camouflaged dummies as artists' wartime specialty

soldiers placing decoys / artist unknown

CAMOUFLAGE—THE ARTISTS' BIT IN THE WAR in Oregon Daily Journal (Portland), August 18, 1917—

One of the interesting developments of the world war is the art of "camouflage," wherein artists excel. Camouflage is accomplished in a variety of ways, the general Idea being to deceive the enemy—to make him think he sees something that he doesn't see, or to make him see something he thinks he doesn't.

It is a trick in which nature excels, the wily opossum and the chameleon and its coat of changeable hue being probably the best known examples. The marking on the wings of a butterfly, the shaping of insects like leaves, the coloring of the sage hen to blend with the sagebrush, are but a few of the natural demonstrations of the principle of camouflage.

In warfare, thrusting above a trench a helmet stuck on a bayonet to draw enemy fire is a crude example. Raiders carry a dummy smokestack to hide their identity, submarines carry fake periscopes, etc.

Getting down to the finer points of the game, and this is where the artists come in, waves and foam are painted on a warship to deceive the enemy as to the ship's waterline, and the "tank" is so painted that at a comparatively short distance it merges with the landscape and is hard to distinguish.

The French and English have even gone so far as to stretch canvas upright to a height of several feet, and to paint trees, shrubbery and landscape on it, so that to the enemy it will look like the edge of a woods. Behind this curtain, then, like stage hands passing behind the back drop on a stage, thousands of troops have marched to new positions. To fool enemy airmen, canvas stretched like a canopy over a roadway is painted to blend with the surrounding field, while soldiers march beneath It, or it ls painted to represent a road over which the enemy will keep lookout for troops while the troops march elsewhere.

And so on. Camouflage is really playing an important part in strategy of campaigning, and the United States army war department has so recognized it as to put artists at the large training camps to teach the art, and painters and decorators are enlisting in special camouflage branches of the service. The illustration above shows troops placing "dummy" soldiers in position to draw enemy fire, and [below] is a camouflaged "Yankee" [a dummy made of papier maché, before being painted]…

inspection of unpainted American decoy

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

camouflage practices in Mexico in advance of WWI

Above José Guadalupe Posada, Calavera de Don Quixote, relief etching, 1913.

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MEXICAN CAMOUFLAGE in The Nenana Daily News (Nenana, Yukon, Alaska) November 16, 1918, p. 2—

Camouflage as war art was known in Mexico long before it was used in Europe, although not by that name. Mexican soldiers since the days of [President Porfirio] Dias have practiced concealment for military advantage. They have been known to place their high crowned straw hats on poles stuck in sand hills in such a way as to make the enemy force believe they were defending the hill, then flank the enemy from another direction. [Victoriano] Huerta's federal soldiers used camouflage to conceal the port holes in the sides of armored railroad cars. A checkerboard pattern was painted on the sides of these cars and black and white squares concealed the rifle ports.

The Mexican fighting men have also used the trick of covering their high hats and bodies with brush to advance on the enemy positions through thickets. Villa originated the plan of driving a herd of cattle into a beseiged town at night in order to draw the fire of the defenders and to explode any mines in the streets.

The most primitive, though effective application of camouflage in Mexico was the practice of the Tarahuamara [Rarámuri] Indian scouts with [Francisco] Madero’s revolutionary army. These half naked scouts would precede the army, and, by doing a kind of pattern dance, raised a cloud of dust which concealed them from the view of the enemy and permitted them to approach the enemy positions without being detected in their envelope of dust which resembled a dust whirl common on Mexican deserts.

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 /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

airplane plants camouflaged by set designers in WWII

Lockheed plant (before)

Lockheed plant (after)

Above and below Various US government views of a WWII aircraft factory, concealed from aerial view by suspended imitations of suburban neighborhoods.

•••

Susan Elia MacNeal, THE HOLLYWOOD SPY: A Maggie Hope Mystery. New York: Bantam, 2021.

They passed through tall, imposing gates to a security checkpoint, and John showed his identification. "Yes, Flight Commander Sterling," one of the guards said, a lean man with a bulbous nose. "Mr. Hughes told us you'd be here this afternoon—and bringing a guest." He waved them through. 

