CAMOUFLAGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1940, Page 6

CAMOUFLAGE

COLOUR’S 810 PART IN AVAR AMERICAN OPINION. BATTLESHIP GREY EFFECTIVE. A dull soot-grey covers Allied ships as they go up and down the seas these days. To the naked eye it seems to be a fairly effective camouflage, but Frederick H. Rahr says no, not at all. Mr Rahr is one of the half-dozen men in the United States who make their livings (very good ones) as colour experts, and his eyes haven’t been naked since he left Harvard ten years ago.

"To make a ship disappear quickly into distance,” says Mr Rahr, “there is no improvement on battleship grey. The colour now being used on the ships of warring nations here would be effective only in the half-light before dawn and after sunset. Zig-zag lines are still the best for breaking up forms so that one can't tell from a distance which way the ships are going. Work is now being done on spot pattern effects which tend to obliterate the surface of an object, such as a ship, aeroplane or tank, when the object nears you. At a distance, of course, the spots of colour are not far enough apart, to the eye, to confuse the eye, so that surfacebreaking effect is lost.” Incidentally, those spot pattern effects were utilised first by Joseph Urban when designing a backdrop for an old Ziegfeld Follies. He wanted blue, and he wanted the blue backdrop to seem to go on for ever into the distance. Military experts have leaped on his discoveries, and have put them to war use.

To get an idea of what tricks colour can play on your judgment of distance, take a green card and a red card, and put them on the floor side by side. The red will always seem nearer to you, the green farther away. “The French.” says Mr Rahr, "have a patent now on a series'of transparent paints applied in coats, which, it is said, will give an object the colour of the light that strikes it. Smokestacks against the sky will have the colour of sky, and the hull of a ship will have the colour of water —that is. if the patent works. From what I hear, our Navy Department, which is as expert in camouflage as any in the world, has plenty of doubts. FOOLING AVIATORS. “The problem of concealing ground objects from aviators is now very well solved. One simply paints them into the ground, and they become invisible from the air. The shadows cast by the object remain a give-away, however. You may have seen the photographs in the newspapers of wire mesh near gun emplacements with Germans tossing branches across the mesh. This breaks up the shadow patterns or conceals them, entirely, and leave the aviator helpless. "Colour is being used to conceal arms plants in Germany from the air. Army uniforms are now universally in a neutral colour that acquires the tone of the earth in which the soldier burrows, whether that earth be white, grey or brown, and, of course, that is the case of the Yugoslav architect, Alfonso Laurent Cik, who, during the Spanish war. drew designs on cell walls calculated to torment prisoners into confessing.

“Tough stuff, this war, terrible, tough stuff without any sense to it. Here’s a little thing. I work a great deal with the asphalt business, particularly on roofing shingles, and I’ve seen a lot of roofing material made. It's made of old clothes, you know, all kinds of old clothes. I’ve seen millions of old German war uniforms go into tiro process, and the product go out all over the world. I've seen German uniforms. French uniforms, English, Japanese. American and Italian, all go into the same batch and come out as roofing material —united at last. Some of Ilia I might very well be on Bolish roofs right now." COLOUR IN GAMES. You may remember Mi' Rahr as the fellow who wants all baseballs to be coloured yellow. He thinks strokes can be taken off any golfer's score by having a ball painted some colour besides while. “A white ball on a putting green is a terrific handicap because you can't see the edges." But ho doesn't know yet what the proper colour should be. He is also trying to work out a two-way football uniform, the roar half of which would be coloured to inspire team-mates, and the front half coloured to depress opponents.

He points out that doctors generally recognise the clinical effects of colour. Maternity wards are now being painted a warm yellow. “Yellow." he says, "is a heartening colour. It gives you ideas and makes you want to talk. The blues, on the oilier hand, are rather depressing. They're used by doctors Io reduce strong excitements. The reds are very stimulating colours.