More on the Art of Camouflage

In an earlier post on camouflage (a very short history of it, and an explanation of why it is an art) I put several links to articles I had read on the subject at the end of the post. I now have three really good new links, which will lead you to articles (with photos) on camouflage, mostly in World War II, but also in World War I.

THE FIRST ONE is a recent book review (actually, a blog post) though the book was published in 1978 and can be bought used. See it here at Amazon.com for as low as $4.23 or see it here at half.com for as low as $2.99 (as of the time I'm writing this). This is a book I'll be looking for in our local library system. Here is the page where you'll find the article and pictures: Military Deceptions

The blog is called: StrangeHarvest - Architecture, Design, Art and More.

The article (with photographs) was posted November 10, 2007. The photos and descriptions are from a book called Masquerade, The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II by Seymour Reit.

The examples shown in the post (which include a blow-up rubber tank and a U.S. Army headquarters that appears to be a trash dump, as well as several others) are fascinating, and of course there would be many times more pictures in the book itself. As I'm typing this there are still very few comments on the post, the latest dated November 25th (today), but they're interesting to read.

ANOTHER LINK. I really like this one. It's about "Dazzle" (ship camouflage). If you're interested in ships, you'll definitely want to see these pages which are very nicely laid out, quite interesting, and with lots of fascinating old photographs, including pictures of some of the artists "at work" and, of course, many photos of the ships that were painted with a "Dazzle" design.

Besides a link ("Next") at the bottom of the page to a second page, there are several links to other pages (with photographs) at the upper right - Don't miss those. This article is called DazZLe CaMoUflage: High Difference Camouflage (hodgepodge) and was written by Roy R. Behrens (a book he has written on the subject is advertised). One thing that is explained here is how painting ships in such a highly visible way could "disguise" it (something I wondered about myself).

LAST BUT NOT LEAST is a link to photographs of the USS Leviathan with a Dazzle paint job, in 1918. Besides looking quite "dazzling," this ship has a strange history, but what's important here is its camouflage paint job.

Click here to see several photos of the USS Leviathan. This is on the Naval Historical Center site ("an official U.S. Navy web site").

I've added two of the Leviathan pictures below. The first is of the plan for "Dazzle" camouflage intended for the starboard side c. 1918 (slightly larger pictures are on the site, and if you click on them you get much bigger versions). The actual design that was painted on the ship differed slightly from the plan (see second picture below).

Here is a photograph of the actual ship in 1918 "in harbor, with tubs at attendance at her starboard bow."

I hope you enjoy what you find when you click on these links as much as I did.

NOTE ADDED June 10, 2008: Another post on camouflage - with videos

NOTE ADDED February 29, 2008: Here is an article I just came across today that tells about how warships' vulnerability to being detected "has led the military to develop new stealth technologies that allow ships to be virtually invisible to the human eye, to dodge roaming radars, put heat-seeking missiles off the scent, disguise their own sound vibrations and even reduce the way they distort the Earth's magnetic field ...." The article is on the Science Daily site.

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