Churchill's Wizards

by Nicholas Rankin

  Hall had to play a clever game when he passed on this ticking bomb to the American Government in late February 1917. Hall’s goal was to get the USA to join the combatants, so he had to convince the Americans that the cable threatening to foment revolutionary war from Mexico was genuine, without letting slip that the intercept had been made in violation of US neutrality. Moreover, Hall could not allow the Germans to suspect that their codes had been broken.

  To camouflage his real source, the telegraph cable to the USA he was still tapping, Hall ensured that Edward Thurston, the British minister in Mexico, obtained a copy of the Zimmermann telegram in the form it had been received at the Western Union office in Mexico City. On 22 February, when Hall showed the American embassy in London the telegram dated 19 January, he could more or less honestly say that it had been obtained in Mexico and cracked in London.

  The deciphered telegram shot to the US Secretary of State and then on to President Woodrow Wilson, who exclaimed ‘Good Lord!’ several times as he read it on 27 February. When published all over the front pages of the US press on 1 March 1917, ‘the Zimmermann Note’ caused a ruckus. Senator Stone of Mississippi and other isolationists suspected a trick by devious Brits trying to hornswoggle the USA into the war. The press magnate William Randolph Hearst (on whom Orson Welles based Citizen Kane) instructed his newspaper editors to treat it as ‘in all probability a fake and a forgery’. There were over eight million German-Americans in the USA, and they remembered previous anti-German propaganda campaigns by British agents. But on 3 March, when Zimmermann himself naïvely admitted to an American reporter in Berlin that he could not deny having written the note, the floodgates of righteous indignation opened. The idea of Mexican revolutionaries like Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata being aided by Prussians to storm across the Rio Grande was too much. Pro-Germanism was swept away and the USA was inexorably impelled towards war. Later that month, 26,000 more US sailors were enlisted. Churchill said, ‘A new Titan long sunk in doubt … now arose and began ponderously to arm.’

  The United States was taking up arms just at the time Britain and France’s ailing ally, Russia, was letting them fall. On 15 March 1917, amid widespread strikes and the eruption of ‘soviets’ or workers’ councils, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was forced to abdicate. A provisional government of liberals and moderate socialists was formed under Kerensky. They were, at least, parliamentarians, and the USA was the first government to recognise them, on 22 March.

  President Wilson finally spoke up for the Allies, including Russia, on 2 April 1917. He declared that ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’ and called the Imperial German Government ‘a natural foe of liberty’. The US Congress formally declared war on 6 April 1917, pledging ‘all the resources of the country’. In terms of resources, the USA produced more steel and more automobiles than any nation on earth, but its army of 5,000 officers and 123,000 men was not then very much bigger than the original BEF of 1914. The draft began in May 1917 and soon the USA had ten million fit young men under arms, being equipped and trained to go overseas. American soldiers first fired at the German enemy in late October 1917.

  The all-out German U-boat threat to the vital food, fuel, and industrial supply lines of the British Isles, France and Italy required the urgent development of new methods of protecting ships from submarines. But the Royal Navy did not think naturally in terms of predators and prey. Incredibly, Lloyd George and Maurice Hankey had to struggle to make the hidebound Admiralty accept even the simple idea that grouping merchant ships into convoys gave security of numbers, and allowed them to be shepherded safely by destroyers carrying depth-charges. But after the convoy system began in July and August 1917, the losses from U-boats began to fall.

  It was almost as hard to convince the naval establishment that camouflaging ships would confuse submarines. British Royal Navy battleships and cruisers had followed the style of the German and French fleets from 1903 in being painted a neutral blue-grey to blend with the sea and the sky, although most destroyers and flotilla leaders stayed black. Ships that did close support work for terrestrial forces (as in the Dardanelles) began getting mottled paintwork from 1915. But the Germans’ intensifying use of submarines and torpedoes in 1917 called for something more daring.

