The Weirdest Camouflage Devices Ever Built Explained

From a fake suburb of houses, cars and feather trees built on chicken wire above the Lockheed plant at Burbank, to a fighting vehicle whose armour plates display the thermal image of the landscape around it. Between them sit painted ships meant to break a rangefinder and canisters of calcium hydride that left a false submarine hanging in the water. This military-history documentary examines twelve camouflage and deception devices—from dazzle patterns first applied to the SS Industry in May 1917 to the BAE Systems Adaptiv panels unveiled in 2011. We cover dazzle painting and the coincidence rangefinder, the painted and boarded Kremlin of 1941, the false neighbourhood over the Lockheed plant at Burbank, the Starfish decoy fire sites, diffused lighting trials on Canadian corvettes, Yehudi lights on the Grumman TBM-3D Avenger, the German Bold bubble target, the dummy landing craft moored at Dover, the Rupert paratrooper dummies of Operation Titanic, the foil clouds of Operations Taxable and Glimmer, the Ghost Army of the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops, and the Adaptiv thermal hull on a Combat Vehicle 90. Some of these attacked the instrument rather than the eye: dazzle aimed at the rangefinder, chaff at coastal radar, Adaptiv at thermal sights. Others worked on brightness alone, and diffused lighting and Yehudi both produced real measured results before radar made the lookout's eye irrelevant. A third group bought time rather than invisibility—Bold, the Ruperts and the Starfish fires each lasted only as long as a decision took. None of them hid an object; all of them moved the threshold at which an observer commits. Which mattered more in the end, the schemes that fooled a human observer or the ones that fooled a machine? #MilitaryHistory #Camouflage #Deception