camouflage contributions by Houdini, other magicians

Above Roy R. Behrens, Misdirection (©2021). Digital montage.

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William Kalush and Larry Sloman, The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero. New York: Atria Books, 2007, p. 338—

[In April 1917, on the day after the US had entered World War I, American magician Harry] Houdini introduced a resolution at the Society of American Magicians’ [SAM] meeting that was unanimously passed that “its members collectively and individually do hereby tender their loyalty to the President of the United States of America and express a desire to render such service to the country as may be within their province.”…

Houdini led the war efforts of magicians by example. On June 2, Houdini was nominated for president of the SAM and elected unanimously without opposition. Taking control of the house organ, M-U-M, Houdini began filling the pages with news of the SAM members' contributions to the war cause, and even reproduced an article from The New York Times that described how the US government was actively seeking magicians and mystifiers to aid in the wartime effort.

Fellow magicians took up Houdini's call. Archie Engel, a Washington DC, magician, became a secret agent for the Treasury Department during the war. Dr. Maximllian Toch, a chemist and New York City SAM member, was put in charge of the military's camouflage division and, working with other magicians, he developed the battleship gray formula used by the US Navy. Toch’s chemical expertise was also used in devising ways to transmit secret messages. Eventually, a camouflage section of the Regular US Army Engineers was formed and the SAM members from all over the country enlisted in it and shared their expertise for the war effort. An amateur magician named Dr. Charles Mendelsohn, who was an expert cryptographer, was put in charge of deciphering German codes for the U.S. Military lntelligence Division. Even before we entered the war, the Department of Justice hired a magician named Wilbur Weber to do counterintelligence on German spies who were operating in the Northwest. He used his magic tour as a cover for his spying activities.

is crime not to be depended upon / who can we trust?

Above A pictorial advertisement for a Victorian-era British illusionist, T[homas] Elder Hearn.

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Alas! This is An Age of Ingenious Camouflage, in Salina Journal (Salina KS), January 17, 1920—

New York—This is an age of camouflage. Yes; of course the word has been overworked. Maybe it isn't used any more in our best journalistic circles. But it's an age of camouflage just the same. Now take the case of John Smith of the East end, up for examination in a case of assault and battery. He did not deny that Emil Emilson hired him to beat up Joe Lansky or that he got $5 from Emil for beating up Joe. But he strongly denied that he did beat up Joe. Finally they got the truth out of John, who thus explained the seeming inconsistencies of his statement:

“When a fellow is hired to do up another guy he goes and tells him about it. Then they get together and they stick court plaster all over the guy's face and tie a bandage around his head with a little beef blood showing through and put his arm in a sling. The guy who wants him done up looks him over and thinks he got his money's worth.”

Now this is art, but is it honest? Is crime not to be depended upon to be what it seems? We know that our leather chairs are not made of hide, but of old rubber boots and condensed milk. We know that chicken salad is frequently made of veal. We understand that our sealskin coats are made from the fur of the muskrat and that our linen is cotton. Knowing, nobody cares. But it had been supposed that crime was above substitution. Here we have a detailed description of camouflage assault.

When thugs become too ingenious to kick in the ribs of the persons they are paid to assault and resort to camouflage to make the patron think he is getting something just as good, whither are we drifting? 

Pennsylvania: garages go ga-ga in camouflage here

Nearly ten years ago, in a blog post titled Who Invented Dazzle Camouflage?, we noted a few of the people who, during and after World War I, claimed to have been the first to propose disruptive or “high difference” camouflage, commonly referred to now as dazzle painting.

Ten years later, we continue to find competing claims. Quoted below, for example, is an excerpt from a 1939 article in a Lancaster PA newspaper, which reported that WWI disruptive camouflage was inspired by an interview (which we have yet to find) in 1916 with Howard Thurston, a famous American magician.

CAMOUFLAGE, ‘SHIP SAVER’ TESTED HERE: Garages Went Ga-Ga in Zebra Stripes Here Long Before the Dazzle Department Started Using Same Technique on Ships in Lancaster Sunday News (Lancaster PA), October 15, 1939, p. 13—

…Lancaster remembers the [First] World War years when local inventors were tinkering with odd gadgets and everybody with an old paint brush was experimenting with the technique of camouflage.

Corn cribs and outhouses and garages for miles around were streaked and blobbed with swearing color while warring nations were still pooh-poohing “dazzle-paint,” and just learning the rudiments of camouflage in brown-painted and branch-decked gun emplacements.

Lancaster had used up gallons of vari-colored paint before a single warship was docked for a camouflage job.

It all started in 1916 when Howard Thurston, the great magician, gave an interview while in Lancaster saying he thought the “illusion” of the magician could well be used in protecting ships at sea from submarines.

