War on scale : models for the First World War battlefront

This essay traces the evolution and use of military scale models during the First World War. The application of such models by all belligerents is characterized by an enormous diversity in scale, context, construction method and purpose. Between the two extremes of a full scale replica of the Paris agglomeration and the tiny boxed miniature of a POW prison cell, a whole range of military models can be distinguished. On one hand, the model production can be considered part of a long tradition of military terrain modeling, as is evident in the examples of relief maps and training models. On the other hand, the rapidly changing technological and tactical developments during the Great War –such as strategic aerial bombing, camouflage and submarine warfare—require the creation of new types of scale models. During the last stages of the war, the encapsulation of the model as research object in a laboratory, looked at through optical devices and studied through model photography, demonstrates how this technological progress paves the way for a scientific approach towards warfare. The evolution of the models thus illustrates how war was waged on a variety of scales and that its theatre was far from limited to the battlefield itself

The visual, the accidental and the actual in the historiography of the fort of Shinkakasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 1891- 1909

Much against the advice of his military counsellors about static fortifications being obsolete in an age and continent of gunboat diplomacy, the Belgian king Leopold II took a resolute stand. Holding on to the doctrine of positional warfare that had turned Belgium into an impregnable fortress in previous decades, he wanted the biggest guns mounted in the biggest fort of central Africa. In 1890 construction took off in Shinkakasa, strategically located within a stone’s throw of the Congo Free State’s capital Boma. Dominating the Congo river’s estuary, the fort was supposed to temper Portuguese and French ambitions towards the central African hinterland. In 1901, during the final stages of its construction, the fort was the scene of a particularly painful incident, when Leopold’s own Force Publique – forcefully recruited from Congo’s villages as cheap labour for the construction site – turned the guns towards the capital. In contrast to scholarly attention devoted to the rebellion in Shinkakasa, the construction phase remains somewhat underexposed. Nevertheless, the case is an interesting exception for the central African context, where construction remained largely dependent on indigenous building materials and knowhow until the 1920s. The building site of Shinkakasa demonstrates how, even in an early colonial context, a one-to-one translation of Belgian building science and technology clashes with local realities. The first (large-scale) application of concrete, the military management of the building site and the introduction of state-of-the-art equipment were all at odds with the scarcity of imported building materials, the reliance on indigenous knowhow, the difficult communication with experts in the Métropole, and the – alleged – incompetency of ‘unskilled’ black labour. In this paper we argue that the colonial building site can hardly be understood as the simple export of fully mastered building technologies ‘from the West to the Rest’. While most construction historians working on Africa have been focusing on the export of (prefabricated) building(s) technologies to the continent, a more recent interest in different actors of the construction process – in particular the Colonial Public Works Departments, private contracting companies and (still incipient) African labour – sparked a true postcolonial turn in the construction history of the non-West. With the archives of the Congo Free State largely destroyed, picturing the building site conditions is a challenging task. Nevertheless, a series of photographs in the archives of the Royal Museum for Central Africa gives a surprisingly inclusive image of the realities on the building site. In particular the African labourers take up a central role in these images, all the more striking if juxtaposed to the few written testimonies of the construction site by engineers or high-ranked military personnel. While in these official reports black labourers are always reduced to ‘man-hours of unskilled labour’, several of the photographs offer a more nuanced perspective on construction in a colonial context. The case is formatted as a ‘visual essay’ in which diptychs of photographs are juxtaposed to the few written sources as to trace different tensions present on the building site

Concrete matter : building the Bruges submarine pens (1917-18)

Starting in August 1917, a large submarine shelter was erected in the German-occupied port of Bruges. Its construction completed a transition from mixed steel-and-timber shelters to all-concrete bunkers in this area. The new Gruppenunterstande prefigured many of the typological, technological and logistic key features of the iconic submarine pens from World War II, when lessons learnt from the Bruges prototype were to be pushed to extremes. The case of the Bruges submarine pens exemplifies the scientifically managed construction site and hints at the underexposure of experimental military concrete technology in architectural construction history. It is argued that the conflict period, rather than forming a gap in an otherwise continuous evolution of building practice, created certain opportunities for a modern and experimental attitude towards building typology and construction

Shape recognition for ships: World War I naval camouflage under the magnifying glass

