Chicanery and Conspicuousness: Social Repercussions of World War I Ship Camouflage

The possibilities of camouflage will not have been exhausted until appearances become so deeply distrusted that people will stare wide-eyed at the reality of a thing and imagine it to be false. Effective concealment then will be in open and conspicuous display of the thing to be hidden. SHORTLY AFTER World War I, an American Impressionist artist named Everett Longley Warner prepared a slide presentation on the procedures that he and others had used in designing ship camouflage [2].Warner was an expert on the subject because he had played a prominent role in the U.S. Navy’s development of wartime camouflage. A half-century later, in 1972, nine years after Warner’s death, documents pertaining to his service (sketchbooks, correspondence and notes) were destroyed or damaged in a fire at his vacant studio. Among the items that survived were selections from his lecture slides, several fire-damaged ship models, and unpublished typewritten statements about his contributions to camouflage [3]