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Razzle-Dazzle: Geometrical Camouflage at Sea, 1918.

JF Ptak Science Books       Post 1679    Part of a series on the History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things.

I found this photograph of the "Womens Camouflage Corps of New York City", the photo lingering away in a collection of News Photo Service WWI images.  After a bit of looking, I've found nothing about the WCCNYC, though women were employed to this work in America and Britain in 1917 and 1918--it just seems as though there aren't images available online showing these workers working.

But: were their painting the entirety of large ocean-going transport ships in sharp geometric shapes and in dazzling colors to make the ship disappear, like, well, it was "camouflaged"?  No.  It wasn't like biological camouflage where all sorts of bits come into play to make an animal blend into its surrounding environment to protect it from predators, or conversely to make it a better predator by allowing the animal to stay completely hidden until their prey could do nothing but become their prize.  Nor was it really like thermoregulation, or sexual or warning signals (again drawing from the bio world)--it was simpler than that, though are there many relational examples in the biological world as well. Nor was it similar to the camouflage schemes used by the air corps, with different and usually sky/ground-blended colors used for the top and bottom of SPADS and Nieuports and Albatrosses.

[The full image from which the detail was taken. The original is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.]

The effect of using the geometrical shapes on the whole of a 600'-long vessel was to make it's speed and direction  more difficult for submarines to figure out and calculate so that the point-to-target launch of their torpedo would be far more complicated.  When the prolific maritime painter Norman Wilkinson figured out this approach for disguising the intentions of ships (around 1917) he instantly recognized its applicability in anti-submarine warfare:  not only would it be difficult to distinguish bow/stern properties of a ship, but also how long it was, and whether it was coming or going, and how big it was--all major factors in determining the launch of a torpedo.  Basically, dazzle camo made it difficult to produce a trajectory for the ship.

This must have been an extraordinary experience, seeing these things for the first time by military commanders, who not but a few years earlier were sending troops into combat with white gloves and red pantaloons. 

[The text accompanying the photo above, intended for use for whatever magazine or newspaper reprinted the work.]

An image of work completed:

And, it must be admitted, the coloring scheme is confusing--more so if you can image looking at it from periscope depth.

[Sir Norman Wilkinson, for all intents and purposes the discoverer of the dazzle effect in naval  warfare.]

In a Letter to the Editor ("Camouflage of Ships at War") in Nature (19 June 1919), Wilkinson explains his dazzle approach, saying that the whole point of this sort of camouflage was not necessarily "obliterative" as in biological camouflage, but rather was intended to "upset a submariner commander's estimate of a vessel's course, when carrying out an attack with torpedo", and stating further that it was not intended for "ships of the line" or to help deceive topside gunnery from another ship, especially at greater distances where the paint would simply not come into play.   [An often-used but never-cited quote from a Wilkinson "lecture"  runs as follows:  "The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked.... The colours mostly in use were black, white, blue and green.... When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater distortion."]

 

[ RMS Empress of Russia]

The technology is still used, with more advanced applications, and appears on one of the world's stealthiest ships, Sweden's Visby Corvette.  Apart from having an exceptionally low magnetic signature, it also has geometric low-radar reflective gray dazzle paint. (It also has applications for land warfare use in the camouflage of armored vehicles against RPGs; see INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS; Steps towards warship invisibility
Obesity, Fitness & Wellness Week, March 15, 2008 and also the Economist, 6/11/2011, Vol. 399 Issue 8737, p83-83, ".) 2/3p "The Old Razzle Dazzle".)

RMW Mauretanis:

HMS Argus:

Edward Wadsworth, Painting of Dazzle-ships in Drydock, 1919.  There are well-known stories of great artists--like Villard and the questionable Picasso--who made contributions in this effort, from making designs to doing the actual painting.  But it was the estimable Wilkinson who made the major contribution and invention of dazzle-at-sea.  (Intereting work was also done by the United States in utlizing electric light placement at night for confusing teh ship's silhouetet against a starry sky, but that will have to wait for another post.)

 

Episode in Anticipation: Large Groups of POWs, 1918

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War Rations--Iron and Bread

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Continuing yesterday's post #1662 (A Short Episode in the History of Bread Photography...): my friend Jeff Donlan pointed out that if 60 million pounds of bread were served weekly to the 4,000,000 members of the German Army, then each soldier must be eating about 2 pounds of bread a day.  And that's not eating a loaf or whatever of "Wonder Bread" (its a wonder its bread--watch that trademark!) or any other white bread where you could ball up two slices and pop them whole into your mouth.  As Jeff points out, if this was a dark or rye or Napoleon's-solder's-like black bread or some some thing, it would be thick and dense.  And so, two pounds of this sort of bread is a lot, especially if the average soldier was running around and weighing in at 150 pounds or so--eating two pounds of bread plus four pounds of potatoes would mean that each soldier was eating about 5% of their body weight in just those two foods per day.