Lancaster liked the idea so much that every amateur magician with a couple of cans of paint and a little imagination immediately went to work hiding his tool shed from the neighbors with outlandish stripes.

Curiously enough, the idea wasn’t put to use until submarine warfare hit its peak in the middle of 1917. The seemingly meaningless experiments in Lancaster were suddenly formulated into real scentific formulas which successsfully deceived U-boat commanders about the size and course and speed of ships.

It didn’t seem reasonable that bright stripes would be less conspicuous than an even dull gray. In fact, they aren’t. But they do distort the appearance of a vessel so that its ordinary outlines are as completely hidden as a length of spaghetti in a can of fish worms.

When it finally did get going, however, England and then the United States set up “Dazzle Departments,” and by the end of the war some 4,000 merchant vessels and 400 warships were sporting stripes.

But futuristic barn-door art wasn’t the only contribution Lancaster made in the direction of life-saving in wartime.…

Many wartime ideas that actually worked out—camouflage, for one colorful example—looked at first like the sketches on the wall of the booby hatch. But history agrees that there’s never been an invention that’s crazier than war itself.

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GOOD CAMOUFLAGE in the St Louis Dispatch, March 8, 1944—

Lancaster PA—A resident reported her automobile stolen from in front of her home. Police found it where she had parked it, but buried under a snow drift after a heavy snow.

RELATED LINKS

Camouflage application process

Disruptive camouflage patterns

Further information

Behrens Camouflage Lecture at UNLV

UNLV lecture on Monday, September 16, 2013 at 7:00 pm

Roy R. Behrens, Professor of Art (graphic design) and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, will be a guest at the Department of Art at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas. He will speak about "Closure and Disclosure: The Dance of Form and Function in Art and Camouflage" at 7:00 pm on Monday, September 16, 2013, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum on the UNLV campus. The event is open to the public.

Other sources

Book Review | The British Phantom Army

Rick Stround, The Phantom Army of Alamein (2012)

The Phantom Army of Alamein: 
How the Camouflage Unit and
Operation Bertram 
Hoodwinked Rommel
by Rick Stroud
Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2012
288 pp., illus. b&w. Trade, $25.95
ISBN: 978-1-4088-2910-3.

Some time in 2013, a new documentary film titled The Ghost Army will premiere on American public television. It will spell out the little-known story of a World War II U.S. Army unit that operated secretly in Europe from 1944 until the war’s end. That unit was made up of more than a thousand soldiers who in civilian life were so-called “creative types,” among them such now prominent names as the painter Ellsworth Kelly, fashion designer Bill Blass, wildlife artist Arthur Singer, and photographer Art Kane. Working as a team, they impersonated other army units and created persuasive illusions (both physical and auditory) of misleading, unreal battle events.

This book is not about that American unit, as tempting as it is to think that “ghost army” is synonymous with “phantom army.” Rather, this book tells the story of a comparable but earlier British outfit—consisting largely of artists as well—that was formed in 1942 for the massive, focused task of fooling German forces (headed by General Erwin Rommel, aka the “Desert Fox”) in the sands of North Africa in the Second Battle of El Alamein. The resulting Allied victory was in part attributed to (by none other than Winston Churchill) the ingenious clandestine trickery of the British Middle East Command Camouflage Directorate in a famous large-scale project called “Operation Bertram.”

Unlike the American Ghost Army (kept secret until 1996), details of this British ruse have been known since at least 1949, when one of its self-touting members, British stage magician Jasper Maskelyne, wrote what is widely considered to be an embellished and largely self-serving account, titled Magic—Top Secret. Three years later, the film director who headed the unit, Major Geoffrey Barkas, published his own eyewitness report of the operation, titled The Camouflage Story (from Aintree to Alamein). Over the years, those two books have been supplemented by ten or more others about the unit’s achievements. According to its publisher, this one, which has just come out, “tells for the first time the full story.”

So what did these soldier-artist-camoufleurs do? How did they hoodwink the Desert Fox? The answer(s) to that constitutes the best moments in the book. In general, I think it would be fair to say that they used two approaches: First, they made key weaponry disappear—not by vanishing, but by disguising it as something else, as a less threatening, innocuous thing. Tanks were made to look like trucks. Field artillery was concealed in other phony forms. And food, fuel and other supplies were covered up and stacked to look like harmless transport vehicles. Second, at other times, for other purposes, they did the opposite—making clever use of the simplest materials, they constructed trompe l’oeil dummies (tanks, artillery, support vehicles) to create an illusory build-up, to “reveal” things that were never there. As a result, they made the enemy think that Allied forces were being amassed at times and places that differed critically from the real situation. This Second Battle of El Alamein, in which these methods were employed, was the war’s first victory for the Allies.

If illusions, unfounded resemblance and various other visual subterfuges are bewildering to experience, they are at least equally hard to describe. One thing that sets this book apart is the richness of… more>>>