Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Warneford, the first pilot to ‘spike-bozzle’ (completely destroy) a Zeppelin in the air, became the hero of the hour. He received a telegram from Buckingham Palace: ‘I most heartily congratulate you upon your splendid achievement of yesterday in which you single handed destroyed an enemy Zeppelin. I have much satisfaction in conferring on you the Victoria Cross for this gallant act. GEORGE R. I.’

  But ten days after his great victory, feted and honoured by Paris society and competed over by French women, 24-year-old ‘Rex’ Warneford VC fell to his death near Versailles when the Henri Farman F-27 two-seater reconnaissance bomber he was flying (without safety harness) rolled over in a steep turn and broke up in mid-air. Warneford was still alive when they reached his face-down body. The enamelled insignia of his Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur was driven deep into his left side.

  Even reconnaissance was not as easy as it sounds. On their first wartime recce in France, on Wednesday 19 August 1914, two RFC pilots lost their way, and each other, in cloud. One flew over Brussels without knowing what city it was; the other had to land twice and get directions from a gendarme. Tangible evidence of the enemy first came back on 22 August in the form of a rifle bullet in the bloody leg of an airborne observer called Jillings. New observers were not always sure what it was they were seeing. At Ypres in 1914, some reported tarmac as troops on the move, and gravestones as bivouacs. By trial and error, it was found that 6,000 feet gave a good view, almost at the limit of rifle fire from the ground.

  From the 1890s the ballistic charge of artillery ammunition had been changing, so the reconnaissance fliers of 1914 no longer saw the distinctive and conspicuous clouds of white smoke that used to billow from big guns. The greater power and range that this smokeless propellant gave to the field guns meant that by 1914 they did not have to be fired ‘over open sights’, directly looking at the target they were shooting at, but could be kept miles back under cover, their ‘indirect fire’ guided by forward observation officers linked by telephone. This technique had begun in the 1860s in the American Civil War, when spotters with flags in fixed Union balloons overhead had helped gunners below to shell Confederate positions accurately.

  The introduction of mobile reconnaissance aircraft now put many more guns at risk. An airman could see an enemy battery and then drop a smoke bomb to mark the place. Friendly spotters would then work out the range with a telemeter and direct the artillery to shell the place. If the aeroplane was fitted with wireless, map grid-references could be radioed back. Here are the wireless messages sent down from a Royal Flying Corps plane spotting for British gunners on the ground shelling an enemy gun battery on 24 September 1914:

  4.2 p.m. A very little short. Fire. Fire.

  4.4 p.m. Fire again. Fire again.

  4.12 p.m. A little short; line O. K.

  4.15 p.m. Short. Over, over and a little left.

  4.20 p.m. You were just between two batteries. Search two hundred yards each side of your last shot. Range O. K.

  4.22 p.m. You have them.

  4.26 p.m. Hit. Hit. Hit.

  4.32 p.m. About 50 yards short and to the right.

  4.37 p.m. Your last shot in the middle of three batteries in action; search all round within 300 yards of your last shot and you have them.

  4.42 p.m. I am coming home now.

  The fear of spotters is a theme of John Buchan’s WW1 novel Mr Standfast (1919). Buchan’s old Afrikaaner scout, Peter Pienaar, joined the RFC and developed a genius for air combat. ‘He apparently knew how to hide in the empty air as cleverly as in the long grass of the Lebombo Flats.’ The climax of the book, during the huge offensive by the Germans in April 1918, is Pienaar’s desperate and glorious flight in a little Shark-Gladas to try and stop the enemy air ace’s aeroplane getting back to the German HQ with the news of a glaring weakness in the Allied line, ‘the knowledge which for us was death’.

  More alarming than the spotter was the camera. Aerial Photographic Reconnaissance (APR) yielded harder evidence than observers’ impressions and anecdotes. APR helped construct a scientific record of terrain from overlapping oblique and vertical pictures, which could be scrutinised in detail and matched to the map. The French, first to take photographs from a balloon in 1858, were soon photographing German positions in WW1. Rudyard Kipling, visiting French troops in his 1915 report France at War, noted ‘the Intelligence with its stupefying photo-plans of the enemy’s trenches’.

  In the 1914 edition of The Art of Reconnaissance, Henderson did not mention photography because it was then a new and secret application of the technology of flight but, in a single day in 1914, British officers had managed to photograph all the defences of the Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and the Solent from a height of 5,600 feet, and to develop the negatives in the air so they were ready for printing upon landing.

  The RFC’s Air Photograph section was officially founded in January 1915. When Douglas Haig launched the first British offensive at Neuve Chapelle two months later, the artillery, infantry and aircrews were all working to the same map of the German trenches, prepared from the 4" x 5" aerial photographic plates taken by the Thornton-Pickard box cameras specially built for the RFC biplanes. This attack failed like so many others, not because people did not know where they were, but because they could not talk to each other; telephony had not managed to keep up with telemetry. By the end of the war, hundreds of aerial cameras had made nearly six million black and white prints for distribution, and the Allies reckoned no German could deepen a trench without it being known about.

