stand fast command / nobody don't do nothing / freeze!

WWI captured German cannon

Thorburn, Alexander Douglas. Amateur gunners: the Great War adventures, letters and observations of Alexander Douglas Thorburn. Barnsley, South Yorkshire: Pen and Sword Military 2014, pp. 193-194—

Any sportsman knows that the eye of an observer trying to spot game is attracted by movement. It is movement that gives away the position either of game in peace or of soldiers in war. The observer of an airplane searching for the position of a hostile battery has his attention drawn by movement.

The approach of a hostile airplane is notified by the airplane scout whom every battery in action must keep on the gun position, a specially selected man, with the sharpest of wits, eyes, and cars, and armed with a whistle and field glasses. The airplane scouts should be exceptionally able to stare into bright sunlight, be acquainted with the designs as well as distinguishing marks of enemy airplanes, and be relieved every hour. On the scout blowing his whistle the order "stand fast" is given and obeyed instantly. (The old instructor's "detail" of the meaning of "stand fast" is unbeatable: "On the order "stand fast" nobody don't do nothing.")…

The guiding principle of camouflage from aerial observation should be this: It is useless to attempt to hide anything, but not difficult to disguise anything so that it will look like something different and harmless. For example, four or six guns at 20 yds interval are obviously a battery. Fill up the spaces between the guns and spread netting or leaves over the top and from the air you have apparently a row of trees, a thick hedge, or even a big hog of swedes or beetroots. But all the men must stand absolutely rigid. The slightest movement anywhere is enough to ruin your attempt at disguise when an enemy airman is scouting overhead The penalty for movement will be possibly smashed guns, probably dead and wounded gunners, almost certainly a move to a new position and all your work to be done again.

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

Henry Miller on Abraham Rattner as WWI camoufleur

Abraham Rattner and Henry Miller (c1930)

Henry Miller, Remember to Remember. New York: New Directions, 1947, p. 55—

It was in the second battle of the Marne, at Chateau Thierry, while directing the camouflage operations of the 75’s, that [American artist Abraham] Rattner was rendered hors de combat by a concussion which sent him flying into a shell hole. The injury to his back which he then received he still suffers from. Transferred to Camp [de] Souge (near Bordeaux) he took charge of the School of Camouflage which had just been started. All the camouflage work undertaken at the front, and at the experimental field near Nancy, had to do with the utter absence of paint and painted color shapes (known as dazzle painting). His job was to construct actual concealments, structures made of poles, chickenwire netting, garlands of tinted burlap, trees, mud, plants, dummy cannons, and so on. Dazzle painting proved to be too limited a form of deception, ineffective because it did not conceal the basic structural shadow forms. The basis of camouflage was to fool the camera’s eye. 

I mention this phase of his [Rattner’s] war experience because, studying some of his earlier work, I had naively concluded that elements of the camouflage technique had crept into his painting. A quality which I often described as “flou” made these canvases contrast sharply with his later work in which the structural element is prominent. It was perhaps the prepossession with disturbing and often dislocating effects of light and shade which created the association. I am particularly fond of the work of this period in which it seems that his watery nature gains the ascendance, for Rattner is a strange mixture of fire and water. In these canvases the human figure blends with the patterns of nature in a sort of shadowy, translucent marine-scape.…

camouflage, infrared photography, aerial surveillance

Above Page 2 of the Color Feature Section of the Boston Sunday Post, December 27, 1936. It discusses wartime camouflage in relation to infrared photography, and credits the achievements of Albert William Stevens (1886-1949), US Army Air Corps, a balloonist and aerial photographer. 

In a Wikipedia biography, it is noted that (in 1930) Captain Stevens “took the first photograph of the Earth in a way that the horizon’s curvature is visible,” and that, two years later, he “took the first photograph of the Moon’s shadow projected onto the Earth during a solar eclipse…”

French Women Employed Making Camouflage Nets

MAKING CAMOUFLAGE SCREENS. French Women are Employed in Making Nets for Disguising Gun Positions, in The Watchman and Southron (Sumter SC). October 16, 1918—

Behind American lines somewhere in France. Seven hundred French women are employed in the American Camouflage station here making nets to screen from observation American batteries and machine gun sections. There was a burst of patriotic song as the Associated Press correspondent entered the large building where they work, for many of them sing as they sew.

