Churchill's Wizards (18 page)

Wilkinson assembled his team of naval
camoufleurs
in the Royal Academy Schools at Burlington House. The three modellers put together a series of one-foot-long, flat-bottomed models of merchant ships; then one of the five RNVR lieutenants designed a dazzle scheme which was painted on in washes by one of eleven young women with art-school training. (One of these ‘lady clerks', Eva Mackenzie, later married Wilkinson.)

The model ships could be revolved on a turntable in front of different sky backgrounds and viewed through a periscope set about ten feet away in order to judge the most distorting effects of slopes, curves and stripes. The designs all had to be different so U-boat captains could not get used to them, but their aim was always to make onlookers uncertain of the whereabouts of the bow, stern and bridge of the ship. Lines and stripes had to be carried round and over the ship, including funnels and lifeboats, so that it was deceptive from all angles. When Wilkinson was satisfied, the colour layout was copied on to a 1 foot: 1/16-inch white paper chart showing both port and starboard side of the design, and then dispatched to the port where the
real ship was lying. There, the ten dock officers, who were usually artists in RNVR uniform, supervised the painting of the stripes on to the vessel, using black, white, blue and green as the principal colours, either in primary form or mixed to various tones. When the British Mercantile Marine began jazzing up the fleet in October 1917, the young Vorticist artist Edward Alexander Wadsworth was in charge of repainting in the dockyards of Bristol and Liverpool. Heavy engineering met the avant-garde; the results are still astonishing.

Judging by the positive reports from sea-going skippers from August 1917 on, dazzle painting worked:

In October 1917 the Admiralty ordered the repainting of all merchant vessels and armed merchant ships and a number of cruisers, destroyers and minelayers on convoy duty. At the end of that same month, King George V came to visit the Dazzle Section at Burlington House, intrigued to learn how something could be camouflaged by being made more visible, not less.

Norman Wilkinson, newly promoted to commander, did his party trick in the room where they tested the designs. He invited the bearded sailor king (a noted yachtsman with various exotic tattoos from his years in the Royal Navy) to act the part of a submarine captain. The king had to look through the shielded periscope at the latest painted model ship on the turntable, and then estimate what course it was steering by placing an unpainted model at the correct position on a compass card to his right. The painted ship was heading ESE; the king reckoned it was going S by W. Incredulous, he walked round to study the little ship, and congratulated Wilkinson. ‘I have been a professional sailor for many years and I would not have believed I could have been so deceived in my estimate.'

By that time Solomon J. Solomon's new camouflage school in central London's Hyde Park, between the Bayswater Road and the eighteenth-century powder magazine, just north of the Serpentine, had been running for almost a year. It was just a few minutes' walk across Kensington Gardens from Solomon's London home and studio at Hyde Park Gate. It was doubly convenient because, as he was not being paid for military work, Solomon needed to keep painting to earn money. An increasing number of grieving families in the officer class were commissioning posthumous portraits of husbands, sons and brothers killed in the war.

The British Army School of Camouflage was run by regular Royal Engineer officers, led by Major, later Lieutenant Colonel, John P. Rhodes, but Solomon was retained as honorary technical adviser. Created to experiment with new ideas, to instruct artist-officers in techniques of concealment, and to run courses that familiarised officers and NCOs with the basic principles of camouflage, the school also placed itself well, politically. Like the experimental training-area that Solomon had wanted near Haig's GHQ in France, it became a handy and safe showplace for top brass, politicos and the press to view aspects of trench warfare, and helped to market the idea of deception and the term ‘camouflage'.

The institution gained the seal of royal approval when the King and Queen came to visit on 8 March 1917. King George V's note in his daily diary is one of the first recorded usages of the French loanword ‘camouflage' in English: ‘May&Iwent to Hyde Park close to powder magazine where we saw a demonstration of the use of camouflage in warfare (which is concealment) most interesting …'

Solomon also went to Scotland to advise on camouflage in the Firths of Forth and Tay, and to Hull after it had been bombed by zeppelins. He went up in balloons and aeroplanes to see how potential targets looked from the air and how they might be made to look like something else. As aerial bombing increased, with night and day raids by heavy aircraft like the Gotha bomber, so did the need for large-scale strategic camouflage, hiding key landmarks that enemy pilots would navigate by.

Meanwhile, France, which had a head start on Solomon and the British
camoufleurs
, was leading the way again in
défense contre
aeronefs
or airships, fitting painted covers to disguise lakes and canals
and the confluences of the rivers Seine, Marne and Oise. Paris installed arrays of smoke generators (
engins fumigènes
) to pump out a fog of obscuring cloud. This was part of anti-aircraft defences that included rings of anti-aircraft guns and hundreds of barrage balloons attached to two-kilometre-high steel cables which would damage any planes that flew into them. Spotters north-east of the capital telephoned a twelve-minute warning of enemy bombers, and wailing air-raid sirens sent hundreds of thousands of Parisians down into thousands of air-raid shelters and dozens of metro stations.

By 1918, the French were trying large-scale visual deception,
camouflage par faux-
objectifs. Giant models of the Gare de l'Est railway station, together with fake boulevards and avenues made of wood and canvas, were set up in fields north-west of the city, with strings of lights that stayed on when Paris blacked out its street lights. But the British Royal Engineers remained sceptical of these kinds of
objectifs simulés
as antidotes to air raids. When enthusiastic amateurs wrote suggesting ‘the erection of a replica of London at some little distance in the country, meanwhile covering the real London with imitation fields', the ideas were (as a witty letter to
The Times
by Colonel J. P. Rhodes pointed out) ‘received with reverence', but ‘reluctantly discarded as unsuited to this imperfect world'. However, these ideas would be picked up later in WW2.