As they walked into the giant wooden hangar, Maggie looked around. Men in coveralls, and even one woman—her hair tied up in a Rosie the Riveter bandanna—were working on the planes. The air smelled faintly of oil and jet fuel. "Impressive," she said, voice lost in the cavernous space. 

"Takeoffs to the west have to be coordinated with the Los Angeles International Airport," John said. 

Warplanes going to the Pacific, Maggie realized. "Where are the factories?" 

"Close by, but hidden. The defense companies worked with set designers to camouflage the plants—they've even gone so far as to put fake grass and wooden cows on the roofs.”  

"That's very...Hollywood." 

above and below ground views

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 /  Under the big top at Sims' circus

WWII aircraft factories hidden from enemy aerial view

Above An aerial view of the Lockheed-Vega aircraft factory in Burbank CA, during WWII, when the entire facility was hidden beneath a vast simulation of houses, stores and residential neighborhoods.

•••

CAMOUFLEURS GOT BUSY in Daily News (Perth, Western Australia) August 4, 1945, p. 10—

The US entered World War II with many a war plant that needed careful defense.

Among the most vulnerable were flimsily protected airplane plants along the eastern and western coasts. They were unexpendable and immovable. Their nakedness demanded some sort of wrapping.

So the US Corps of Engineers put to work a motley legion of industrial designers, billboard painters, crack Hollywood illusionists, and serious artists.

By last week, workmen were yanking wire trees and make-believe houses off many camouflaged war plants.

The makeup job had been costly: Fullblown protective concealment of thirty-seven vital plants had cost 22 million dollars. Other money went for simpler tone-down work, or “disruptive painting,” at smaller plants and airfield hosts.

In the heat of its enthusiasm for plenty of camouflage, the Corps of Engineers gave out contracts for disguising fields hundreds of miles inland.

Famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy turned camoufleur to plan the two million dollar “passive protection” of Baltimore’s Glenn Martin bomber factory.

Warner Brothers technicians had to protect the big Douglas plants at Santa Monica against twin risks. Within easy periscope sight from the Pacific, it was vulnerble to shells as well as bombs.

Douglas airfield architects had their camouflage plan ready before Pearl Harbor. They made minatures, then photographed them from simulated bombing altitudes.

Building the dummy airport, phony plants, and a fake residential [neighborhood], complete with washing on clotheslines, took two and a half years, and cost two and a half million dollars.

It was duplicated on the plants when the war came.

Masking the consolidated plant at San Diego called for great nets draped over the Pacific Highway.

At Seattle, the task was difficult.

Boeing’s Flying Fortress plant was sandwiched between busy Boeing Field and a natural landmark, the Duwamish River.

Camoufleurs hid the field so trickily that veteran pilots had to ask the way in.

Atop the Boeing plants went a 26-acre village, made of chicken wire, canvas, lumber and painted chicken featers. The town had fifty-three houses, stores and a gas station.

Some of its streets crossed the field, went up Beacon Hill.

Camoufleurs skipped the river.

•••

Below The large, concealed underground parking lot at the Lockheed-Vega plant in Burbank.

concealment of a california aircraft plant during WWII

Above View from above of the spurious suburban neighborhoods that covered the Donald Douglas Aircraft plant in Southern California during World War II. Below in this post is a view of the same structure, as seen from the concealed factory level.

•••

Donald Albrecht, World War II and the American Dream. National Building Museum, and MIT Press, 1995, p 196—

Because the [Donald Douglas Aircraft] plant was dangerously near the coast, its buildings were camouflaged so that enemy aviators would see only what appeared to be an unbroken stretch of suburban subdivisions. Paint was applied to simulate streets and houses, and nearby trees were trimmed to the height of the plant buildings to present a uniform appearance from the air. The Santa Monica factory featured an even more elaborate deception scheme, with canvas houses, fake trees, and camouflage netting covering the entire plant. 

Gertrude Stein as camouflaged in self-effacing Alice

Above Roy R. Behrens, front cover of dust jacket for COOK BOOK: Gertrude Stein, William Cook, and Le Corbusier (Dysart IA: Bobolink Books, 2005).

