a wooden superstructure, we dazzle-painted the sides

Unidentified WWI truck camouflage

Cecil Day Lewis [father of actor Daniel Day Lewis], The Otterbury Incident. London: Putnam's Sons, 1948—

Just then I heard the rumble of the enemy tank coming down Abbey Lane to our right. To be absolutely accurate, it wasn't a rumble, but a clattering, squeaking noise, made chiefly by the old tireless bicycle wheels on which the tank ran. It was a wizard job, that tank. We'd built it in the school workshop. The superstructure was made of wood, and we'd dazzle-painted the sides: there was a bit of camouflage netting, which Ted had got from his brother in the Airborne, over the top of it, and a broom handle sticking out through a hole in the front for a gun. It held three people easily: the driver, who pedaled it; the gunner; and the tank captain. With its high, box-like shape, it really was more like an armored car, but we called it a tank.

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

ship from which Hart Crane committed suicide / 1932

USS Orizaba

The American Modernist poet, Hart Crane, took his own life at age 32, by jumping from a ship into the Gulf of Mexico while en route to New York in 1932. 

Shown here are two views of the ship that he was traveling on, the USS Orizaba. At the time, however, it would not have been camouflaged. These are photographs from World War I (c1918), at which time it had been painted in a multi-colored “dazzle camouflage” scheme. As is evident, the camouflage patterns on the ship’s two sides are substantially different, as was standard wartime practice. The top image shows the port side, while the other shows the starboard.

USS Orizaba

As noted by art historian Henry Adams in The Golden Age of Cleveland Art: 1900 to 1945 (Cleveland OH: Cleveland History Center, 2022), Crane grew up in northeastern Ohio, where his father was a restaurant owner and candy manufacturer. In view of Crane’s suicide, it is a darkly comic irony that his father was the inventor of the candy known as the Life Saver.

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