parents sent their daughter to Iowa.

In the fall of 1913, unable to locate the bride, Tummell filed a lawsuit in Superior Court for $20,000 in damages against her parents. When he learned her whereabouts, he “went after her and finally brought her home with him.” The following year, Tummell (apparently without his wife) moved to Los Angeles to work as a technical director for film companies. Whatever the circumstances, their marriage ended in divorce in 1917.

Earlier, while living in Missouri, Tummell had been a member of the Missouri National Guard. In 1917, he joined Company F of the 24th Engineers, an army camouflage unit. He passed through Kansas City on November 27, on his way to training at Camp American University in Washington DC. According to an article in the Muskogee Times-Democrat on the following day—

The company will be composed entirely of men recruited from the motion picture industry and its business will be to render [American] batteries, billets and other war instruments invisible to [enemy eyes]. After three months of intensive training in Washington [DC] the movie fighters will embark for the war zone.

Following the war, Tummell returned to his film career in Hollywood. Between 1925 and 1977, he contributed to 59 films. In 1933, he received an Academy Award as Best Assistant Director for his work on Cavalcade. He died in Los Angeles in 1977 at age 85.

While looking for information about William Tummell, we discovered that the US Army photograph that we used on the cover (below) of False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage (2002) is that of a camouflaged soldier from Tummell's unit, Company F of the 24th Engineers, taken at Camp American University in November 1917.

Camouflage Artifacts at Spencer Museum of Art

Above Photograph of the interior of a World War I British submarine under construction. The intense exterior lighting is casting shadows on the workers inside, and providing an apt demonstration of the disruption of shapes using shadows. This photograph was published in France in Le Miroir magazine on February 10, 1918, with the following caption—

The British fleet, which was by far the most powerful in the world during peacetime, has increased its superiority since the beginning of the war thanks to the strengthening of its ordnance. It is not possible, of course, to offer precise information on this subject. The fact that the German fleet remains in the port indicates that our enemies are not fooled by the results of naval combat. Our allies have launched many submarines. Here is one of them under construction.

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On March 2, 2019, an exhibition opened at the Spencer Museum of Art on the campus of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. It continues through June 9, but unfortunately I found out about it only recently and won't be able to see it. Titled Camouflage and Other Hidden Treasures, it includes a selection of artifacts from the Eric Gustav Carlson WWI Collection, which includes nearly 4,000 items from the Great War. The current exhibition includes only about 1/60th of the full collection.

Over the years, Kansas and Missouri have increasingly become prime locations for research pertaining to art, architecture and design in connection with camouflage. In Kansas City MO (as we mentioned in an earlier blog), there is the National WWI Museum (formerly the Liberty Memorial), which features what remains of a huge WWI diorama, called the Pantheon de la Guerre. Completed by French artists in 1918, it originally included about five thousand full-length figures, including identifiable images of some of the French army's camoufleurs.

Also of significance is the Missouri State Capitol Building in Jefferson City MO. It was designed by New York architects  Evarts Tracy and Egerton Swartwout in 1917. When the US entered WWI that year, Tracy was among the first officers in the American Camouflage Corps. Prior to that, one of the co-founders of a civilian forerunner to that unit was Iowa-born sculptor Sherry Edmundson Fry, who was commissioned to create the figure of Ceres that stands on top of the building's dome. Inside the building, in the House Lounge, are the famous Missouri history murals by Thomas Hart Benton, who was a US Navy camoufleur during WWI. Also inside is a mural (with two camouflaged ships in the background) titled The Navy Guarded the Road to France. It was painted in 1921 by US naval camoufleur Henry Reuterdahl, whom we've often blogged about.

There's yet another option: The Ulrich Museum of Art at Wichita State University in Wichita KS owns what may be the largest collection of paintings and other artworks by Frederick Judd Waugh, who was a prominent American ship camoufleur during WWI.

Khaki Hunting Outfits in Camouflage History

Article on hunters' use of camouflage (1917)

The following is an excerpt from a syndicated article that was reprinted in newspapers throughout the US during World War I (see original page above).

SOLDIERS' KHAKI UNIFORMS CAMOUFLAGE RESULT OF HUNTERS’ EXPERIENCE in Fort Wayne Sentinel (Fort Wayne IN), December 11, 1917, p. 16—

While the term camouflage may be applied in the world war to masking batteries and hiding troops from enemy fire, it only describes the tricks long in use among hunters for years, and even among the American Indians, according to Lester Pritchard of Battle Creek, who has won more than a local reputation as a hunter.

According to Louis Ebert, a well-known hunter, camouflage has been employed by Missourians for years. “At the Culvre Club and at the Lemp Club duck hunter used camouflage,” Mr. Ebert said, “Culvre Club members have built large tanks whose color is a dark brown and sunk them in the streams. The hunters hide in the tanks and wait for ducks to come close enough to be shot, then they poke their guns over the top of the tanks and fire. At the Lemp Club trenches similar to the kind dug by solders in France are being used as a hiding place for duck hunters. The hunters, garbed in khaki and squatting in the trenches are protected from the keen eye of the duck or goose because the brown of their togs and the surroundings harmonize."