From The English Love Affair with Nature. 3.15: War
Another intensely involved naturalist was Hugh Cott. He is one of those people you really wouldn’t expect to be a trend-setter or national hero of any kind. He was an academic with spectacles and a cat, and specialised in a branch of evolutionary zoology. It doesn’t sound very promising; but the branch was animal coloration, which in a nation at war meant the same thing as Peter Scott’s natural history: camouflage. It was a hot topic, with the public as with the military authorities: nobody wanted a bomb to fall on their own house. The war began with all kinds of amateurish attempts at camouflage painting, with – as Cott loudly protested – no thought given to how paint schemes would actually work when seen from the air.
Cott started out in life conventionally enough: public school at Rugby; Royal Military College, Sandhurst; Leicestershire Regiment. After the war he did a Zoology degree, and had the good fortune to go on expeditions to the Amazon, the Zambezi River and Lanzarote, where he became fascinated by animal coloration, both as a zoologist and as an artist. David Rothenberg describes one of Cott’s graphic works like this:
Hugh Cott’s marvelous engraving of a potoo hidden in a black and white Costa Rican forest, frozen vertically like the tree trunk on which it hides. In nature the visible and invisible dance back and forth with each other, depending on how much we have learned to see.
Perhaps only a professor of philosophy and music, a jazz musician free enough to play duets with cicadas and laughingthrushes, could have described a zoology illustration in such a way.
Back in Britain, Cott took a doctorate at Glasgow under the animal camouflage expert John Graham Kerr. In the First World War, Kerr had tried to persuade a reluctant Admiralty to apply the principles of animal camouflage to ships, with Winston Churchill’s support. But the Admiralty was not used to being lectured by terrestrial zoologists, and Kerr was eventually replaced by a marine artist with less baggage, Norman Wilkinson. He had hundreds of ships painted in complicated ‘razzle-dazzle’ camouflage patterns, all different to avoid helping the enemy to recognise any class of ship by its pattern. A typical dazzle pattern might be zebra-striped vertically at one end, horizontally striped in the middle and diagonally striped at the other end, in the hope of making it hard for a submarine commander to work out which way the ship was headed and at what speed. It is unclear whether the approach helped, as the dazzle patterns, tactics, speeds and sizes of ships all varied. It would have been a hopeless experimental design, if scientific understanding rather than survival had been the objective. A furious row broke out after the war: Kerr argued to no avail that the credit for dazzle should have been his, not Wilkinson’s.
But Kerr was nothing if not persistent. He believed that camouflage could save lives, and having had little success himself in one war, he was keen for his protégé Cott to do better in the next. Cott managed to get on to the Camouflage Advisory Committee in 1939, but the old Wilkinson/Kerr arguments broke out again, and Cott found himself, like Kerr before him, on the outside, complaining in Nature about how poorly camouflage was being done. That article gained him one last chance: to camouflage a pair of large rail-mounted guns. Cott painted one gun in conventional splotches of colour, and the other he carefully countershaded, painting the top of the barrel darker and the underside lighter to hide its self-shadowing; and he disrupted its outline with splashes of contrasting colour. Then he had the pair of guns photographed from the air. His countershaded gun was effectively invisible. Cott was delighted, but the authorities, faced with proof that they were wrong, hesitated and did nothing. Cott gave up, trained in military camouflage with the Royal Engineers – where his skills were appreciated – and sailed to Egypt.
Cott’s enthusiasm carried him right through the Second World War, teaching camouflage theory in the Western Desert and keeping boxes and jars full of snakes, beetles and lizards. As he wrote,
In war, as in peace, to young and old alike, animals may be, and should be, a fount of joy and inspiration.
Cott was tolerated with that specially English kind of reserved amusement that we use for those we admire and find mad at the same time. He was lucky to have as his commanding officer Geoffrey Barkas, who had filmed the real African exteriors for Robert Stevenson’s 1937 King Solomon’s Mines. Barkas wrote that:
Captain H. B. Cott, the well-known naturalist and author of a standard work on the protective patterning and behaviour of animals, birds, and insects, was our Chief Instructor. His distinguished University experience, coupled with several months of practical work with a Corps in the Western Desert, made this appointment peculiarly his.
The ‘standard work’ was Cott’s Adaptive Coloration in Animals, published early enough in the war for good-quality paper to be obtained for a fully-illustrated 500-page zoology textbook. Barkas was familiar with it because it had become the army officer’s bible of camouflage: love of nature had reached the battlefield. Rothenberg explains:
When I heard that this volume was popular wartime reading for soldiers, I found it hard to believe until I got my hands on an old, dusty copy and found I couldn’t put it down.