  It was the paramount need to deceive eyes in the skies that led to the rise of camouflage.

  * Is Churchill’s vivid image of the ships, written down eighteen years later, an accurate memory, or is it coloured by intervening developments? Mottled or dispersive naval camouflage is not usually recorded as appearing until 1915.

  2

  The Nature of Camouflage

  Camouflage does not feature in the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encylopaedia Britannica in 1910–11, but the cataclysm of the Great War taught everyone about it. The Twelfth Britannica in 1922 had illustrated articles on the subject, including one by the marine artist Norman Wilkinson, who had devised a startling way of deceiving the eye about ships at sea. The word ‘camouflage’ itself is French, and was said by Eric Partridge to derive from the Parisian slang verb camoufler meaning ‘to disguise’, or perhaps from the Italian camuffare, derived from capo muffare, ‘to muffle the head’. ‘Camouflage’ entered the English language during WW1, and the Oxford English Dictionary’s first example of published usage is from the Daily Mail in May 1917: ‘The act of hiding anything from your enemy is termed “camouflage”.’

  There are two stories about the first use of camouflage in 1914, and both are linked to artillery, artists and aircraft. A 43-year-old Parisian portrait painter called Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, serving as a second-class gunner, was said to be the first person to think of covering artillery with painted sheets so the enemy could not spot them. His motive was to save lives; after a German shell hit his battery in the open and wounded his companions badly he thought he might be able to stop it happening again by blurring the shape and colour of the guns. In another story, a German aeroplane dropped a bomb on a battery of the 6th Regiment of Foot Artillery at Toul, west of Nancy, killing and injuring some friends of the painter Louis Guingot and Sergeant Eugène Courbin. Courbin had some canvas sheets, edged with eyelets, run up in the workshops of the Associated Stores in Nancy where he used to work as an administrator. These splotch-painted tarpaulins were then stretched over the guns and lashed to poles. Meanwhile, Guingot got hold of some capes or cagoules which he dyed yellowish and then daubed with green splashes outlined in black for the artillerymen to don over their bright blue uniforms.

  All this was approved by their commanding officer, Colonel Fetter, who put it to the test by having his aviator son fly over a newly ‘camouflaged’ battery at a height of 300 metres. The pilot dropped a message saying h
e could only spot the five men deliberately left wearing their regular bright blue uniforms. Colonel Fetter then got Courbin and Guingot, together with Henri Roger and Eugène Renain, to start making covers and capes to help conceal the 120 and 150 mm guns and their crews, as they moved up to Metz.

  From October 1914 onwards the war on the western front became bogged down in trenches. The war of the future became a grotesque return to medieval siege warfare, and as the armies rooted into the mud the first shoots of true camouflage began to show. You could, in the traditional way, stack wicker fences around the guns to hide them from view but that was not really camouflage, just screening, like those ‘masked batteries’ of field guns that shelled the Martian machines in H. G. Wells’s 1898 thriller, The War of the Worlds. Camouflage was a new art that painters would help pioneer.

  The French Army’s section de camouflage at Amiens received official status on 12 February 1915, with the immediate priority of disguising guns and gunners from enemy view. Guirand de Scévola was promoted to lead it, with the 63-year-old Impressionist Jean-Louis Forain as its first Inspector General. General Joffre gradually expanded camouflage by attaching workshops to each army corps, not only in Amiens, but also in places like Arras, Bourget, Châlons-sur-Marne, Chantilly, Epernay, Nancy and at 34 rue du Plateau, Paris.

  The section de camouflage started with thirty officers and seven men drawn from the worlds of theatre, painting, sculpture and design. All the artists wore a white-and-red armband or brassard embroidered in wire with their unit’s badge: a silver chameleon, the slow-moving African lizard whose pebbly-looking skin can mottle and alter colour. Chameleons’ swivelling, binocular eyes, set on each side of the head, help them to calculate the range of their insect prey and to shoot out a lightning-fast sticky tongue that snatches it out of the air. Chameleons seem to combine the skills of camoufleurs, spotters and gunners.

  The art of camouflage in WW1 follows the basic principles of survival of the fittest in nature. Camouflage confers strategic and tactical advantage in the arms race between seeing creatures. Both predators and prey can deceive each other by colouring that blends them into the background, or by patterning that disrupts conventional outline. Seeing and not being seen are matters of life and death. When a Cabbage White butterfly settles on a striped green-and-white cornus bush, its folded wings perfectly match the ragged pale edges of the leaves. In My Early Life, Winston Churchill says that of the magic-lantern lectures that he could remember from Harrow School, two were on battles, one on empire, one on geography, but one was ‘about how butterflies protect themselves by their colouring’. Although many animals and birds deceive, Homo sapiens succeeded as a species because human individuals used their intelligence to outwit each other, as well as other species, in competition for resources. The decoys and disguises of the early hunters helped to deceive their prey. An early student of this was Abbott H. Thayer (1849–1921), an eccentric autocratic artist from Monadnock, New Hampshire. His article ‘The Law Which Underlies Protective Coloration’ in the ornithological magazine The Auk in April 1896 stated that camouflage was a matter of depth perception, as well as surface colouring. Thayer painted naturalistic trompe l’oeil pictures which made people think a two-dimensional canvas was solid and three-dimensional. He came to realise that nature sometimes did just the opposite.