This all sounded like a lot of food to me--until I stumbled on the following article in a journal I had never encountered before.  It was in Illustrated World, a Popular Mechanics-lite sort of publication, for November 1916, in an article "From Trench and Barrack" that I found these two photographs.  I was astonished first of all to find a bread-consumption reference within 15 minutes of wondering about such a thing for the first time ever--but there it was.  A big slab of fork+-high bread in a picture made to depict the daily rations of a German POW in the hands of the British.  The prisoner was alloted 1.5 pounds of bread.  Plus a half-pound of (cooked) meat, 8 ounces of vegetables, one ounce of coffee or ta, and the other stuff as can e seen in the photo's caption. 

And there you have it.  If the prisoner is getting 1.5 pounds of bread, then it makes sense for the active soldier to be eating two pounds.  At least it all makes sense in 1916.

The thrust of the article in Illustrated World though was the other sort of ration that Great Britain would be shelling out--shells.  This would be the iron ration that--after two years of a terrible and monumentally destructive war--would be the most common form of ration exchanged during the conflict.

 

An Episode in the History of Bread Photography: Monumental Bread and Infographics, 1914

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1662

In the history of pictures of bread, this loaf seems to be about the biggest.  The 60-million-pound loaf is meant to represent a week's ration for teh newly-fighting German army.  The war, the Great War, WWI, was just beginning when this article hit the newsstands on 22 August 1914.  There wasn't much yet printed in the Scientific American regarding the war, and it seems as though this was the first cover of the magazine to deal with the new world-ender.  But in the blazes of the guns of August (B Tuchman) the end of the conflict might've looked a little close at hand.  I doubt that many would've seen the 100,000,000 dead and wounded that would come as a result of the war, at this point just finishing its first month.

I am not sure why, but the editors of SA chose to think about supply for their first stab at making a cover-comment about the war.  It does give some idea of the sheer numbers of people involved, at least on the German side.  Hoiw this is iterated by a 400-foot-tall loaf of bread, I can't exactly say.

(Are potatoes one tenth the density of :"meat"?  The potato sack and the meat chunk look to be about the same size, though the meat bit is less than a tenth of the weight of the potatoes.) 

Two issues later--5 September 1914--we see the following artistic display of quantitative data, a much more effective way of generating understanding on the differences in troop strengths among the waring countries:

 

The United States would not get involved in WWI until 1917, and so American statistics were not included in this image.  But if they were, the U.S. Army's size would be somewhat larger than little Montenegro there at the far right.  Given the American population of 92,000,000, the army was quite small, with barely 98,000 soldiers under arms (half of whom served overseas). (Montenegro's force of 50,000 was somehow pulled out of a population of 350,000 people--Belgium, with a population of 7 million, had an army more than double the size of that of the U.S.)  Of course this was a peacetime, hands-off army for the United States, and by the end of 1914 President Wilson expanded the standing army to 140,000; by 1918, when the newly-instituted draft¹ really kicked in, more than 4,000,000 people would be in the armed services, half of whom would serve overseas. 

Notes

1. Beginning in 1917 all males between the ages of 21 and 30 were required to register for the draft/military service, and by September 1918 more than 23,000,000 men had done so.  This was an extraordinary leap from the Army totals for 1914.   

The History of Blank, Empty and Missing Things--German POWs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1556

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war.  The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands.  This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs--I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was  a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms,  looking like bacteria, fading into their future.  

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

 
This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together--there was little free ground
.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might've been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

 

Barbed Wire, Trench Warfare, and the Next Lethal Step: Electric WIres

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1555   [Part of the History of Lines series]

Barbed wire was one of the most successful and horrifying defensive weapons of World War I.  In 1915 it was made more effective yet by adding high-voltage electricity to the emplacements.  In general the electrical barbed wire fence was employed as only a tiny fraction of all wire fences during the war--as the non-electrified fence was already extremely effective, very cheap to produce and very easily installed--but the possibility of finding an electrified wire somewhere along the lengthy rat's nests of mile sand miles of this thing must've had some sort of weight in most soldiers' minds. 

The following image (and details) from The Illustrated London News for 9 October 1915:

And the places where the barbed wire was made and packaged, again from The Illustrated London News for 16 October 1915.

It looks as though the wire was stretched across 3.5 foot poles, with the barbed wire added diagonally, and then rolled up in long sections for easy transport and deployment.