  The Scottish Professor of Zoology Sir John Graham Kerr was among the first in 1914 to propose something like the painter Abbott Thayer’s ‘countershading’, concealing objects by reversing the natural positions of light and shade. Kerr suggested that Royal Navy warships should use white paint as well as the standard grey. But the Admiralty did not run with his biologically based idea, nor with Abbott Thayer’s notion of painting submarines blue ‘like high swimming open sea fish’. During the 1917 submarine crisis, another painter came up with a dramatic new idea.

  Norman Wilkinson was a 38-year-old professional marine artist who later became President of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colour. Living near Portsmouth, he was a yacht racer from an early age, and was encouraged to break into commercial art by Arthur Conan Doyle, then working as a doctor in Southsea, long before he became famous as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Wilkinson’s painting of Plymouth Harbour, commissioned by the chairman of Harland and Wolff, hung over the mantelpiece of the smoking-room on the Titanic, the biggest passenger ship that yard had ever built. Wilkinson worked consistently for The Illustrated London News from 1901–15 (the heyday of the black and white illustrator) and claimed to be ‘the father and mother of the “artistic” poster on English railway stations’.

  Wilkinson joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) and, as we have seen, painted in the Dardanelles. In 1917 he was posted to Devonport in the English Channel, and with the rank of lieutenant in the RNVR, was in command of an eighty-three-foot motor launch which swept for mines and patrolled off Portland Bill with two depth charges ready for enemy submarines. Wilkinson knew from the Dardanelles how alarming and effective submarines could be; now U-boats were sinking sixty vessels a week. On Channel patrol, he watched scores of troop-and supply-ships sailing across to France. Painted black and starkly silhouetted, he saw they were ideal targets for a U-boat commander’s periscope sight.

  Wilkinson also happened to be a lifelong dry-fly fisherman (his oils, drypoints and etchings of angling scenes are well known). Fishing requires tactics and camouflage; trout have to be persuaded, cautiously and intelligently, to rise to a deceptive fly. ‘The good fisherman’, Arthur Ransome observed, ‘is always engaged in the active exercise of his imagination. He is the fish he catches.’ In a chilly railway carriage, travelling back to Plymouth from a weekend’s trout fishing in Devonshire in the spring of 1917, Wilkinson had a sudden vision. If it was impossible to paint a ship so that no submarine could spot her, ‘the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her … in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading’. He arrived at Plymouth consumed with excitement, went straight to the Royal Naval Barracks and asked if he could see the commander. Wilkinson made a rough draft of a camouflaged ship, marked port and starboard with odd shapes in green, mauve and white, went to see the Flag Captain of HM Dockyard, Charles Thorpe, got him excited too, and drafted a letter to the Admiralty Board of Inventions and Research, dated 27 April 1917:

  The proposal is to paint a ship with large patches of strong colour in a carefully thought-out pattern and colour scheme, which will so distort the form of the vessel that the chances of successful aim by attacking Submarines will be greatly decreased … The idea is not to render the ship in any degree invisible, as this is virtually impossible, but to largely distort the external shape by means of violent colour contrasts.

  The director of naval equipment, Captain Clement Greatorex, picked up the idea, and gave it the name ‘dazzle painting’. At the end of May, a small store ship, HMS Industry, was then test-painted according to Wilkinson’s designs, and coastal stations and other ships were ordered to report what they saw
of her.

  Wilkinson was informed that there was no room to do this at the Admiralty in London, so he would have to find other premises to develop his proposals. Walking along Piccadilly, he bumped into an old friend, the sculptor Derwent Wood, RA, outside the Royal Academy at Burlington House, where Solomon J. Solomon used to drill with the United Arts Rifles in their white jerseys. Wood suggested using the Royal Academy schools, and by the middle of June 1917 Wilkinson had managed to get the use of four studios for his ‘Dazzle Section’.

  Wilkinson also outflanked the cautious Admiralty by selling his idea to the vigorous Glaswegian shipowner Sir Joseph Maclay, newly appointed by Lloyd George as the controller general of merchant shipping. J. P. Maclay saw the benefit of camouflaging Merchant Navy ships to protect them from submarines. Going behind the Admiralty’s back caused ‘a ding-dong row’, but because Wilkinson was not a regular naval officer he got away with it, and ‘Dazzle’ was transferred from Royal Navy to merchant shipping.

