 Recalling that fiasco, Warner said, “Thereafter I was for distortion patterns which make a ship hard to hit—not hard to see.”

A few months later, Warner presented his own ship camouflage plan to the US government.According to existing records, he argued that it is “impossible to make a ship invisible from a submarine, because she was almost invariably outlined against the sky and consequently would show up in silhouette.His proposal, therefore, was to break up the silhouette in such as way as to make it very difficult for the enemy to obtain the range.” This method, known officially as the Warner System, was one of six camouflage measures approved by the US, with others having been devised by George de Forest Brush (in partnership with his son Gerome Brush, and with Abbott H. Thayer), William Mackay, Lewis Herzog, Maximilian Toch, and a person named Watson.