Tree Rings of Soldiers' Uniforms, 1918

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Aside from the strong impact that this 1918 image [the original available at our blog bookstore, here] makes, the enormous mounds of clothing of captured German solders that were routinely handled as part of their processing, it struck a deeper chord to an older image still (that we'll see below).  The photograph seems threatening to me, even though the action taking place in it wasn't, it was mundane--the men, who I believe are German POW's, are processing the clothing for disinfection and cleaning.  But the size of the mound reminds us of the magnitude of the numbers of the dozens of millions who were killed during WWI, as well as the millions who were taken prisoner.  What remains to be said about this image is how often that pile of clothing was replaced:  is it a monthly, or weekly, or daily pile?  My guess is that it was more daily than anything else, if for no other reason than there is an enormous oil lamp in the background of the photo, suggesting that the process went on all day and into the night.  My initial reaction is that this pile was replicated often during any given month....

 

And the image it reminds me of are those made of the enormous mounds of buffalo hides, piles readied for shipment away from the Plains by rail. 

I am in no way suggesting that the prisoner were skinned like the buffalo, not in any way.  But they do bear a resemblance in the way that thousands of men or buffalo could be represented in such a compact space, flattened husks of the living thing, gross representations of big numbers. 

German Military Medical Retreat, Coastal Poland, 1915

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This image, from the 22 Juli 1915 issue of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig) shows a collection of German soldiers that were treated at a medical aidstation.  The woman in white is the German crown princess, accompanied by her four navy-uniform-clad sons, are adrift in a sea of wounded and recovering soldiers who I guess were given leave from the war, celebrating their survival at the old spa and vacation spot Ostseebad, in Zoppot (Sopot, Poland).  (The issue may be purchased at our blog bookstore.)

And the detail:

And another:

Making Things Disappear--German POWs, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1410

In continuing series of posts on Blank and Empty Things is this image on fading, disappearing German prisoners of war.  The French had been pounding them in western France in the summer of 1918, and Germans were surrendering and being captured by the thousands.  This news service photograph shows one of the assembly camps with about 10,000 POWs--I made a heavy scan of the group of soldiers in the distance and was  a little taken aback to see that the men had lost their human forms,  looking like bacteria, fading into their future.  (The original photo is available for purchase through our blog bookstore.)

The full image is impressive, and shows just a small fraction of the men taken prisoner during 1918; and it shows even a lesser percentage of those killed.

This detail of the foreground shows the familiarity necessitated by the men being pressed so closely together--there was little free ground.

Also, I thought that the French soldiers in the midst of the prisoner might've been feeding them, but it seems as though they were just walking in their midst.

World War I in Ivory--Pianos and Recovery

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1409

These images come from my collection of World War I news photo service photographs, and are among the minority that show even momentary happiness.  In both of these cases, the emotion resolves itself in song and in the piano.  The first image takes place in a U.S. overseas hospitals for wounded soldiers, and they seem genuinely relieved to have the attention and the entertainment. (Both images are available at our blog bookstore.)

The second image is dated 2 November 1918--just nine days before the armistice--and shows the "Broadway Quartet" as they rehearse "I'm Only a Buck Private" for a behind-the-lines show for U.S. servicemen, somewhere in France.  The note with the image (from the Western Newspaper Union) says that the staging used for their shows came from found wood, bits of flooring, and camouflage netting torn into pieces.  

Barbed Wire Cutting Device on the Mall, 1918.

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1394

"Will Cut its Way Through Hun Entanglements" reads the header to the caption for this new photo service war photo from the Central News Photo Service, published nearly at the end of 1918, just a few months before the end of the war. The inventor, John E. Logan, was demonstrating his invention "before senators and representatives of Congress" on a "miniature tank wire entanglement".  The "entanglement" wire was much nastier than what you'd think of as the "barbed wire" of today--not concertina wire, but something small and nasty that was meant to catch soldiers, to pin them more deeply in the wire like a sharp metallic quicksand, stopping their advance and making them meat bait for machine gunners and everyone else. 

Logan attracted a fair size crowd for his demonstration in the vicinity of the Capitol.  His machine seemed to work well, too, cutting through 72 strands of wire in about a half minute.  I'm not sure how many of these machines were produced (can't find anything on them offhand)  but there would've been a need for a great number of them, given that since there was something like 12-25,000 miles of trenches dug during the war that there must've been millions of miles of barbed wire produced.  (That's an off-hand guess, but it probably isn't horribly wrong.)

(The original photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

The Children's Parade: Liberation of Ostende, 1918

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1393

Ostende, a port city of West Flanders on the North Sea in  northwestern  Belgium, was an important stronghold and also a  key to holding the inland port of Bruges, which is something that the Germany Army was able to do until the very end of World War I.  Under constant occupation by an invading force, the city was only liberated by the armistice signed two days before this photo was made, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918. (The original photo is available for purchase via our blog bookstore, here.)

Some of these children might still be alive, though all but two of the soldiers of this war are all dead.  I remember talking to my grandmother ten years or so ago, asking her about what she did to celebrate the end of the war.  She laughed, and then told me that she and her sisters and brothers went out to the street (in their small town of Housatonic, Massachusetts) and danced and danced.  She then said that a few other children went to their kitchens to come out with pots to bang with wooden spoons--and then it struck me, taking away my breath, that what she was talking about was celebrating the end of WWI, not WWII, which is what I thought she was going to talk about. 