  In the real world, the contours of an object in relief are shown by brightness on the side facing the light source, and shadow on the other side. Thayer was the first to observe that many animals had what he called ‘countershading’: darker colours above, on their backs facing the sun, grading to lighter colours below, on the belly. Because these arrangements worked against the usual visual expectation – lighter above, darker below – they made a round-bodied creature appear flat against its background. The British biologist Edward Bagnall Poulton was the first to note in the 1880s how the white spots stippling the darker shaded side of a Purple Emperor butterfly chrysalis made it seem as flat as a leaf, though he did not then grasp that it was a general principle right across the animal kingdom.

  In 1909, Thayer’s son, Gerald, published a groundbreaking book, Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, An Exposition of the Laws of Disguise through Color and Pattern: Being a Summary of Abbott H. Thayer’s Discoveries. Abbott Thayer’s introduction was grandiose and combative. Zoologists and naturalists could not understand what painters saw: ‘The disguising patterns worn by animals … are, in the best sense of the word, triumphs of art.’ Both Thayers were over-insistent that all animal camouflage was about the organism’s ‘obliteration’ in its environment, and neither had read or understood The Origin of Species where Darwin specifically linked bright plumage to sexual selection rather than disguise. Nevertheless, it is still a remarkable work, an important urtext for camoufleurs before the actual word existed, and a manifestation of ideas that were also expressed in contemporaneous new movements in art. Thayer’s pointing out of what he called ‘ruptive marks’, for example the black and white bands that break up and disguise the outline of a ringed plover nesting among pebbles, occurred at just the same time as artists like Georges Braque across the Atlantic in Paris were beginning to disrupt surface resemblance and the single viewpoint with cubism.

  Avant-garde painters certainly influenced the French military during the Great War. Writing not long after the armistice, Guirand de Scévola said it was the Cubists who sprang to mind when he first thought about disguising the form of the guns. Violent techniques that Braque and Picasso had used to distort figure and ground, and jam together different viewpoints and perspectives to show things in new lights, could also be used to alter the look of objects so they could not be recognised.

  A photo in The War Illustrated (3 July 1915) headlined ‘Hide and Seek with Heavy Artillery’ shows disruptive patterns on artillery, and is captioned: ‘The latest ruse de guerre of our ingenious ally. French gunners painting ‘75s’ the colour of the landscape, to form an effective disguise from inquisitive aircraft.’

  Picasso, who once defined cubism as not painting what you see but what you know to be there, recognised camouflage as his bastard child. Gertrude Stein recalled being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail in Paris one night in 1915 when one of the first camouflage-painted heavy artillery pieces was hauled past them. Picasso looked amazed at the cannon with its blocks of disruptive pattern and then cried out, ‘C’est nous qui avons fait ça!’ (‘We invented that!) Later, in Alsace, Stein noted how culturally specific camouflage was:

  Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french [sic] looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very neat camouflage and it was american … The colour schemes were different, the designs were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability …

  In Technics and Civilization (1934) Lewis Mumford put forward the idea that the invention of the photographic camera had made humans more extrovert, so people began posing for the shot or acting for the motion picture, as if they were all constantly on stage or up on the screen. He thought this technological shift, from the self-examination of the mirror to the self-exposure of the camera, put a premium on presentation. Apply this to war, and the front you need to present to face the enemy, and one can see the new possibilities of a false presentation, of deception.

  This was exactly how the British understood the idea of camouflage by the end of the Great War: ‘Deception, not concealment, is the object of camouflage’ stated the official pamphlet on its principles and practice. The 1921 Manual of Field Works (All Arms) defined camouflage as ‘the art of concealing that something is being concealed. Its keynote is deception.’ Popular usage during the later war years came to reflect this: a half-lie or prevarication would be ‘camouflaged truth’; a doubtful patriot a ‘camouflaged Hun’, and so on. In journalism, an article placed with false information for the enemy was referred to as ‘a camouflage’.


  Although the British practice of camouflage got official status in 1915, it took until 1917 for the word ‘camouflage’ to begin entering the public domain. Because it was ‘official’ in wartime it was therefore an official secret – protected by DoRA – and so the art of hiding things had to be censored to keep it from all those who might be interested in what was being hidden.

  When George Bernard Shaw was visited for the last time by G. K. Chesterton’s younger brother, the pugnacious political journalist Cecil Chesterton, he was dressed in khaki, ‘a deeply sunburnt, hopelessly unsoldierlike figure’:

  The word camouflage was in everyone’s mouth then; and … my unruly imagination instantly presented me with a picture of Cecil camouflaging himself as a beetroot on a sack of potatoes by simply standing stock still.