Camouflage hides or disguises the appearance of troops, weapons, ships, airplanes, equipment, or structures. The military art has long emphasized deception, but although warriors and soldiers in some situations, such as ambushes, tried to conceal themselves, forces marshaled for battle in ages past put little premium on blending into the surroundings. A general who wished to keep the presence of units from the enemy could simply put them out of sight behind some convenient topographical feature. By and large, camouflage is a modern phenomenon, for it took a number of advances in military technology to make it essential.
In the age of black powder, weapons produced such obvious clouds of smoke that there was little hope of disguising them after they came into play. In addition, officers more concerned with seeing and controlling their men than with hiding them emphasized colorful uniforms rather than ones that would help a soldier disappear into the background. Moreover, weapons were not lethal enough to prohibit units from standing in the open (see
Uniforms and Military Dress).
A number of factors radically altered this situation. The introduction of small-bore repeating rifles, machine guns, and rapid-fire artillery toward the end of the nineteenth century increased the rate, range, and accuracy of fire. Its increased lethality made cover and concealment in battle more valuable while the advent of smokeless powder made it possible. Battle dress came to hide rather than advertise a soldier's presence. The British donned khaki uniforms for colonial campaigns in the 1880s and for home service as well in 1902. The Germans went to field gray in 1910, whereas the French changed later, replacing their blue and red uniforms for horizon blue only after
World War I began. This trend for more camouflaged clothing led to the mottled utilities worn today.
World War I greatly increased these impulses toward the use of camouflage. By then concealment of land forces required an added dimension—hiding them from aerial observation. Nets woven with various patterns of colored cloth cloaked gun positions, storage facilities, and so on. On the front line, armies showed considerable ingenuity. Modern artists served their countries by devising camouflage schemes; the French called upon cubist painters, while the Germans made use of the expressionist Franz Marc, among others. In
World War II, belligerents put a great deal of effort not only into hiding what was actually there, but also in displaying dummy equipment to make the enemy believe that something was there that was not. On the home front, the threat of aerial bombardment also caused authorities to camouflage civilian targets, such as oil storage tanks and factories. One U.S. aircraft factory in California disappeared under an artificial town built on its roofs.
At sea, camouflage had little purpose when ships stood at only a cable's length to blast away at each other, but the growing range and power of naval guns and the use of fast, long-range torpedoes available by the close of the nineteenth century changed this situation. By the 1890s the French and Germans painted their warships gray, and in 1903 the British followed suit. The German use of submarines in World War I further increased the need for camouflage. A number of naval advisers and artists argued that ships could not literally be hidden but that patterns painted on them could confuse an enemy as to the type, size, and direction of a vessel. After much debate, the British adopted "dazzle painting" in garish colors and shapes. After the war, the U.S. and British navies abandoned camouflage, but they returned to deceptive color schemes again in World War II. Some, like the dazzle painting of World War I, broke up the shape of the vessel; some attempted to make ships less visible against the horizon; and some were meant to make a ship appear to be of another class or type.
With limited exceptions, warplanes made little use of camouflage in World War I, but after that conflict, studies demonstrated the value of using light gray or blue on the bottom surfaces of an aircraft to make it less visible from the ground, and varying earth tones or sea tones on the upper surfaces to allow it to blend in when seen from above. Simple black best cloaked an airplane at night. Although radar has diminished the importance of aircraft camouflage, it is still employed. Of course, in a sense, certain high-tech countermeasures provide a kind of electronic camouflage by confusing and distracting enemy radar or infrared sensors, or, in the case of stealth technology, so reducing an aircraft's visibility to radar that it cannot be spotted at all.
Many of the visual camouflage practices of the World War II era retain their relevance today, but modern imaging technology pierces the darkness of night and also requires that soldiers be aware of the heat signatures of their vehicles, which stand out vividly in infrared scopes. Camouflage must now be even more than meets the eye.
John A. Lynn
Guy Hartcup, Camouflage: A History of Concealment and Deception in War (1980).