Cold and Understatement on the Western Front, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 1392

The caption stamped on the back of the news photo service agency photograph (from the Western Newspaper Union) said that the bitter cold encountered by these Canadian soldiers on the Western Front in the winter of 1916 "was one of many difficulties encountered by the soldiers".  "Great hardships have been caused by the frigid weather in this region" continues the caption.  Indeed.  Even for Canadians this was a cold winter, though not so cold that the Canadian trooper in the foreground stopped to put on his gloves to remove the ice from the water trough. These soldiers may have been cavalry, as there is a horse-like medallion on the front of their lids. (This photo is available for purchase from our blog bookstore, here.)

Evidently the role of the cavalry in the BEF along the Western Front is an under-appreciated thing, or misunderstood, at least.  I'm not sure how they influenced the outcome of this stagnant section of the war, where the line of battle remained essentially unchanged throughout the duration of the war.  Millions of troops were deeply entrenched over hundreds of miles of battlefront, wailing away at one another with massive artillery barrages, countless machine gun nests, and then eventually tanks, planes and poison gas.  Back in February 1916 there weather was so tough and frigid that the battle of Verdun was postponed a bit, waiting for less intense weather conditions.  Dozens of millions of artillery shells and  billions of bullets later, in 1918, there was little change in the positions of the armies, except of course for the millions of casualties. 

 

A Field of Artillery Shells--a Miniscule Sample of the 40,000,000 Shells Fired at Verdun, 1916

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1388 (out of order!)

I just finished posting this from yesterday on a sea of shells and what those explosives meant in terms of overall destructive firepower for WWI.  This explosives image is a little easier, in a way, just showing hints of the vastness of what might be an acre of large ammunition.  

This photo (dated 15 April 1916 by the news photo service of Underwood and Underwood) shows a French senator--H. Charles Humbert--viewing "a field literally covered with shells",  the photo really only giving some glimpse of the extent of the palleted shells, which fade into the distance behind M. Humbert and extend deeply into the field in front of him.  (The original photo is available here at our blog bookstore.)

M. Humbert (1866-1927) would've had more of an interest in this scene than most, as he represented the Meuse district, and at this point int he war the shells were headed to a part of that area, Verdun. Verdun of course was one of the major battles of WWI, fought from  21 February to 18 December 1916, in the hills and dales of north-eastern France, at Verdun-sur-Meuse. There were 306,000 battlefield deaths at Verdun, plus another 500,000 wounded, in what may have been one of the most gruesome battles of modern times. 

Humbert was also an Army veteran and wrote on the military, and as it turns out, as the war approached he adopted a call to arms for more canons and more shells for the defense of France the inadequacy of the defenses of the French Army, and the insufficiency of officers and munitions  ("Des canons, des munitions!").  He certainly would've been relieved with what he saw here.  Of course this is photo would represent a percentage well to the right of the decimal place of all those shells used at Verdun, which numbered an inconceivable 40 million.  When this photo was made in April the battle was already wicked and had been fought for two months--there were still eight months of gore to go. 

Ephemeral Uniqueness in Large Crowds, 1917

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1390

There are 1500 or so of these news service war photographs here, and one of the remarkable things that I've discovered about them--trivial things to be sure compared with their overall message, ephemeral bits of semi-nothing--is that in many of the very-large-group images that there is sometimes just a single person who is doing something that no one else is doing, and it has been captured almost forever in the photo.  There are photos of thousands of troops, all facing east, with on solitary soldier facing west; there's the solitary waver; there's the one bare-headed man in  a sea of a thousand men with hats; there's the one person raising his hat to the photographer in a sea of people looking at the camera but not raising their arms.  Then of course there's the group photo of a mass of German WWI POWs, with only one soldier without a hat or helmet, and he looks just like me. 

Here are two other examples--the first is a detail from a photo showing British children cheering their American allies in 1917, showing one man clearly reacting to the hundreds of screams by covering his ears.  And is the only one doing so.  The second detail shows a large contingent of American soldiers leaving for Europe on a steamer--there is only one man  who turns to the camera and waves.

Both original photographs are available from our blog bookstore, here.

The second detail:

The entire first image, showing the children cheering the raising of the two flags:

And this:

And the second, showing a group of hundreds of soldiers waiting to leave Hoboken, New Jersey, for the fight in Europe, 1917.  Most are pulling themselves inside their coats as much as possible; I suspect being right there on the harbor--and seeing the floating bits of ice in the water--that it was wet and very cold.  Our one adventurous Doughboy gives the camera a spread-fingered wave....he also seems to be quite tall.  He is the lone waver.  There also seem to be a lot of smiles in the crowd.