Well There‘s Your Problem - Bonus Episode 41 PREVIEW: Camouflage

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

tactical guacamole full episode on PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/posts/camo-bonus-105879976

But you see the basic idea here, this is an early implementation of something called lozenge camouflage. And again, it's quite vorticesque, it's quite cubist, and the deal is you have a bunch of differently coloured blocks, which are separated by thick black lines, and it does break up a shape. Like, we're getting to the basics here, we're getting to disruption, we're getting to countershading as well. ALICE We're getting to the basics here, we're getting to disruption, we're getting to countershading as well. ALICE We're getting to what we know today.

ALICE Yes. I mean, the principles haven't really changed. Next slide please. SEAN I love these. ALICE Yeah, so you can see that this disseminates throughout, it disseminates outwards and downwards, from specialists trying to do this stuff for special cases, out to more generalized stuff, and like, from July 1918, this is when the German military were being ordered to paint helmets in this kind of lozenge camouflage. You just pick some kind of neutral colors, and you do like blocks, blotches, separated by lines. And you have a mix of light and dark colors, and it breaks up your silhouette and that

becomes standard, it's still something you individually have to do by hand, but it's sort of like standard procedure, certainly. STORM He's always reminded me of like tortoise shells or turtle shells. ALICE Yeah! STORM Getting denied entry into the turtle club in my in my German helmet. Am I not totally enough for the turtle club? This is reminding me.

You know what this is reminding me of is the regulations surrounding building five of our ones in most of America. You got to make them blocky. You got to break up the box. You got to use a bunch of materials. They're just doing old timey camouflage. So you don't notice there's a huge building there. ALICE Absolutely. Absolutely.

To be fair, the Germans started doing this from July of 1918, so you can kind of tell how much that helped them, given that the war ended in November. JUSTIN Yeah, a little late to the bust on that one, I think. ALICE I mean, this is the thing, like, think. This is the thing, so much of European history, particularly leading up to the Second World War, can be understood by the last few months of the First. This is when they really invent, like, Houthi tactics that are gonna be the basis of a lot of subsequent maneuver warfare, but also it's where you have a bunch of disgruntled soon-to-become

fascists, it's not for nothing. That one of the- Yeah, most of World War I doesn't look very much like World War II, except for those last few months when you really get the preview of what World War II is going to look like. It's also really weird when you look at war memorials and stuff and you see people who got killed two months ago of the war, and you're like, oh, this is someone who potentially survived years and years of trench warfare and was very very adapted to that, and then the second it turns into maneuver warfare someone shoots his head

off. And it's, again, all of this has a political resonance. RIght. JUSTIN It's only three days from retirement. ALICE Yeah. Mendozaaaaaaaak! ALICE. Also, in particular, I mentioned Hurtio tactics, I mentioned, like, the guys who did those things, the guys who did the kind of raids, like trench raids and maneuver warfare and stuff, were called stormtroopers.

Like stormers in assault. It's not for nothing that an early fascist, like, Freikorps was called the Stahlhelm, the steel helmet. In Italy, all of these guys were, like, on the same basis that, like Freikorps, was called the Stahlhelm, the steel helmet. In Italy all of these guys were on the same basis that if you weren't in these kinds of units, you didn't fight. It was fully a belief amongst these people that they were the only ones who had had a war, and then that leads obviously to the kind of myths of betrayal and all of this. STAFF in the back, and then leading to, of course, as it always does, to rampant anti-Semitism.

Yeah. So, like, all of this stuff has a strong political valence, and yeah, camouflage is a part of that. If we go to the next slide, I'll talk about the fun stuff, though. Which is... Oh, hell yeah. Boat. Love this shit.

Boat. I could have put in about a million slides of this, and I'm kind of regretting that I didn't. So the problem with ships, right, is that they're very difficult to hide completely. Particularly because at this point, you know, you have smokestacks, you have boilers, they're giving off a shitload of smoke that's visible from over the horizon, and also it's a big object. ALICE It's very large. ALICE It's like, these things are not easy to hide, and at a certain point you have the idea, why hide it, right?