  As Norman Wilkinson had realised on the Plymouth train, a ship with smoke unravelling from its funnels, moving against a changing sky and sea or sharply outlined on a horizon, was hard to hide. But, by using the ‘razzle-dazzle’ geometry of bold stripes, curves and zigzags in black, white, blue and green to break up the structural outline of the hull, Wilkinson hoped he could disrupt the low-down periscope view from a U-boat. The distorting of perspective might make its commander doubt the target vessel’s course, speed and distance in the same way as hunting lions miss the outline of an individual zebra, their vision confused by the flickering herd. The point of dazzle painting was deception. A camouflage officer once explained to a merchant skipper who objected to the vivid painting of his vessel:

  Dear Sir, – The object of camouflage is not, as you suggest, to turn your ship into an imitation of a West African parrot, a rainbow in a naval pantomime, or a gay woman. The object of camouflage is rather to give the impression that your head is where your stern is.

  Wilkinson assembled his team of naval camoufleurs in the Royal Academy Schools at Burlington House. The three modellers put together a series of one-foot-long, flat-bottomed models of merchant ships; then one of the five RNVR lieutenants designed a dazzle scheme which was painted on in washes by one of eleven young women with art-school training. (One of these ‘lady clerks’, Eva Mackenzie, later married Wilkinson.)

  The model ships could be revolved on a turntable in front of different sky backgrounds and viewed through a periscope set about ten feet away in order to judge the most distorting effects of slopes, curves and stripes. The designs all had to be different so U-boat captains could not get used to them, but their aim was always to make onlookers uncertain of the whereabouts of the bow, stern and bridge of the ship. Lines and stripes had to be carried round and over the ship, including funnels and lifeboats, so that it was deceptive from all angles. When Wilkinson was satisfied, the colour layout was copied on to a 1 foot: 1/16-inch white paper chart showing both port and starboard side of the design, and then dispatched to the port where the real ship was lying. There, the ten dock officers, who were usually artists in RNVR uniform, supervised the painting of the stripes on to the vessel, using black, white, blue and green as the principal colours, either in primary form or mixed to various tones. When the British Mercantile Marine began jazzing up the fleet in October 1917, the young Vorticist artist Edward Alexander Wadsworth was in charge of repainting in the dockyards of Bristol and Liverpool. Heavy engineering met the avant-garde; the results are still astonishing.

  Judging by the positive reports from sea-going skippers from August 1917 on, dazzle painting worked:

  September 25th, 9.55 a.m. sighted HMS Ebro, in the Sound of Mull on the port bow, end on.

  She appeared to alter course to port immediately after and seemed to continue to do so, whereas, in reality, she was altering her course to starboard.

  I should think confusion would be caused in aiming gun or torpedo.

  I was so sure that she was trying to cross my bows that I was on the point of stopping my engines and going full speed astern to avoid a collision, when I discovered that she was altering course to starboard. After passing the vessel it was almost impossible to say how she was steering.

  In October 1917 the Admiralty ordered the repainting of all merchant vessels and armed merchant ships and a number of cruisers, destroyers and minelayers on convoy duty. At the end of that same month, King George V came to visit the Dazzle Section at Burlington House, intrigued to learn how something could be camouflaged by being made more visible, not less.

  Norman Wilkinson, newly promoted to commander, did his party trick in the room where they tested the designs. He invited the bearded sailor king (a noted yachtsman with various exotic tattoos from his years in the Royal Navy) to act the part of a submarine captain. The king had to look through the shielded periscope at the latest painted model ship on the turntable, and then estimate what course it was steering by placing an unpainted model at the correct position on a compass card to his right. The painted ship was heading ESE; the king reckoned it was going S by W. Incredulous, he walked round to study the little ship, and congratulated Wilkinson. ‘I have been a professional sailor for many years and I would not have believed I could have been so deceived in my estimate.’