•••

Sidonie Smith (in a discussion of Stein's autobiography, titled The autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) in Subjectivity, identity, and the body: women's autobiographical practices in the twentieth century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993, pp. 76-77—

…Stein ventriloquizes "Alice"…

By speaking through the voice of Alice B. Toklas, Stein pursues an art of camouflage. The relationship of cubist painting and camouflage is remarked by "Alice" as she recalls the cannon in camouflage on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris. And later, she notes the significance of camouflage in World War I as she recalls touring the front after the Armistice: "The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities that did it the difference was inevitable. The color schemes were different, the designs were different, the way fo placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability." Using "Alice" as a piece of camouflage, Stein can make herself the egotistical center of the text and the influential center of twentieth-century modernism. She can, as Timothy Dow Adams argues, publicize herself through a "tall tale" in which "she creates herself as a legendary figure, given to outrageous bragging and superhuman abilities." That is both the art and artifice of her text.

The camouflaged Stein displaces her "monumental egotism" into the self-effacing voice of "Alice"…

Quaker guns and non-functioning decoy cannons

Wooden artillery used for training purposes

During World War I, non-functioning imitation cannons served two purposes. If they were more or less accurate models of actual battlefield artillery (above), they could be used to train soldiers to become accustomed to their use.

At the same time, there was also a need for non-functioning dummy cannons, traditionally known as “Quaker guns,” to throw off the enemy’s estimates of the size and location of forces. These were often crudely built from scrap lumber, since they would only be seen from a distance. Others (like the one below, probably made from papier maché) were more convincingly modeled. Once assembled and put into position, it was important to camouflage them as if they were genuine functioning guns.

Non-functioning decoy cannon, not yet camouflaged

WWI German version of a dummy trench observer

This is one example of the use of the same camouflage trick by the two opposing sides during World War I. Snipers stationed at the front were poised and ready to shoot at anyone in the enemy’s trench who was foolish enough to look over the edge. As a result, both sides made dummy imitation soldiers’ heads (made of papier-mache or plaster), which were mounted on sticks and held up above the top of the trench.

If the dummy was shot at, it might enable the targeted side to determine the sniper’s location. This public domain photograph, which was initially published in Le Miroir on January 28, 1917, shows a French Army corpsman examining a captured German version of a dummy trench observer (complete with a German helmet and duplicitous field glasses), mounted on a wooden stick.

How a Wild Ass Looks to a Color Blind Lion

Thayer photograph in Central Park

Above Photographic comparison of a stuffed zebra and a wild ass in Central Park in NYC, from Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom by Gerald Handerson Thayer. New York: Macmillan, 1909/18. The caption reads: Artificial ass and zebra, looked at from the low viewpoint of an ambushed lion, showing the effacing effect of the stripes in actual operation (facing p. 136). The entire book is available online.

•••

Unsigned, HOW A WILD ASS LOOKS TO A COLOR BLIND LION. Artist Thayer Demonstrates His Theory of Concealing Coloration. IN CENTRAL PARK’S WILDS. Lay Crowd Sees Zoological Demonstration of Idea That Col. Roosevelt Attacked in The Sun (New York), March 12, 1912, p. 7—

If Col. [Theodore] Roosevelt finds time to take from his multifarious activities on the first cloudy day after today he can run up from the Outlook office to the 81st Street entrance to Central Park at 10 am and see how a wild ass looks from a lion’s viewpoint. If this please him he can also see how a zebra looks from a ditto viewpoint on a cloudy day in the Sotik [Kenya]. But better than all he can verify his expressed opinion of how Abbott H. Thayer, portrait painter and father of the Thayer theory of concealing coloration in the animal kingdom, looks from an African faunal naturalist’s viewpoint.

Mr. Thayer will necessarily be in proximity to the wild ass. The faunal naturalist has said of the artist amateur in the field of zoology and ornithology that he was “wild,” that being one of the minor characterizations indulged in by the faunal naturalist in his “Revealing and Concealing Coloration in Birds and Mammals,” by Theodore Roosevelt, author’s edition extracted from the bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History.

Just because Mr. Thayer did not trot out his wild ass and his zebra—both stuffed, but very lifelike—at the demonstrations he gave in the wildernesses of Central Park and the lot behind the Museum of Natural History yesterday morning Col. Roosevelt was not there. Nothing so picayune as stuffed hummingbirds perching on an azalea flower or a dummy filly loo bird nesting next to a neolithic brick in the back yard of the museum could lure a hunter of big game to forsake conferences and such, even though this was to be Mr. Thayer’s last word in a controversy upon which he entered unafraid with the premier stalker of the oryx. So Mr. Thayer had to be contented with an uninterrupted demonstration of the counteraction of rotundity and the immutable law of countershading as applied to the coloration of a bluejay, a canvas duck, twenty-nine hummingbirds and a chrome colored dog.

