Showing posts with label army. Show all posts
Showing posts with label army. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 17, 2025

camouflage as a less hazardous wartime assignment

US wartime camouflage in France, 1918
It is no surprise to learn that, in both world wars, draft eligible men in the US were apprehensive about the hazards of serving. A good number of them, maybe most, made an effort to be assigned to service roles that were less hazardous than serving as infantry in the trenches. Others, who had worked in civilian life in specialized vocations, were well-advised to look for ways to serve in the military equivalent of those same vocations.

Understandably, in World War I, when the formation was announced of an American Camouflage Corps, and artists were encouraged to apply, applications flooded in. 

We thought about this recently when we ran across a reference in the preface (by Anne Wintermute Lane) to The Letters of Franklin K. Lane (1864-1921) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin 1922), who served in the US Government when Woodrow Wilson was in office. In the preface, the author recalls that an initial difficulty in editing Lane's correspondence was that it took weeks to find and set aside "just the requests for patronage, for commissions, passports, appointments as chaplains, promotions, demands from artists who desired to work on camouflage…[and so on]."

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Nov shmoz ka pop / WWI spurious wacko camouflage

an inept attempt at camouflage / WWI
Gene Ahern (originator in 1921 of the Our Boarding House comic strip featuring Major Hoople), "Ain't Nature Wonderful: Camouflage Still Yet" in Fort Wayne Sentinel, August 14, 1918, p. 3—

About this camouflage music, we juggle the camouflage art on themselves so they would be in their seventh heaven, and have their victims turning flip flaps. A book agent could waft into your office camouflaged as a puff of cigar smoke, and could annoy you with special offers, beautiful bindings, subscriptions, etc., and the only way to get rid of him is to purchase a piece of his stock, because you can't get a toe hold on him to throw him out because he's camouflaged invisible.

Insurance posts could wear the same harness, so you're in for it, fellow citizens, and the only exit for you is to take a try at the camouflage trick yourself.

F'rinstance: Have a 6x3 ebony box in your office and when an ill wind shows up, camouflage yourself like you just expired and fall into the silver-handled box and have on your fizz a camouflaged doesn't-he-look-natural expression.

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