From the early stages of the war, artists, naturalists and inventors showered the offices of the United States Navy and the British Royal Navy with largely impractical suggestions on making ships invisible: Cover them in mirrors, disguise them as giant whales, drape them in canvas to make them look like clouds.
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How to camouflage ships at sea was one of the big questions of World War I.
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“I have been a professional sailor for many years,” the confounded King reportedly said, “and I would not have believed I could have been so deceived in my estimate.” “East-southeast” came the answer from Norman Wilkinson, head of the new department. The King had served in the Royal Navy before the death of his older brother put him first in line for the throne, and he knew what he was doing. George was then asked to estimate the ship’s course, based on his observations from a periscope fixed about 10 feet away. The model was mounted on a turntable set against a seascape backdrop. The King was shown a tiny model ship, painted not standard battleship gray, but in an explosion of dissonant stripes and swoops of contrasting colors. So it was imperative that what George V was about to see worked. The Lanfranc’s sinking was outrageous, but it was by no means the only one – between March and December 1917, British ships of all kinds were blown out of the water at a rate of 23 a week, 925 ships by the end of that period. Imperial U-boats made good on that promise – on Apa U-boat torpedoed a hospital ship, the HMHS Lanfranc, in the English Channel, killing 40 people, including 18 wounded German soldiers. The next year brought fresh horror: Desperate to grind down the Allies and bring an end to this costly war, the Kaiser declared unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, 1917, promising to torpedo any ship that came within the warzone. German U-boat technology was a devastating success fully one-fifth of Britain’s merchant ships, ferrying supplies to the British Isles, had been sunk by the end of 1916. The visit came during one of the worst periods in war that had already battered British sea power. In late October 1917, King George V spent an afternoon inspecting a new division of Britain’s merchant naval service, the intriguingly named “Dazzle Section”.
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