The dog, it may be stated parenthetically, was a volunteer subject, and by making itself perfectly visible in the operation of running away with one of the dummy birds thereby demonstrated that Mr. Thayer’s theory as applied to chrome dogs may be all right in the barren where such dogs come from, but not in the entirely artificial conditions in and about 81st Street and 8th Avenue.

The artist-naturalist opened his ocular refutation of Rooseveltian criticism by ranging on the ground back of the museum a dozen or more birds of dun colored canvas hue. Everybody who gathered to view the experiments agreed that the birds as they lay on the dead grass were really very visible. Then Mr. Thayer took an assortment of paintings and began to daub deceiving lines and splashes on the hurricane decks of three or more of the birds. Everybody agreed that when the countershaded the birds by painting—counter shade is the exact term—they became really very invisible.

There was just one thing which he couldn’t persuade Col. Roosevelt to accept, Mr. Thayer explained—the counter action of a rotundity and countershading. Wasn’t it plain enough that when a bird is round—and it may be said that most birds are more or less round—that he is lighter on the underneath side than he is on top the tricks of these shadows appear to counteract that bird’s natal gift of rotundity? Yet Col. Roosevelt had just a short while ago written Mr. Thayer from the Outlook office that “if a man wears a black frock coat and white duck trousers that man will not become by that fact invisible whether he is a rotund or a thin man.”

It began to filter in upon the consciousness of several in the crowd of spectators that Mr. Thayer did not agree with old Dr. Darwin and William Wallace [sic: should be Alfred Russel Wallace] and those other persons who worked it out that the stripes and dots and zigzags on all birds and mammals, with the exception of genus homo, were not designed necessarily for their protection. Mr. Thayer, who is an artist first and a naturalist only through his art, believes that the Almighty colored the flamingo as he did so that the stealthy crocodile would mistake the bird for a sunset on the Nile and not snap at it. Animal coloration is for protection, according to the theory which Mr. Thayer expounded yesterday to a policeman and about 150 people in plain clothes.

The spectators moved over to Central Park upon Mr. Thayer’s invitation and there they beheld the bluejay test. Mr. Thayer laid a sheet down where shadows would streak it; that represented snow in the winter home of the Canadian jay. Then he laid several stuffed jays on top of the sheet and defied anybody to distinguish the bluejays from the bluish shadows on the sheet. It is not the province of The Sun to decide any private bets, but one might say that if a person couldn’t—

After that came the hummingbirds perched amid the flowering glory of some specially imported azaleas and cinerarias. Because the birds were so particolored, Mr. Thayer explained, and not monochromatic, their outlines were blurred and they were rendered invisible even though they had ruby throats and emerald backs. Counteraction of rotundity again and there you were! A hummingbird from a hawk’s viewpoint—if hawks eat hummingbirds—would be—nothing.

Maybe it takes an artist like Mr. Thayer or Edmund Russell [Shakespearean actor?] to comprehend these fine points in optics and to get a wild ass from a lion’s viewpoint. But Col. Theodore Roosevelt, he says that no zebra ever deceived him by appearing like the evening sky against a foreground of reeds and he’d have a small opinion of a lion who would get only that impressionistic stuff when there was a meal behind it…

•••

Mary Fuertes Boynton, "Abbott Thayer and Natural History," in Osiris Vol 10, 1952, pp. 542-555—

Mr. Thayer placed a model of a zebra not many feet back from the bridle path in Central Park, New York City, and the story goes that no one reported seeing it, not even the mighty hunter Theodore Roosevelt, who rode daily on that path and maintained in print that the zebra was the most conspicuous of animals [p. 546].

Papier Mâché Used in Wartime Camouflage

H.L. Messmore with battlefield dummy (1918)

Above Above is a colorized version of a 1918 photograph of H.L. Messmore, a prominent supplier of components for amusement parks, carnivals and expositions. For example, he contributed to the Panama Exposition in San Francisco, the Chicago World’s Fair, the Golden Gate Exposition and the New York World’s Fair. He was a partner in Messmore and Damon, which his brother George established in 1914. It was H.L. who built the Electric Park in Detroit in 1907, and also served as manager of Luna Park at Coney Island.

