Headquarters for the development of U.S. camouflage is a group of neat, air-conditioned buildings in a pine forest at Fort Belvoir, Va. There experts train camouflage officers who are attached to practically every unit in the U.S. armed forces. Fort Belvoir picks its prospective camoufleurs from officer personnel, rates horse sense and a high I.Q. higher than previous training in art or even engineering. Continually besieged by well-meaning civilians who think they can contribute invaluable ideas or specialized backgrounds to army camouflage work, Fort Belvoir's officers have developed a healthy skepticism, finding that most people have many more misconceptions than good ideas about camouflage.
Said one officer last week: "There must be something intriguing about the word camouflage. We have at least 200 times as many applicants as we have jobs to offer in the military service. These include everything from famous portrait painters and sculptors to sign painters and advertising specialists. It only gums up the works and causes a serious loss of time. There is no room for the esthetic color expert, or for any man who can't march 20 miles a day carrying a full pack, in the military camouflage unit."
Concealment v. Confusion. World War I's camouflage was chiefly front-line camouflage, designed to fool ground observation or relatively slow-moving aerial observers, and so aimed primarily at total concealment wherein an objective such as a battery of 75-mm. artillery would melt so unobtrusively into its surroundings that the enemy would be unable to notice it. In this respect front-line camouflage has scarcely changed at all. But the coming of the bomber plane has started something new in rear areas. To meet that danger the modern camoufleur has to think of the necessity not of complete concealment, but of blurring a huge target from the eyes of a modern bomber who must actually see what he hits. The problem is not so impossible of solution as it appeared at first sight.
So, instead of erasing the lines of his bomb-threatened factory in a hazy chiaroscuro of paint and props, today's camoufleur makes it look like something else (an innocent farmhouse or a block of houses). He hopes to disguise all nearby landmarks, to give the surrounding terrain an unexpected look. If his elaborate system of obfuscation causes the enemy bombardier to hesitate in the single fleeting moment when accurate aim is possible at 20,000 ft. and 400 miles per hour, the bomber may have to return amid antiaircraft fire for a second try or else go home with no hits to report.
Tricky Decoration. The principles of camouflage have often been traced, by theorists, back to protective coloration by which nature conceals animals. But much of today's camouflage finds a more apt ancestry in the Renaissance art of trompe l'oeil ("fool the eye") with which tricky 16th-Century artists painted in nonexistent bookcases, windows, benches and tables so naturally that they looked like the real thing. Since modern rear-area camouflage produces many of its disguises with dummy structures and elaborately built alterations rather than with paint, camouflage has become as much the province of engineers as of artists.