countershading and disruption in artillery camouflage

The three photographs in this blog post were originally published in black and white in Scientific American during World War I. 

As posted here, they have been restored and AI colorized. They are excellent examples of attempts to camouflage artillery by applying countershading (as proposed by American artist Abbott H. Thayer) and by breaking up the cannon's shape by applying high contrast disruptive patterns, such as stripes. 

It is interesting to look at these in comparison to a series of five hand-drawn illustrations (as shown below) by WWII British army camoufleur and eminent zoologist, Hugh B. Cott, in Adaptive Coloration in Animals, which we have blogged about before.

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 camoufleur as much use as fridge at North Pole

Above WWI camouflaged-painted tank-like vehicle with rotating turret gun.

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Hugh B. Cott, “Camouflage” in The Advancement of Science. Vol 4 No 16, January 1948, pp 308-309—

[At the beginning of World War II] the possible methods, scope and usefulness of camouflage were by no means generally appreciated. Perhaps you will allow me to give a single example. When early in 1941 I took up my first service appointment, the Brigadier to whom I reported for duty welcomed me with these words—he said: “A camouflage officer is as much use to me as a refrigerator at the North Pole.” It happened that we were no where near the North Pole, but in tropical Africa, where a refrigerator would have been a very useful piece of equipment. However, I was not unduly discouraged by this somewhat chilly reception.

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

Sale-priced books on camouflage / free shipping

Zoologist Hugh B. Cott and WWII camouflaged cannon

In the past we've often blogged about a variety of camouflage called countershading, which was first discussed at length by Abbott H. Thayer, c1897. Later, it was also featured in a famous book by British zoologist and camoufleur Hugh B. Cott, titled Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940). Cott was also highly adept at scientific illustration, using a method called stippling, and his book is a rich resource of that. Above is a series of pen-and-ink drawings he made that are intended to show the effectiveness of the application of countershading to the barrel of a cannon.

Also shown here is a World War II photograph that documents a demonstration by Cott. It shows two camouflaged cannon, one of which is disruptively painted, while the second is countershaded. The disrupted cannon is easily seen. It is nearly dead center of the photograph, positioned on the railroad track, and pointing toward the upper left. By following the track toward the upper right, you can see the second (countershaded) cannon, the barrel of which is all but invisible.

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OTHER WAYS TO APPLY CAMOUFLAGE in The Des Moines News (Des Moines IA), August 15, 1918, p. 4—

Wouldn’t be a bad idea for gents to camouflage their eyes so they’ll look wide open for Sunday mornings in church.

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Try the Camouflage on These

On the piano next door that’s hopped every time you try to rest. Break in some time when they’re away and camouflage it to look like an umbrella stand, or a fireplace.

Too bad, too, there isn’t any way to camouflage the warbling of that oh, ho. ho, ha, ha, hee, hee, damsel who thinks she’s Mrs. Caruso.

And that bugle practicing kid across the street. The best way is to camouflage the bugle with an ax.

The auto that’s always kicking up a fuss and is always being repaired and tried out when you’re trying to get full weight on your sleep at night and in the morning. Sneak out some midnight, drag it in to alley and camouflage it to look like a pile of garbage, then push it next to the ash can so the garbage chauffeur will haul it away with the rest of the rubbish.

Wonders can be worked with the camouflage art.

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Camouflage Some More

What a merry bunch of camouflagers we are. The first of the month when bills come and collectors knuckle the front door, some of us are camouflage so that we are out to the collector.

Some camouflage themselves so that the other people just envy their easy sailing and wish they could afford a car and a maid, but most of the time the car isn’t paid for and the house is mortgaged to get it and they just have their head out of the water when it’s calm. Great stuff, this camouflage.

Restaurant hash is another gag that gets camouflaged to a frazzle.

Gristle, leftover meat from uneaten orders, etc., come under the nom de plume of “choice bits.” Water is another article that’s camouflaged muchly, as milk, oyster stew, circus leomade, and many other fine works.

For a video introduction to countershading, see <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLX5YQF-H3k>

The Color Revolution and Camouflage

Ad in Ladies Home Journal, October 1929

The Color Revolution
by Regina Lee Blaszczyk
The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2012
368 pp., illus. 121 col. Trade: $34.95
ISBN: 9780262017770.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

THE PHRASE in this book’s title initially appeared in print in a 1929 issue of Fortune magazine, a few months after the huge financial crash that launched the Great Depression. It announced that there was an ongoing “color revolution,” a widespread adoption of color in industrial products, resulting in “apricot autos, blue beds, and mauve mops.”

Ironically, this book also documents that, in another sense, this was not so much a “revolution” as an “evolution,” the stirrings of which can be traced to the early nineteenth century. It was massively encouraged by the Industrial Revolution, in the interior uses of color at the Crystal Palace Exhibition (the first World’s Fair in 1851), the invention of synthetic dyes, and chromolithographic prints and packaging.

