[Note: article text is the same as for The How and Why of Camouflage (Aviation Week; 1942-10-01)]
Two hours' flight from our West Coast, dawn is breaking over the ocean's rim. On the aircraft carrier that flies the flag of the Rising Sun, the flight commander is giving final instructions as the ship maneuvers into the wind.
"On the west side of Greenhill, look for two Greek Theatres in the center of a large recreation park. Bomb anywhere in the recreation park, but particularly those Greek Theatres. To your places!"
And that's how much good it would do to camouflage one target with another just as visible. Just one reconnaissance flight in search of the Greenhill Chemical Corporation – granted that the enemy knows its general location – would reveal the incongruous arrangement of Greek Theatres and tennis courts that disguised respectively the huge, vital storage tanks, and the more spread-out manufacturing plant, distillery, etc.
I have used an exaggerated example, perhaps, but it is indicative of some of the rationale that must lie behind every single camouflage job which has been, or now is, quietly under way in America.
To call camouflage a science may be correct. But it is more than science – it is an art, with a definite technique. It may properly be called the architecture of concealment. It is decidedly a tailor made job – custom-built to the last detail.
During the thirteen months since Pearl Harbor, a small handful of artists and engineers have been spending their days and most of their nights devising effective means of concealing West Coast defense plants from the eyes of the enemy.
As a member of this group, I have seen professional interest in camouflage grow from the stage of scattered individual effort by a single designer here and there, to a group effort; thence, to a series of organized camouflaging units. It was a rapid transition – but no more rapid than the gathering hunger for knowledge displayed by industry at large toward this architecture of concealment.
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