Bonus Episode 41 PREVIEW: Camouflage

But you see the basic idea here.

This is an early implementation of something called lozenge camouflage.

And again, it's quite vorticist, it's quite cubist.

And the deal is you have a bunch of differently colored blocks, which are separated by like thick black lines.

And I mean, it does break up a shape.

Like, we're getting to the basics here.

We're getting to like disruption.

We're getting to counter shading as well.

We're getting to what we know today.

Yes.

I mean, the principles haven't really changed.

Next slide, please.

I love these.

Yeah.

So you can see that this disseminates throughout.

It disseminates outwards and downwards from specialists trying to

do this stuff for special cases out to more generalized stuff.

From July 1918, this is when the German military were being ordered to paint helmets in this kind of lozenge camouflage.

You just pick some like kind of neutral colors and you do like blocks uh blotches separated by by lines um and you have a mix of light and dark colors and it breaks up your silhouette and that becomes standard it's still something you individually have to do by hand but it's it's sort of like standard procedure certainly um these these always remind me of like tortoise shells or turtle shells yeah getting denied entry into the turtle club in my in my german helmet am i not turtly enough for the turtle club this is reminding me you know what this is reminding me of is uh the uh regulations uh surrounding building five of her ones in most of america you got to make them blocky you got to break up the box you got to use a bunch of materials they're just doing old-timey camouflage so you don't notice there's a huge building there absolutely absolutely um

to be fair the germans started doing this from july of 1918 so you can kind of tell how much that helped them given that the war ended in November.

Yeah, a little late to the bus on that one, I think.

I mean, this is the thing, though, like, so much of the, like, so much of European history, particularly of leading up to the Second World War, can be understood by the last few months of the first.

Like, this is when they really invent Hootia tactics that are going to be the basis of a lot of like subsequent maneuver warfare.

But also, it's where you have a bunch of like disgruntled, soon-to-become fascists.

It's not for nothing.

Yeah, like most, most of World War I

doesn't look very much like World War II, except for those last few months when you really get the preview of what World War II is going to look like.

It's also really weird when you look at like

war memorials and stuff, and you see people who got killed with like two months left to go of the war, and you're like, oh, this is someone who potentially survived years and years of trench warfare and was very, very adapted to that.

And then the second it turns into maneuver warfare, someone like shoots his head off.

And it's again, it's all of this has a political resonance.

Right.

Three days from retirement.

Also, in particular, like I mentioned Jutia tactics.

I mentioned

the guys who did those things, the guys who did the kind of raids, like trench raids and maneuver warfare and stuff,

were called stormtroopers, like stormers in assault.

It's not for nothing that an early like fascist Freikorp was called the Stahlhelm, the steel helmet.

In Italy, all of these guys were like on the same basis that if you weren't in these kinds of units, you didn't fight.

Like it was fully a belief amongst these people that like that they were the only ones who had like had a war.

And then that leads obviously to the kind of like betrayal and like myths of betrayal and all of that.

Stab in the back and then leading to course to as it always does to rampant anti-Semitism.

Yeah.

So like all of this stuff has a like a strong political valence and yeah, camouflage is a part of that.

If we go to the next slide, we had to talk about the fun stuff though, which is

boats.

the shit boat i could have i could have put in about a million slides of this and i'm kind of regretting that i didn't um so the problem with with ships right is that they're very difficult to hide completely um particularly because at this point you know you have like smokestacks you have like boilers they're giving off a shitload of smoke that's visible from over the horizon and also it's it's a big object it's very large um it's like these things are not easy to hide and at a certain point,

you have the idea,

why hide it, right?

Like,

what you should do instead is make it difficult to shoot at, to obtain a firing solution.

Because you have to, like, whether it's with guns or with torpedoes, you need to, like, you need a sort of early mechanical computer to be able to calculate, like, the thing is this far away moving in this direction at this speed.

Where do you aim to hit the fucking thing?

And so, if you can mislead your enemy as to what speed the the ship is going at, what direction it's facing in, all the better.

And that leads you to this invention of dazzle camouflage, of which this is a beautiful example.

And this is what so much of modern warfare is, is really just being, it is about buying that little bit of extra time so you can shoot first or make the guy miss his first shot, whether it's a guy shooting at a guy or a ship shooting at a ship or a plane shooting a plane.