The screening of artillery is the most imporant work of camouflage, as it is the main reliance in deceiving the aerial observer and camera and in preventing the enemy from locating our batteries.

For this purpose huge camouflage nets are provided of wire and fish-net, which cover the guns like a great horizontal tent. In the netting are tied bunches of green burlap, of the same color as the surrounding grass or foliage. And thus viewed from above, the overhanging green net merges the battery into the landscape of trees and turf.

Hundreds of these nets were being made by the women workers. The 75 millimeter takes an overhanging net, 30 feet square, the 165 millimeter gun has a 37 foot net, and the American machine gun gets an 18 foot net. The nets are graded inten colors of green and earth-brown, so that the shield may have the exact tint of the surrounding trees. The nets are shipped to the front in huge bundles, one for each gun.

It has been a problem to get the 700 women required for this deft work on the nets, and one of the chief means of drawing them is a Red Cross home for the babies of the married women, and a YMCA kitchen which gives them a good meal for 60 centimes (12 cents). Camouflage garlands are also made by the women. These garlands of green burlap are strung between the trees, in order to break up lines and diffuse edges so that the location of a convoy or battery will not show on an aerial photograph.

In the carpenter shop huge frames for green umbrellas were being made. The umbrellas open like an ordinary sun-shade, and camouflage a machine gun. In the blacksmith shop the men were turning out steel "cabins" which are sunk below the ground, for an observer. They have a front of bulletproof steel and are about as strong as a small safe. In one of these an observer is safe in the midst of a shower of shrapnel.

Laying on paint much as a scrub-woman wields a mop, an artist was walking about on a gigantic camouflage screen for an airplane hangar. The great piece of painting was spread on a field and covered an area of 1000 square yards. The artist was using a brush as big as a broom.

“Camouflage is making a constant battle against the aerial camera,” said the escort, "for with photographs made from airplanes the enemy gets a complete view of our positions unless they are obscured by some device of camouflage.” 

RELATED LINKS

Film of scene described above

The role of American women in WWI camouflage

Chicanery and Conspicuousness: Social Repercussions of  WWI Ship Camouflage

Earl B. Wooden | Hollywood designer and camoufleur

Earl B. Wooden (1893-1952) was a Kansas-born scenic film designer, who (as a "set decorator" and "set dresser") produced scenery for Hollywood films. One of those was Corpus Christi Bandits (1945), the poster for which is shown above. During World War I, he also served as a US Army camouflage artist, as described in the news article below.

•••

Stockton Review and Rooks County Record (Stockton KS), January 31, 1918—

Mr. and Mrs. E.B. Wooden received a letter this week from their son Earl, notifying them that he had arrived safely in France, where he went from California recently to work in the Camouflage Corps. His particular work will be the planning and architectural construction of camouflage for artillery and other things at the front that must be concealed from enemy airplanes. In this, he is an adept, as he has been engaged for the past four years in the creation of artificial scenery for a big film company at University City in Los Angeles. He says his work has hitherto ben to deceive the public at the movies; now it will be the pull the wool over the Bosche's eyes. His parents knew of his going and were surprised as well as pleased over getting word from him so promptly.

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."

Camouflage Hoodies | Sinister French Artillery Robes

early WWI French camouflage (c1914)

In earlier blog entries (such as one on camouflaged robes, and a second on French camouflage and criminals), we've posted information about the hooded outfits that were devised by French artists who were serving in artillery teams at the beginning of World War I. As I've described elsewhere—

 …what we call camouflage was first promoted by artists serving in the French Army in the early years of WWI. While there is some confusion about which individual initiated the ideas, the reasons are not in contention. Soldiers assigned to artillery teams were dismayed by the ease with which airborne enemy spotters could find and report the positions of their field artillery. In response, they initiated two countermeasures: the application of disruptive ("broken color") patterns on the surface of their cannons, and the donning by those in artillery teams of sinister-looking hooded robes, called cagoules (they closely resembled the outfit worn by a French crime novel character called Fantomas (c. 1911) or darkened paint-stained versions of Ku Klux Klan ceremonial robes).•

A surprising number of photographs of these hoodie-like camouflage outfits have survived, including a handful of full-color images in the collection of the Bibliothéque Nationale de France, and can be accessed online (posted here are restored, cropped and cleaned-up renditions of those). Other images of these outfits, whether black and white photographs and drawings, or painted illustrations by artists, were also commonly reproduced in contemporaneous magazines, such as on the cover of Scientific American (September 29, 1917). Even a few of the robes have survived.