It was also about “evolution” because in part it was empowered by the theories of Charles Darwin, whose much-debated writings about natural selection prompted an increase of interest in the survival function of colors and patterns in natural forms. Was conspicuous coloration a means by which to find a mate? At the same time, did subdued coloration contribute to concealment? One consequence of this exchange was the rise of modern theories about ”protective coloration” in nature, which in World War I acquired the name of “camouflage.” In turn, this led to chatter about “warning coloration,” such as zoologist Hugh B. Cott’s remark that the traffic commission “has adopted a system of coloration whose copyright belongs by priority to wasps and salamanders.”

A recurring theme throughout this book—which the author plays up from beginning to end—is that modern applications of color have developed hand in hand with advances in camouflage. Indeed, it is even contended that, at the end of WWI, it was former camouflage experts (both army and navy) who “applied their knowledge of visual deception to product design and created a new profession: the corporate colorist.” If a person has the wherewithal to conceal an object, he or she can also make that same object conspicuous, through reverse engineering. As this book points out repeatedly, the uses of color in product design were based on the inversion of camouflage techniques—in the words of American artist (and WWI camoufleur) H. Ledyard Towle, it was “reverse camouflage.” More>>>

Isla Forsyth on Camoufleur Hugh B. Cott

H.B. Cott illustration, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940)

We've been fortunate in recent weeks to run across a new, major research document on zoology in relation to military camouflage. Titled From Dazzle to the Desert: A Cultural-Historical Geography of Camouflage, it is a 316-page doctoral dissertation by Isla Forsyth, who completed her PhD earlier this year at the School of Geographical and Earth Sciences at the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Glasgow, Scotland.

The study's central figure is a man we've blogged about before—the widely admired British zoologist and military camouflage expert named Hugh B. Cott (1900-1987). He was in addition wonderfully skilled as a scientific photographer and illustrator, and indeed one of the virtues of his authoritative book about animal camouflage, titled Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London: Methuen, 1940), is that he himself provided all its illustrations, whether photographs, stippled pen-and-ink drawings, or (as in his depiction of various frogs and a salamander, reproduced above) a full-color painting.

While Forsyth's dissertation was not intended as a standard biography of Cott, it nevertheless reveals a lot about a leading contributor to the theory and practice of camouflage. "This study on camouflage," as Forsyth explains, "draws attention to moments, places, sites, networks and spacings of [Hugh B.] Cott's life, not in an effort to close in around the individual and know him fully, but rather, as a means to extend the breadth and to cast greater clarity on the history of military camouflage. …it is a geographical biography of camouflage through Cott."

It is a fascinating document, supplemented by equally interesting photographs that pertain to camouflage. Let's hope it soon becomes a book. In the meantime, the entire dissertation is available online at this link.

Hugh B. Cott | Zoologist and Camoufleur

from Hugh B. Cott, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940)

Reproduced above is one of my favorite drawings from what is one of my favorite books. It is a cluster of drawings of the "hind limbs of the Common Frog (Rana temporaria), showing coincident disruptive pattern[s]." They are one of about 150 illustrations of natural camouflage in Hugh B. Cott's well-known classic book about that fascinating subject, titled Adaptive Coloration in Animals (London: Methuen, 1940). What makes these drawings (and the book itself) even more interesting is that Cott (1900-1987) was not just a zoologist—he was a highly skilled scientific illustrator (these are his own pen-and-ink drawings), a wildlife photographer, and a prominent British camoufleur in World War II.

In these drawings, he is trying to show how disruptive patterns in animal forms combine with continuous patterns to produce an effect that Cott referred to as coincident disruption. As he so aptly explained it, disruptive patterns work "by the optical destruction of what is present," while continuous patterns work "by the optical construction of what is not present." He then concludes that "while disruptive patterns appear to break up what is really a continuous surface, coincident patterns seem to unite what are actually discontinuous surfaces" (p. 70).

This same illustration was also recently reproduced in the new book by art historian Ann Elias, Camouflage Australia (Sydney University Press, 2011). Having followed her research in recent years, I was delighted to be asked to write a preface for the book, which is an admirable achievement in interdisciplinary research. In the preface, I could not resist the temptation to compare Elias' own efforts to Cott's drawing of the frogs' hind limbs. The author, I said, "has folded up a lengthy limb of scholarly tradition (made up of sacrosanct disciplines like aesthetics, zoology, anthropology and sociology), in order to reveal new zones that are cross-disciplinary" (p. viii).

French Truck Camouflage

Colored lithograph from La Guerre Documentée

To my mind, this is one of the most exquisite illustrations of camouflage, as practiced during World War I. It's one of a series of colored lithographs that appeared initially in La Guerre Documentée (c1920).

It represents three stages in the application of disruptive camouflage. In the top, there is no disruption since the truck is painted in monochrome gray (in a manner not unlike the use of battleship gray in ship camouflage). In the second stage, disruptive shapes have been applied that contradict its physical shape. And then, in the bottom image, the truck has been placed in a setting in which it is not only visually broken apart (high difference) but aspects of its pattern blend (high similarity) with various parts of the background.