Meanwhile, the
camoufleur
Oliver Bernard was having a different kind of war in France. Bernard stayed in the field because he was determined to show the bastards who called him ‘a cock sparrow' that a little man could prove himself a proper soldier, and also that he was not a stuck-up ‘artist-officer' like Solomon. Bernard liked the clarity of army field service manuals, and learned from them, so that when he was asked to take rifle inspection on parade one morning, he knew just what to do. He understood that good discipline must be consistent and authority certain. Bernard had bollocked bad workmen when he was in the theatrical world, and now his soldiers had to accept that dirty kit, lost ‘pull-throughs' for cleaning rifles and unshaven chins would not pass muster. His need to fit in was far greater than Solomon's. Oliver Bernard was an orphan who now found a place to belong; his autobiography,
Cock Sparrow
, is dedicated to the Corps of Royal Engineers.

Bernard's baptism of fire with Second Army in the Ypres Salient came in early May 1916 after he was appointed the erecting officer of the second, third and fourth camouflage trees at Burnt Farm, Belle Alliance and Hill Top Farm respectively. He was determined that all his OP trees would be better designed and placed than Solomon's had been, and that he would not lose face by showing fear. Bernard described his Wimereux-manufactured ‘Oh Pips' as:

The sun was setting as the
camoufleurs
cut through the springtime woods towards the canal barges at Essex Farm. There were stray shells bursting, splintering trees and blowing reeking holes in the ground. As the sky darkened, the violence became almost pretty: shrapnel shells burst orange in purple patches of smoke. Oliver Bernard noticed that his companion and reconnaissance adviser, the
camoufleur
André Mare, was sweating profusely. His own new Brodie ‘tin hat' was heavy and uncomfortable, so he complimented the Frenchman on the design of his lighter shrapnel helmet. Mare shook his head gloomily, ‘
Non, non, pas bon pour les petits
morceaux, votre chapeau est le meilleur
.' (‘No, no, no good for little bits [of shrapnel], your hat is better'.)

It took two nights' quiet work to erect that first tree. After their moment of triumph Bernard and Mare were challenged by a British sentry not in the know, and taken along trenches to a battalion HQ in a rough-hewn dugout and questioned by candlelight. Only a telephone call to heavy artillery HQ at Vlamertinghe confirmed that they were not spies. On the third night their party of forty-odd sappers and gunners carrying nearly a ton of equipment for their second tree was shelled heavily, and the guide lost his way. Bernard got very angry. After swearing blue blazes and threatening to shoot anyone who left the kit or the trench, he stormed off with a stolid lance corporal called Kearvel who claimed to know how they could get to the line of pollard willows at Belle Alliance.

The two men clambered over the parapet and stumbled eastward
into a cratered moonscape fitfully illuminated by star shells, taking turns to fall into holes. Bernard was hard of hearing but even he could not miss the machine guns chattering like magpies and the deep baying of the big guns. On he went through an old communication trench, with Kearvel behind him. The trench deepened; turning to look back in the shadowy flicker of a fading star shell, Bernard glimpsed not his lance corporal but two figures with coal-scuttle German helmets. In momentary darkness he scrambled out of the trench and lay flat behind the enemy parapet. He carried a Browning .45 Colt automatic in his officer's leather holster. Across his wrist, Bernard says, he shot the first man through his gas mask, and then his puzzled companion, who toppled sideways. The third man, an officer, took two bullets before a fresh shell blast sent Bernard jumping and stumbling back towards his own lines. He ran into Kearvel, who had located the tree site, and then they found the work party, with André Mare sitting sheltering beneath sandbags half sheared through by machine-gun bullets. Bernard says he never enjoyed a cigarette more. They moved the gear to the site, put up a protective breastwork and dug a sap for the following night, when the tree would actually be erected. Bending over a toolbox, the gallant Corporal Kearvel was shot clean through the buttock to much ribaldry from his mates.

There were worse incidents. On his first job with the First Canadian Division's heavy artillery in June 1916, Bernard stepped into the entrails of a sentry who had been blown apart while he was crawling around in no-man's-land near Maple Copse trying to find a shattered fir tree that would accommodate an OP periscope. The smell of the sentry's blood was ‘surprising'. The same month found Oliver Bernard at German House in Bois de Ploegsteert, sawing down a stout oak that Solomon had spotted months before as suitable for an ‘Oh Pip'. They dug a sap twenty feet out from the frontline trench; when they were ready to substitute their fake tree, which had to be three feet higher than the original oak in order to give them a better view, they also had to raise an entire parapet of sandbags in one night to look commensurate with it.

Oliver Bernard worked with the 1st Canadian Division until October, often in company with Major Norton, DSO, a tall Survey Officer, Royal Artillery (SORA). Bernard thought of them as ‘the big and little wizards' of the Ypres Salient, crawling on reconnaissance
missions, helping to erect snipers' hides, periscopes, and fake tree observation posts in sites from Boesinghe to Arras.

On 4 July 1916, the fourth day of the Battle of the Somme further south, Bernard made his first examination of the remains of a shattered windmill, Verbranden Molen, near Krustaat, which had a vertical oak beam sticking up like a fingerpost from its rubble of ruins. Bernard had discovered that the Ross company of London (who made the best spyglasses for the Lovat Scouts) also manufactured excellent periscopes ten feet six inches long. He reckoned that if they could dig a concealed observer's cabin under the mill, sink a further eight-foot well down which they could lower the periscope for lens cleaning, then hide a couple of periscopes in the upright beam, they could establish a panoramic view of the German batteries hidden behind Wijtschate (or ‘Whitesheet') hill.