The Mail (Adelaide, SA : 1912 - 1954)(about) |
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Saturday 9 August 1941
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To Deceive the Enemts Pr ying Eye
&H. WL Q. macTlalliL. +
T ONCE saw, at Mount Lofty, a quail-thrush alight in a patch of dry bracken X. and leaves. I saw the spot it landed, and stood for some time trying to locate the bird. After a time, a slight movement betrayed its presence. There it was, blended into the color of the leaves in a most remarkable way.
This is the sort of deception we have to prac tise in war nowadays. Although at present we are far from the conflict and our city, suburbs, and countryside, clad in their mantle of blos soms and color, look unsullied and virgin like, there yet may come a day when an enemy may blast us with bombs and shoot us from the air with guns. If they ever do, we must endeavor to protect ourselves by emulating the method of the quail thrust and adopting a camouflage to conceal us from the eyes of the enemy. A company of men has been told off to attend to all this. Its members are well up to their job, one of them having been % quail-thrash expert in the last war, with some extraordinary achievements to his credit. What these healthy and sane surrealists are doing, and have done, is truly wonderful. In Britain, hundreds of thousands of lives and mil lions of pounds' worth of property have been saved by their efforts. One marvellous effort was the transfiguration
of a 6.000-ton slag dump into the representation of a factory. It was near a military objective of great value, and the thousands of incendiaries and bombs that were showered on the slag heap would have pulverised a big city. After every assault it was dressed up again as before. This Is camouflage of the best kind. The Hun started off with a great lead in camouflage,- but. as in the air, we have caught up and passed them with the aid of our artists, architects, schoolmasters, picture restorers, paint manufacturers, film, directors, sculptors, fanners, dress designers, and magicians. (One can imagine how the magician revelled in his job.) The camera is their greatest enemy, for every activity from the development of a big gun to a party cuts its personal signature on /the land scape for the enemy trained to decipher it. The importance of all this is being passed on to the soldier, who Ls taught that by the simplest precautions he can provide himself a great deal of safety. A few twigs round a tin hat may
seem a small thing, but there is nothing too small or too massive for the attention of these men appointed by the Government to look after our safety. When bullets whistle and «fctombs crash, then these silly looking stripes and splodges come into their own and are blessed by those at the receiving end. It is amazing how a small thing becomes a harbor of refuge at a lime like this. A friend once told me that at the Gallipoli landing he saw a small twig standing up in the sand and crawled toward it for the vague comfort of having it between him and the bullets. Gen. Allenby, in his Palestinian campaign, made use of dummy mules, and I understand that dummy tanks and aeroplanes have become quite fashionable in the European conflict in the past few months. I firmly believe the well-worn story of the dummy Hun aerodrome which an R.A.F. machine bombarded with a wooden bomb, but I positively refuse to credit the story of the Germans building a dummy city of Berlin. I know the Hun is deficient in a sense of humor and perspective, but surely never as bad as this.