To understand why, see how Cott describes a grasshopper:
A beautiful example is afforded by the remarkable stone-like grasshopper Eremocharis insignis, from Algeria… Very stout and short in form, this little Acridian is uniformly coloured a light sandy-buff, even to the eyes, in perfect harmony with barren stony surroundings. … When alarmed it remains motionless, and unlike active leaping species, makes no attempt to escape, but relies simply on its cryptic appearance. … the large hind legs are habitually tucked closely in against the body – an attitude reminding one somewhat of the resting posture of a tree-frog. In this position the femora fit accurately against the sides of the abdomen … As a result, the leg no longer betrays itself – it becomes part and parcel of the weathered rock fragment for which the animal so well passes.
Cott’s graceful and muscular prose is not only science but fine writing. Like Darwin before him with the Origin of Species, Cott relied on the cumulative effect of examples and arguments to show that ‘adaptive coloration is one of the chief attributes of the higher animals, and has been, indeed, one of the main achievements of organic evolution’. In 1940, at a low point in the popularity of Darwinism among scientists, Cott was a standard-bearer for that cause. His other reason for writing was simply his love of Darwin’s ‘endless forms most beautiful’. Research has moved on from old-fashioned descriptive natural history to mathematical modelling and experimental testing, so Adaptive Coloration in Animals is likely to remain the best textbook on camouflage ever written. As Rothenberg puts it:
Cott wants to present a rigorous functional explanation for everything lovely he finds, but at the same time it is clear that wonder at the marvelous diversity of pattern in animals and plants is what has lured him into the whole subject.
Given that there was a war on, Cott framed his book in terms of an evolutionary arms race, a struggle between the superbly acute senses of predators and the ‘elaborate cryptic uniforms’ of prey – there are military references everywhere. Here is how Cott explains disruptive coloration:
When the surface of a fish, or of a factory, is covered with irregular patches of contrasted colours and tones, these patches tend to catch the eye of the observer and to draw his attention away from the shape which bears them.
Once in uniform, Cott happily taught camouflage, emphasizing nature’s principles with biomimetic examples rather than just burbling about shape, shine, and shadow. In his lectures, he stated that visual deception could take nine forms. You could
- merge with the background, like a hare;
- disrupt your shape, like a ringed plover on a pebbly beach;
- disguise yourself, like a praying mantis among leaves;
- misdirect your attacker, like a butterfly with eyespots;
- startle with a sudden flash of colour, like a grasshopper with bright blue wings;
- use a lure, like the angler fish;
- distract with a smokescreen, like the ink of the cuttlefish;
- play the dummy, like hoverflies imitating wasps; or
- fake a display of strength, like a puffed-up lizard.
It says much for Cott’s qualities as a teacher that he could say this sort of thing to soldiers in wartime. To young men risking their lives, anyone aged over 25 was pretty ancient. When the British Eighth Army was preparing for Alamein, Cott was 42. He knew his stuff, believed in it totally, and put it across with quiet passion. He inspired thousands of soldiers and zoology students, including plenty of future researchers who in turn communicated their love of nature to their pupils.
As for military effect, Barkas’s camouflage unit provided the Eighth Army with a brilliant deception, Operation Bertram, to conceal the location and timing of the allied attack at El Alamein, which began on the 23rd of October 1942. In complete secrecy, Generals Montgomery and Alexander asked Barkas to make it appear that the main attack would not come along the obvious route, the coast road, but twenty miles to the south. The task called for the camouflage unit to create an entire armoured corps made of simple materials like woven palm hurdles. The real tanks would be disguised as trucks: the idea had been suggested by the former Middle East Commander in Chief, General Wavell. The elaborate deception was planned by the shapeshifting Dudley Clarke and the reliable Charles Richardson. Cott’s bullet-point principles of disguising yourself, misdirecting your attacker, playing the dummy and faking strength all came into play, taking a month of strenuous preparation. The rest, in a bloody battle, was up to Eighth Army, but the enemy, caught off balance, never recovered. Announcing victory, the prime minister Winston Churchill told a delighted nation what had been done, and more remarkably, how:
“By a marvellous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert. The enemy suspected – indeed, knew – that an attack was impending, but when and where and how it was coming was hidden from him. The Xth Corps, which he had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.”
… (remainder of chapter not included here) …