It's about getting that little bit of extra time to basically get one off before him or make his shot miss.

Yeah.

And this is this is a British invention that was then like very, uh, very quickly adopted by the US as well.

And it's a fantastic time for artists because you want to make each ship unique if you can.

You have this huge canvas, and you were just saying to an artist, fucking do some weird shit.

Do some weird shit to this.

Yeah.

Get real weird with it.

Just get some real crazy.

There's some great pictures of

known murderous ship, the RMS Olympic in dazzle camouflage.

Less ill-fated sister.

Like they did this not only to warships, but they did it to transport ships that were carrying people and supplies across the ocean as well.

They did it to a lot of shit.

Yeah.

And this is like explicitly founded on the basis of like

fucking animals camouflage themselves.

Ships should do likewise.

And it's...

Sort of successful.

I mean,

if nothing else, it's impactful, right?

And it sticks with us that we're talking about it in a podcast like 110 years later.

Yes.

It reminds me of the, you know,

the art book that was released for Joe Durowski's version of Dune?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it got some of the same coloring.

Also, both in the First World War and in the second, this is largely work that's done by women.

Like the history of this mostly talks about like men and a lot of the like scale modeling and testing and stuff was done by women.

This is like, again, because it's stuff that like

for the most part is a kind of like, you know, marginalized activity.

It's like, it's, it's almost embarrassing to your career Navy officer because, you know, it's not like, it's not quite cricket, you know, to be

to be painting your ship in like various gay colors.

You'd have to be painting the side of my ship.

It's just not on.

It's just not on.

You have to have Jay be able to see it.

Otherwise, this is not sporting now.

I I mean,

it would be a tragedy if there was homosexuality in the Navy.

I'm only just now hearing about this need time process.

Speaking of homosexuality, may I have the next slide, please?

Pink.

Yeah.

I put in a few examples of pink here just because I was in a mood for it.

So, yeah, as much as it's become important to hide stuff from aircraft, it's like aircraft are not really hiding from the ground or from each other during the First World War for a long time, uh, even when they're told to.

Like, because again, this like individual prestige thing, the stuff that you know leads you to the gold helmets back in the day, leads pilots to this kind of knights of the sky stuff.

Um, well, it's like so how many of these guys start out as cavalry officers, and how many of them were Aristos?

Absolutely, and come on, guys, I'm the red baron, supposed to be red, yeah, yeah, and like a lot of these guys get fucking killed on that basis.

But like, for instance, you can see this German plane here.

You know, the orders are paint it with this like, you know, sort of blotchy lozenge camouflage.

And clearly, what they've done is gone, okay, cool.

Nothing about painting the rest of it in any particular color.

So I'm going to do it in pink then, in like bright pink.

And

so so much of it is like recognizing individual pilots through individual or squadron liveries.

And it's something that

only really changes at the very end of the war and then afterwards.

Because pilots are gay.

And I say this approvingly.

You know, I'm thinking about how in Black Adder, we never actually saw Lord Flashheart's plane.

Imagining him flying around the pink planes.

It's like, yeah, yeah, my plane's pink, not because I'm a puff, but because it attracts the birds.

Woof.

If we go to the next slide, I have an example of the kind of

interwar thing um oh this is sick this is this is it's one of my favorite colors um this is this is nevo night invisible varnish awfulness um because it was invented

in in awfulness um so the the the idea is that like if you're trying to fly a plane at night and hide it at night black isn't the most effective because it's like um you know it's too dark you can still see it um

and so the idea is that you have this kind of grayish kind of moonlit color um and that's like a very very very dark green almost yeah yeah it does that's what my eyes read it as at first too but now when i look at it harder i i see what november means it kind of it's already tricking the eye yeah and they tried this interwar um i included as a detail just that like eventually they finally subdued the kind of like uh rampant homosexuality of fighter pilots

and and made Bring it back.

That's what I'm return about.

Make the fighter pilots more gay again.

Don't just focus on the family shit in the U.S.

Air Force.

Get this shit back.

They made them paint their shit normal colors.

This didn't end up like sticking around.

It wasn't particularly effective as far as anyone could tell.

And by the Second World War, generally, you're painting planes in like...

a much more like kind of land camouflage kind of look.

But you know, it's interesting the only way they could get rid of the homosexuality was by making every single United States Air Force pilot just an insane evangelical.

Yeah.

Next slide, please.