Camouflage Remembered

Camouflage Remembered

When I left my job at North American Aviation in Downey, Calif. In August of 1953 I had no inkling that I would eventually become the sole expert in the employ of the Navy for camouflage. I had a lot to learn in a very short time. I had heard a talk at a meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Optical Society of America by Seibert Quimby Duntley, Head of the Visibility Laboratory of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. I was intrigued and requested a job. I was hired at a slight reduction in salary. During the two years that I spent at the Visibility Lab I learned a lot about our country’s efforts at camouflage during the war. Duntley, a professor at MIT, had been under contract during that period to form a group to study the problems of visibility and concealment. I clearly recall one of his anecdotes, “If it’s camouflaged bomb it.” One of the East Coast worries in those days was the real possibility of the Germans flying up and down the coast from Greenland to a Caribbean base bombing the major cities. Boston had worries. The Charles River at night was a guide post to all the major targets in the area no matter what means might be taken to hide them. Duntley was my first mentor and I was the recipient of a wealth of information on The United States activity in camouflage during that period. Most of the stories I recall of his I will save for another time.

The Navy decided after the war to relocate its small group at the Bureau of Ships in Washington devoted to visibility and camouflage to the Navy Electronics Lab in San Diego in order to be closer to the SIO Visibility Lab and to take advantage of the perpetual good weather for research purposes. One of that group was Cdr. Dayton R. E. Brown, an artist originally from Coronado and a self-made scientist that had served the Navy during the war as their camouflage and visibility expert. He was slated to be a consultant to the group but they needed a manager, a Head. They asked Duntley, the senior scientist in the field, for a recommendation and he suggested me. I took the position, Head of the Visibility and Concealment Branch of the Navy Electronics laboratory in the summer of 1955. I occupied this position and its successors until my retirement in 1975 as the sole individual involved in camouflage. Brown retired and died during that interim and the rest of the personnel  under my guidance became a much expanded organization called the Electro-optics Division, and were engaged in visibility, fiber optics, lasers and infra-red research and development.

What I really want to pass on are some of the anecdotes about camouflage that may not be on the record at this time. Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921), a well-known American artist, is sometimes described as the father of camouflage. Brown often cited his work as basic in the design of modern camouflage. It is true that Thayer, an artist and naturalist, came up with the disruptive design concept, taken from nature, that later went by the name of ‘dazzle.’ Dazzle painting of ships was common in WWI and early WWII. It was later abandoned by the Navy for a variety of reasons. First, it was expensive and time consuming to apply; two, it frequently led to accidents and misidentification by friendly forces; and three, it didn’t actually work very well. By the time I saw service in the Pacific in 1945 there were no dazzle painted ships in service.

Thayer’s major contribution turned out to be ‘counter-shading.’ Dayton Brown’s development of counter-shading for ships, submarines and aircraft became standard by war’s end. Today’s ships all sport ‘haze grey’ and ‘deck grey’ as standard schemes and nobody notices because it seems ‘they’ve always been that way.’ Thayer took his idea straight from nature. Fish and birds tend to have a natural protective coloration, dark on the top and light on the shaded bottom.

There are two anecdotes related by Brown. He tells how he convinced Admiral John Sidney McCain (Senator McCain’s father), commander of Pacific Naval Air at the time, of the value of counter-shading on aircraft at a remote Pacific Atoll. He had heard of a short visit by McCain at the base and wanted to show the admiral how it would look. The admiral had no time so Cdr. Brown offered to paint a plane at the end of the runway with a fire hose while the admiral looked on from his aircraft waiting to take off. This occurred and all Navy planes had that dark top and pale underbelly thereafter.

The second event occurred in a Navy office in Washington. Cdr. Brown was trying to explain counter-shading to a group of high level officers. It was frustrating. Finally he took a cigarette and held it up in front of a window and asked them what color it was. It clearly appeared black in spite of its white paper wrapping against the bright backlight of the window.

Brown told one further story for which I happen to have the aerial photo negatives. He had a project shortly after the war to look at submerged submarines off the coast of Hawaii. Like the story of the Emperor’s clothes, submariners have a tendency to believe they are invisible once they submerge their vessel. Traditionally they have always painted the subs black. Brown’s pictures showed, as he described it, “they looked like big black whales submerged in mint jelly.” Thereafter subs have sported a somewhat lighter shade.

Long after I retired from Navy employment I had an opportunity to lecture the Top Gun School at Miramar Naval Air Station on disruptive painting of jet fighters. What goes around comes around. Decades after that a young naval flyer knocked on my door at home and wanted information on how to camouflage a jet fighter. It’s a little like the story of the ‘Yehudi’ project and General Dynamics – but that too is for another day.