During World War I, H.L. Messmore appears to have shared with the army his expertise in making papier mâché and plaster figures. In this photograph, he is inspecting an unpainted dummy of a soldier, to which he is about to add sculpted binoculars. The caption on the black and white photograph (which is available online at the National Archives and Records Administration website) states that “after use in this country in the Liberty Loan Campaign, [it] will be placed in a trench in France as a dummy target.”

In earlier posts, we’ve talked about such uses of plaster and papier mâche dummies during WWI. Since horse carcasses were a common feature at the front, hollowed-out dummy horses might be used as observation posts. An instructional example (in this case, it appears to be a clay model) is shown below, both front and back, including the rough-hewn shape of a soldier inside.

Spurious Horse Carcass (c1918)

When I was an art student in the 1960s, I thought papier mâché was a non-durable technique used only by hobbyists and amateurs. But I learned from one of my painting teachers that it was highly durable and had been used very seriously in building all sorts of astonishing things. In particular, he showed me a functional lute that he had made using papier mâché. I was amazed, since it looked and felt identical to a lute made out of wood. He also built highly detailed, elaborate marionettes from the same materials.

Arthur B. Jensen's book (1919)

During WWI, one of the people who made an effort to extend the use of papier mâché for military purposes was a man named Arthur B. Jensen (1899-1987), who was Danish-born (apparently) and lived in the vicinity of Rockford IL. While serving in the US Army Reserves, he was the senior instructor in the Camouflage Department of the Blackhawk Division, which was initially stationed at Camp Grant IL, near Rockford. At the end of the war, he published a book on the use of plaster and papier mâché for modeling, titled Jensen System of Modeling: Employing the Superskill Modeling Device (1919). As he explains and illustrates, while stationed at Camp Grant, he and other soldiers made a 25-foot high statue of Blackhawk (the Native American leader), constructed of waterproofed plaster and papier mâché. Reproduced below is the title spread of Jensen’s book, and a photograph of the statue he made.

Papier mache statue of Blackhawk (c1918)

The following is an excerpt from Jensen’s book (pp. 3-4)—

Plaste papier modeling has a glorious past. The US Army used this method in the World War for making dummies to attract enemy fire and so learn their location, and in many other ways. In several instances, a dead horse lying on No-Man's Land near the enemy trench was replaced by a good duplicate made in plaste papier, and the observer would crawl into the paper horse before dawn each day and observe the enemy's action all day at close range. Great guns were imitated in this material and placed in the vicinity of real guns that were carefully concealed through camouflage. The Boche [German] observers sent out to discover the location of the real batteries that were doing the havoc to the enemy would discover the paper guns only, and so the enemy artillery would train their fire on the dummy batteries and allow the real guns to continue their fire without being molested. The real guns were concealed by having their outlines painted out by means of broken forms of various colors painted all over the guns, and also covering the guns with foliage. A great statue of Blackhawk, 25 feet high,was modeled in this material and waterproofed, just before the Blackhawk Division left Camp Grant IL, for France in July 1918. This work was done by the Blackhawk Division's Camouflage Department, of which the writer was a member. It still stands, after these many months, defying the elements; the winds and rains and snows could not destroy it; and it still looks as permanent as though carved out of solid rock.

[Added March 22, 2017] Since our original post of this page, we've discovered a related article in the March 1920 issue of Boy's Life magazine, titled "The Use of Plaste Papier in the War" (p. 55), including the following excerpt—

Plaste papier is really nothing more than wrapping paper dipped in plaste, which makes it plastic and pliable while the artist is modeling with it, and very hard and rigid after it dries.  It was very light, being modeled as a hollow shell, and so could be carried about near the fornt line trenches easily.

To make this substance even more easily handled, Lieutenant A[rthur] B. Jensen has invented a superskill modeling device, which consists of aluminum strips which describe the important lines of the head, neck and shoulders of a man and woman. This device enables anyone to secure the correct lines and proportions of the head, without interfering in the slightest with the modeler's originality. On the same frame one can model the head of President Wilson, a portrait of himself, the bust of Venus de Milo, or any other subject.