The gestalt psychologists' term for this was an embedded figure. In his famous book, Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940), British zoologist (and military camouflage instructor) Hugh B. Cott talked about the combined use of blending and disruption in the coloration of animals, as when a frog folds up its legs, and connecting patterns link its limbs. Much earlier, American artist Abbott H. Thayer had described the same phenomenon (in Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom (1909)), but it was Cott who came up with a suitable name—he called it coincident disruption.

Who Invented Dazzle Camouflage?

Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske (1854-1942)

So who was the first to make use of disruptive patterns in ship camouflage, a practice that was widely known in World War I as dazzle camouflage? The easiest answer—and the one that's most often repeated—is British artist Norman Wilkinson, who proposed the use of dazzle painting in 1917, and who presumably gave it its name. Yet, from the very beginning, others have claimed to have thought of it first, notably the Scottish zoologist and Member of Parliament John Graham Kerr (1869-1957). A well-documented discussion, concluding on the side of Kerr, was published two years ago, in Hugh Murphy and Martin Bellamy's "The Dazzling Zoologist: John Graham Kerr and the Early Development of Ship Camouflage" in The Northern Mariner XIX No 2 (April 2009), pp. 171-192. Kerr called for the adoption of which he called "parti-coloring" as early as 1914.

Kerr was the teacher of zoologist and camoufleur Hugh B. Cott, who would later write Adaptive Coloration in Animals (1940). But he was also acquainted with (and largely approved of his theories) American artist and naturalist Abbott H. Thayer. In 1923, in "Camouflage in Nature and War" in the Brooklyn Museum Quarterly (Vol 10, p. 161), Thayer's son and collaborator Gerald suggested that his father and he could also have been credited with early accounts of dazzle camouflage. He writes, "The moving object [such as a ship] cannot, as a rule, be hidden, but it can be made less definite, more puzzling, a more 'tricky' and difficult target, by certain arrangements of color and pattern. This my father and I pointed out in 1909 in our book Concealing Coloration in the Animal Kingdom; and we there used the terms 'dazzle' and 'dazzling' very much as they have since been used in connection with the camouflage ships."

There are other complications too. The photo above is a portrait of American Rear Admiral Bradley A. Fiske who states in his autobiography (From Midshipman to Rear-Admiral. NY: Century Company 1919) that, as early as 1902, he had employed a dazzle-like method, to interfere with range-finding. He writes: "This scheme of preventing range-finding by an enemy was a scheme that I had devised when I was executive officer of the battleship Massachusetts in 1902. I had told possibly half a dozen officers about it under the pledge of secrecy, because I thought it would be a very valuable thing to use in case we ever got into war, but I wanted the idea kept secret. The scheme was simply to break up the smooth lines on a ship, such as the sides of masts, funnels, etc., by putting irregular strips of wood on them, or pieces of canvas that would flutter. To use the ordinary one-observer range-finder, a smooth vertical line is necessary; and I found by some experiments which I carried on on board the Massachusetts that accurate range-finding could be prevented by that simple means. One day I sent out a whale boat to a distance of about half a mile from the ship, with her two masts stepped. One mast had the irregular pieces of wood nailed on it, and the other was in its ordinary condition. I tried using the range-finder myself, and I found I could measure the ranges of the smooth mast very accurately, but of the other one only inaccurately. I did not tell anybody what I was trying to do, and I fancied from some of the fragments of comment that I heard that some people thought I had gone crazy" (pp. 620-621).

Hyde Definition and PenCott™

Hyde Definition: Digital Camouflage Design Solutions is a British firm that specializes in designing camouflage clothing for military, hunting, photography and other purposes. Founded in 2008 by Dom and Rachel Hyde, it released the following year a commercial fabric pattern called PenCott™, so named in tandem homage to two prominent British contributors to World War II camouflage: Roland Penrose (artist) and Hugh B. Cott (zoologist). They have an extensive, interesting website, with a blog, examples of their work, a glossary of terms, and a wonderfully rich selection of links.

Wildlife Camouflage

Given that protective coloration in nature and military camouflage make use of the same perceptual tendencies, it may come as no surprise that a number of zoological illustrators also served as camoufleurs in World Wars I and II. Among them were British scientists Alister Hardy and Hugh B. Cott, both of whom wrote and illustrated their own books on the appearance of animals, while both also served in the British Army as camouflage experts. But there were other naturalists and wildlife illustrators who contributed to camouflage, including Bruno Liljefors, Abbott Handerson Thayer, Gerald Handerson Thayer, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Francis Lee Jaques, Arthur Singer, and Roger Tory Peterson. According to Douglas Carlson, Roger Tory Peterson (University of Texas Press, 2007), pp. 108-109—

After his six-month training period [c1943], he [Peterson] was assigned to Engineer School. His first task was to work on a camouflage manual; as his discharge papers noted, he "illustrated camouflage practices and mistakes, sample problems and other phases of camouflage." In Peterson's words, the manuals were about "simple camouflage where the individual soldier made use of cast shadows or eliminated cast shadows." He also made color, black-and-white, and half-tone illustrations…In a 1944 letter to friend and fellow bird painter George Sutton, he wrote about his army art department: "twenty enlisted men, all of them very accomplished and at least four of which made $20,000 a year or more as nationally known illustrators…"