Like, what you should do instead is make it difficult to shoot at, to obtain a firing solution, because you have to, whether it's with guns or with torpedoes, you need to, like, you need a sort of early mechanical computer to be able to calculate, like, the thing is this far away, moving in this direction at this speed, where do you aim to hit the fucking thing. And so if you can mislead your enemy as to what speed the ship is going at, what direction it's facing in, all the better. And that leads you to this invention of dazzle camouflage, of which this is a beautiful example. Um,

S1 0530 And this is what so much of modern warfare is, is really just being, is about buying that little bit of extra time so you can shoot first or make the guy miss his first shot. Whether it's a guy shooting at a guy or a ship shooting at a ship or a plane shooting a plane. It's about getting that little bit of extra time to basically get one off before him, or make his shot miss. ALICE Yeah. And this is a British invention that was then very quickly adopted by the US as well, and it's a fantastic time for artists because you want to make each ship unique if you can,

you have this huge canvas, and you were just saying to an artist, fucking, do some weird shit to this. ALICE Yeah, do some weird shit to this, yeah. ZACH Yeah, get real weird with it, just get some real crazy. There's some great pictures of known murderous ships, the RMS Olympic in dazzle camouflage. They had Celeste's ill-fated sister. Like, they did this not only to warships, but they did it to transport ships, they were carrying people and supplies across the ocean as well, they did it to a lot of shit. ALICE Yeah, and this is like explicitly founded

on the basis of like, fucking animals camouflage themselves, ships should do likewise. And it's sort of successful. I mean, if nothing else, it's impactful. Right? And... Yeah, it sticks with us that we're talking about it in a podcast like 110 years later. Yes. It reminds me of the, you know that art book that was released for Joe Doroszki's version

of Dune? Oh yeah? Yeah, like that's some of the same coloring. ALICE Also, both in the First World War and in the Second, this is largely work that's done by women. The history of this mostly talks about men, and a lot of the scale modelling and testing and stuff was done by women. This is, again, because it's stuff that, for the most part, is a kind of marginalized activity.

It's almost embarrassing to your career navy officer, because it's not quite cricket, you know? To be painting your ship in various gay colors. "- You're painting the side of my ship, it's just not on. You have to have Jay be able to see it, otherwise it's just not sporting, now. It would be a tragedy if there was homosexuality in the navy. I'm only just now hearing about this need-timed process. Speaking of homosexuality, may I have the next slide please?

SEAN Pink! ALICE Yeah. I put on a few examples of pink here, just because I was in a mood for it. So yeah, as much as it's become important to hide stuff from aircraft, it's like, aircraft are not really hiding from the ground or from each other during the First World War for a long time. Even when they're told to. Because again, this individual prestige thing, the stuff that leads you to the gold helmets

back in the day, leads pilots to this kind of Knights of the Sky stuff. RILEY It's like, how many of these guys started out as cavalry officers and how many of them were Ristos? JUSTIN Absolutely. And come on guys, I'm the Red Baron. It's supposed to be red. ALICE Yeah, and like, a lot of these guys get fucking killed on that basis.

But like, for instance, you can see this German plane here, the orders are, paint it with this blotchy lozenge camouflage, and clearly what they've done is gone, okay, cool, nothing about painting the rest of it in any particular color, so I'm gonna do it in pink, then. In bright pink. So much of it is like, recognizing individual pilots through individual or squadron liveries, and it's something that only really changes at the very end of the war, and then afterwards. Because pilots are gay.

And I say this, surprisingly. You know, thinking about how in Blackadder we never actually saw Lord Flashheart's plane, imagining him flying around the pink plane, just like, yeah, my plane's pink, not because I'm a poof, because it attracts the birds! Woof! ALICE & LIAM LAUGH If we go to the next slide, I have an example of the kind of interwar thing. JUSTIN Oh, this is sick. ALICE This is... it's one of my favorite colors.

This is Nevo. Night Invisible Varnish Orphaness. Because it was invented in... JUSTIN It's a acronym too. ALICE In Or in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in... in...

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ALICE Yeah. And they tried this interwar, I included it as a detail just that, like, eventually they finally subdued the kind of rampant homosexuality of fighter pilots. And made them... BOO. Bring it back. That's what I'm returned about.

Make the fighter pilots more gay again. Get this focus on the family shit in the US Air Force. Get this shit back. They made them paint their shit normal colors. This didn't end up sticking around, it wasn't particularly effective as far as anyone could tell, and by the Second World War generally you're painting planes in a much more land camouflage kind of look. But...

RILEY You know, it's interesting, the only way they could get rid of the homosexuality was by making every single United States Air Force pilot just an insane evangelical.