020. “Camouflaged! How the Erstwhile Merchant Fleet Looks in War Paint,” by Louis Biedermann, 1918.

Transcription: Oh, what a tangled web we weave. When first we practice to deceive --especially when the web is woven of shuttling ships, and the destined victim of the deception is some U bost skipper squinting through a hastily protruded periscope and vainly trying to get the range of a moving target from which most of the horizontal and vertical bearing points have been climinated, while whorls, saw-teeth and triangles of black, white, gray, blue, green and pink blend dizzily into the shifting wave outlines of the seascape. We are well past the practice stage, though, and there are days when the results of ship camouflage turn New York Harbor, for instance, into a floating nightmare. For the benefit of the hundreds of thousands of other readers who never see the water-front, Mr. Biedermann has indicated here the general effect of the motley rout, though purposely avoiding any approach to a portrait of any actual ship.https://scholarworks.uni.edu/camouflage_cartoons/1019/thumbnail.jp