  By that time Solomon J. Solomon’s new camouflage school in central London’s Hyde Park, between the Bayswater Road and the eighteenth-century powder magazine, just north of the Serpentine, had been running for almost a year. It was just a few minutes’ walk across Kensington Gardens from Solomon’s London home and studio at Hyde Park Gate. It was doubly convenient because, as he was not being paid for military work, Solomon needed to keep painting to earn money. An increasing number of grieving families in the officer class were commissioning posthumous portraits of husbands, sons and brothers killed in the war.

  The British Army School of Camouflage was run by regular Royal Engineer officers, led by Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, John P. Rhodes, but Solomon was retained as honorary technical adviser. Created to experiment with new ideas, to instruct artist-officers in techniques of concealment, and to run courses that familiarised officers and NCOs with the basic principles of camouflage, the school also placed itself well, politically. Like the experimental training-area that Solomon had wanted near Haig’s GHQ in France, it became a handy and safe showplace for top brass, politicos and the press to view aspects of trench warfare, and helped to market the idea of deception and the term ‘camouflage’.

  The institution gained the seal of royal approval when the King and Queen came to visit on 8 March 1917. King George V’s note in his daily diary is one of the first recorded usages of the French loanword ‘camouflage’ in English: ‘May&Iwent to Hyde Park close to powder magazine where we saw a demonstration of the use of camouflage in warfare (which is concealment) most interesting …’

  Solomon also went to Scotland to advise on camouflage in the Firths of Forth and Tay, and to Hull after it had been bombed by zeppelins. He went up in balloons and aeroplanes to see how potential targets looked from the air and how they might be made to look like something else. As aerial bombing increased, with night and day raids by heavy aircraft like the Gotha bomber, so did the need for large-scale strategic camouflage, hiding key landmarks that enemy pilots would navigate by.

  Meanwhile, France, which had a head start on Solomon and the British camoufleurs, was leading the way again in défense contre aeronefs or airships, fitting painted covers to disguise lakes and canals and the confluences of the rivers Seine, Marne and Oise. Paris installed arrays of smoke generators (engins fumigènes) to pump out a fog of obscuring cloud. This was part of anti-aircraft defences that included rings of anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of barrage balloons attached to two-kilometre-high steel cables which would damage any planes that flew into them. Spotters north-east of the capital telephoned a twelve-minute warning of enemy bombers, and wailing air-raid sirens sent hundreds of thousands of Parisians down into
thousands of air-raid shelters and dozens of metro stations.

  By 1918, the French were trying large-scale visual deception, camouflage par faux-objectifs. Giant models of the Gare de l’Est railway station, together with fake boulevards and avenues made of wood and canvas, were set up in fields north-west of the city, with strings of lights that stayed on when Paris blacked out its street lights. But the British Royal Engineers remained sceptical of these kinds of objectifs simulés as antidotes to air raids. When enthusiastic amateurs wrote suggesting ‘the erection of a replica of London at some little distance in the country, meanwhile covering the real London with imitation fields’, the ideas were (as a witty letter to The Times by Colonel J. P. Rhodes pointed out) ‘received with reverence’, but ‘reluctantly discarded as unsuited to this imperfect world’. However, these ideas would be picked up later in WW2.

  Meanwhile, the camoufleur Oliver Bernard was having a different kind of war in France. Bernard stayed in the field because he was determined to show the bastards who called him ‘a cock sparrow’ that a little man could prove himself a proper soldier, and also that he was not a stuck-up ‘artist-officer’ like Solomon. Bernard liked the clarity of army field service manuals, and learned from them, so that when he was asked to take rifle inspection on parade one morning, he knew just what to do. He understood that good discipline must be consistent and authority certain. Bernard had bollocked bad workmen when he was in the theatrical world, and now his soldiers had to accept that dirty kit, lost ‘pull-throughs’ for cleaning rifles and unshaven chins would not pass muster. His need to fit in was far greater than Solomon’s. Oliver Bernard was an orphan who now found a place to belong; his autobiography, Cock Sparrow, is dedicated to the Corps of Royal Engineers.