Camouflage (military)

The camouflage indicates any means or device tending to return less visible or to give a misleading appearance, with something or an living being.

The colors used in order to obtain a camouflaging effect are generally various alternatives of greens, khaki, chestnuts, or beiges. Sometimes the gray or the black is also used, but in any event the colors used are it with an aspect chechmate.

A camouflaging system is carried out starting from various materials and techniques, such as paintings, branches, nets coloured in textiles or printed fabrics.

History of the military camouflage

In the Military field, the camouflage is largely used to dissimulate with the sight of the enemy of the material, of the vehicles, ships or of the military personnel.

First World War

Certain German planes (Fokker) during the first world war, used a decoration made of rhombuses of various colors in order to dissimulate the planes parked on the ground of the enemy observation aircrafts. With regard to the appropriate dresses, only the British, German armies and the USA, adopted colors in different tons of khaki which made by far the soldiers less visible.

French side, some allot to work Louis Guingot the paternity of the development of this technique in the French Army. The French Army used competences of various artists: of which Andre Mare, Fernand Leger and Louis Abel-Truchet.

Second world war

The camouflage was very much used and improved during the second world war, at the time which one employed it on the behaviors and clothing worn by the troops of certain countries, the planes, tanks, as well as the warships. Each belligerent country adopted types of camouflages the purpose of which were to differentiate the friendly troops from the enemy troops.

Each season of the year allowed to use a more adequate camouflage in the ambient natural environment. For winter for example, mottled white behaviors made their appearance. For the urban combat, as during the Battle of Stalingrad, one used behaviors which revealed a brick decoration, behaviors which were used mainly by the Soviet army.

Techniques of trompe-l'oeil were used on the Atlantic Wall, of the painters drew blind windows and frontages to dissimulate Blockhaus and made them pass for residential buildings.

Currently

The modern means of detections (Infra-red vision , Radar, Acoustic detection ) made the camouflage less operative but its use remains recommended. The armies and industrialists develop in reaction with this progress of new means of camouflage such as for example, of the nets, which in addition to being multi-coloured, decrease the thermal radiation of the covered object (making it thus less visible with the means of vision in infra-red)

Principle of FOMECBLOT

FFOMECBLOT are the initial ones of: Fund, Forme, Ombre, Mouvement, Éclat, Couleur, Bruit, Lumière, Odeur and Traces. It is about average a mnemotechnics for the French-speaking soldiers in order to keep in mind fundamental camouflage.

An alternative is FORMATT for Forme, Ombre, Reflet, Mouvement, Arrière-plan, Tonalité, Traces. It is indeed advisable to break the form to make it less discernible, not to forget that the sun turns and that a shelter camouflaged the morning can be found exposed the afternoon, to take guard with the metal objects, the watch glasses and other optics and to move slowly. It is also necessary to take care of always sticking to its environment if there is displacement (of an wooded area towards fields for example), to communicate by signs and finally to erase any trace of its passage (impressed, waste…).

Optical camouflage

Laboratories of the American army develop camouflages making the carrier invisible. This camouflage allows the reflection of the light on a side of the body the other. Thus, a man located in front of a black wall will be seen with a black color. Sensors (placed on the back) emphasize the same color (on the belly). This type of camouflage is in phase of development. It is also developed for the heavy armoured tanks and other vehicles. Its effectiveness does not enable him yet to be highly reliable.

Naval camouflage

During the Second world war, warships, to protect itself from the submarines whose U-Boot, adopted a camouflage which made it possible to scramble the vision of their infrastructures. This camouflage constituted geometrical forms of gray or black colors; sometimes one redrew contours of another ship in order to better mislead the enemy observer. Thus by a Périscope it was difficult to determine about which type of vessel it was.

to see example below.

Military examples of camouflages

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