Camouflage

Last week observers had difficulty recognizing the Queen Mary, though Britain's big luxury liner lay in plain sight next the Normandie at her dock in Manhattan's North River. Her superstructure, more spotlessly white than ever, seemed to be suspended over a smudgy grey cloud that blended with wharves and water. The lower part of the ship had all but disappeared under a coat of grey paint. Day or two later the white superstructure almost disappeared too. The Queen Mary was not slapping on war paint (battleship grey is several tones bluer and less muddy) but was introducing the latest style in camouflage, a solid, sooty, flat grey.

Camouflage in the last war meant whirls, blotches, stripes and curlycues with which "experts" made common objects look like a futurist's bad dream. Stripes and blotches were supposed to do for ships and tanks what stripes and blotches are supposed to do for giraffes and tigers. Camouflage artists called the effect "disruptive coloration." At sea it was meant not to conceal the ship but to spoil U-boats' calculations of its speed and course, make torpedoes miss their mark. Opponents of dazzle long insisted that camouflage should conceal as well as confuse, and since World War I they have waged their own quiet war against disruptive camouflage. When the Aquitania, also painted a solid, muddy grey, slipped into her berth near the Queen Mary last week, it looked as if British anti-dazzlers had won.

What U. S. ships, would look like if war came is still a deep defense secret. But outspoken army camoufleurs turn thumbs down on dazzle. Their problem, they feel, is harder than outsmarting a periscope running ten to twelve feet above heaving wave-levels. They have to conceal parked tanks, trucks, grounded planes, big guns from modern aerial camera-eyes which can even pick out the curl of withered camouflage leaves from 3,000 feet in the air.

Down in Virginia's cedar-dotted Fort Belvoir, where the U. S. Army runs its only experimental camouflage laboratory, camoufleurs study how to outwit stereopticon, infrared and color photography from airplanes, try to solve such apparently insoluble problems as what to do when tanks are concealed in deep shadow and the sun goes behind a cloud; how to camouflage a truck, when an aerial camera can pick up a tireprint on the grass "almost from the stratosphere." They also experiment with dazzle v. solid color camouflage.

One result of their tests has been to replace old-style burlap and fishnet "flattops" for concealing big guns and trucks with new style drapes made of visinet, a light, durable paper compound. Fort Belvoir camoufleurs "dazzled" visinet drapes with green blotches to resemble vegetation, burnt sienna blotches to blend with Virginia clay soil. Solid color drapes they painted with a mixture of blue, yellow and red oil paints, producing a somewhat greener green than the usual olive drab of U. S. Army trucks. For solid brown drapes they mixed flat burnt umber and yellow ochre coldwater paints, made drapes look like big chocolate bars.

Photographed from the air, the old-style dazzle drapes showed up distinctly. The solid green and chocolate drapes could not be seen at 5,000 feet, could not be photographed at 10,000 feet. Result: from now on, well dressed U. S. Army trucks, tanks, big guns will carry solid green drapes for summer wartime wear, solid brown drapes for autumn.

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