• From Roy R. Behrens, "Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience" in Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds., Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance. Sydney AU: Sydney University Press, 2015, pp. 1-15.

 

Aerial Views, Camouflage & Crazy Quilts

Prior to World War I, in part in response to the Armory Show (1913), there was a flood of comparisons (in cartoons in particular) of cubism and futurism with less exalted forms of "art," such as the "crazy quilts" (made of leftover quilting fragments) created unassumingly by America's grandmothers. Above is an especially funny cartoon of grandma and her cubist quilt. Drawn by Clare Briggs and titled THE ORIGINAL CUBIST, it was published in the New York Evening Sun, on Tuesday, April 1, 1913.

After World War I began, camouflage was widely adopted, and inevitably there were comparisons of camouflage and cubism, and, in turn, of camouflage and crazy quilts. More serious, and far more interesting as well, were the various many comparisons of cubism, camouflage, crazy quilts and views of the earth from an airplane (a novelty then). Here's what Ernest Hemingway said in "A Paris-to-Strasbourg Flight" in the Toronto Daily Star on September 9, 1922—

The plane began to move along the ground, bumping like a motorcycle, and then slowly rose into the air. We headed almost straight east of Paris, rising in the air as through we were sitting inside a boat that was being lifted by some giant, and the ground to flatten out beneath us. It looked cut into brown squares, yellow squares, green squares and big flat blotches of green where there was a forest. I began to understand Cubist painting.

Of course Hemingway wasn't the only one to make such comparisons. Journalists and the general public saw it too. Below are two aerial photographs of the French landscape from the same time period. The second view, which appeared initially in Collier's Weekly in 1918, was captioned with a text that read—

NO WONDER CUBISM STARTED IN FRANCE! No one need wonder any longer where the cubists got their inspiration. They must have gone up in an airplane and had a good look at France! This airplane view of an observation balloon floating over a French village is as good a bit of cubist art as anything that Marcel Duchamp ever turned out.

Aerial Photography and WWI Camouflage

The following text is a news article issued by the US Signal Corps, published as "War News" in American Photography Vol 12 (1918)—

Plans have been completed for the great enlargement of facilities for training and equipping the aerial photographic force for photographing the German trenches from the skies and keeping up to the last minute the large composite picture of the whole German front…

The bulk of the training [of the aerial photographic staff] will be for the developing and printing work which must be done on a standardized plan under process specially developed during the war, often in great haste on special motor lorries close to the front and to the staff. After a month's course, the men will be given a short advanced training and immediately sent overseas for operation in the American sector.

Aerial photography has greatly developed during the war. During the single month of September, British official reports state that 15,837 aerial photographs wee taken by the British alone. No new trench can be dug, no new communication system opened up, no new batteries placed but the ever-present and infallible camera above records it for the examination of the staff below. So piercing has been this work that camouflage has been developed as a protection, thus forcing aerial photography to even greater ingenuity.

Every sector of the front is divided into plots about half a mile square, each one numbered and entrusted to a squad of photographer who become fully familiar with it. As fast as the photographs are made, they are developed, printed, reduced or enlarged to a standard scale, and then fitted into their proper place on the large composite photograph of the sector. This work requires a large force of experts in developing, printing and enlarging, as well as in map reading interpretation.

Cases are on record where only twenty minutes have elapsed from the time a photographer snapped his camera over the German trenches until his batteries were playing upon the spot shown. In that time the airman had returned to his lines, the photograph had been developed and printed, the discovery made, and the batteries given the range and ordered to fire.