Much of the experiments that led to the development of World War I ship camouflage were conducted on an intuitive basis or based upon pseudo-scientific work. As a result of this rather empirical approach, possible effects of the naval camouflage schemes that were developed against the background of submarine warfare on the Atlantic still remain unclear. So-called dazzle paint schemes were conceived to break up target contours and disclose the ship’s number, direction, speed and distance—thus complicating targeting through primitive stereoscopic range finders and periscopes used at the time. Digital image analysis provides helpful tools to assess the effects of dazzle painting techniques. By applying dazzle map textures to digital three dimensional models, different paint schemes can be examined and evaluated under variable atmospheric conditions. Shape recognition algorithms are implemented in an attempt to draw some conclusions about different dazzle designs. This paper provides a brief overview of the origins and methodology of dazzle camouflage. It proposes an experimental framework for ship classification purpose, thus exploring the possibilities of quantitative analysis of rendered computer images to evaluate possible effects of dazzle painting. The test results indicate some possible effects of the World War I paint schemes

Michelin’s illustrated guide to the battlefields of the Yser and the Belgian coast (1920) : guidebook, field manual or architectural compendium?

Even before the guns went silent in late 1918, French tyre manufacturer Michelin published the first from a series of guidebooks to the battlefields of the Western Front. Being just one among many battlefield guides to appear in the aftermath of the Great War, the Michelin guides responded to an increasing demand for information about reaching and touring the battered landscape and the ruins left by the conflict. What sets the Michelin guides apart from their counterparts, is the extensive use of exactly those techniques that the military had applied so successfully during the war: detailed maps, high-quality photographs and spot-on information for motorised traffic. This methodical approach parallels wartime military advancements in cartography (artillery barrage and trench maps), photography (aerial reconnaissance and damage survey) and technology (mechanised and motorised warfare). Taking this idea one step further, the methodology of the Michelin guide can be considered a logical continuation of the company’s earlier efforts in the French war industry. Departing from such insights, the proposed paper looks into the troublesome relation between tourism and conflict space and the geopolitics of the battlefield guide. More specifically, it uses the Michelin guidebook to demonstrate how the First World War is a turning point in this respect. Battlefield tourism was far from a new phenomenon in 1918, with early accounts reporting back to Waterloo and the emerging tourism industry following the American Civil War. Battlefield guides then provided assistance in making the conflict topography readable and understandable to the untrained eye of the non-military visitor. This role of the landscape, as merely being a passive backdrop for military events that were limited in time and space, changes radically during World War I. The continued stalemate of the Western Front, combined with the potential of industrialised warfare, turns temporary fieldworks into permanent spatial interventions and transforms the landscape into a space to be modified, constructed and urbanised – in short designed. A close—or rather ‘tactical’—reading of the Michelin issue on the Yser and the Belgian coast, and a comparison with other contemporary battlefield guides, for instance de Touring Club de Belgique’s book on the Front de Flandre, demonstrates how this is even more true for the front in the Flanders region. The latter book sets off with a detailed survey of the geology and micro-topography of the battlefield, explaining how local conditions paved the way for an artificial landscape of inundations and solid ground-level constructions, rather than trenches and underground warfare that characterise most of the Western Front. Furthermore, the Michelin guidebook depicts the ruinscape of the front in a series of before-and-after photographs of monuments, not unlike, for instance, the image report of the Misson Dhuicque which captured the threated or destroyed Belgian heritage between 1915 and 1918. But the Michelin guide also looks at experimental structures in reinforced concrete behind the lines, such as the submarine shelters in the port of Bruges, and places them at the same footing of the monuments in the medieval centre of the city. In doing so, the Michelin guide exemplifies a modern approach towards the artificialities of the landscape, heritage and built environment of the conflict and hints towards a reading of the Western Front as a designed temporary urbanity imposed on the rural landscape

Military design thinking

The relationship between design and the military can be approached from various viewpoints. The overlapping concepts of military design (on different scale levels between product design and town planning), design thinking (design methodology) and military thinking (evolution of military doctrine) can be combined into the concept of ‘military design thinking’. Military design thinking relies on a “scientized” approach towards (architectural) design. Conflict is seen as a fertile breeding ground, absorbing civil creativity and setting a military inspired paradigm of modernity. The transformation of reinforced concrete from a primitive to a modern material on the battlefields of World War I is taken as a case study. The conflict marks a turning point in the typological evolution from geometrically inspired fortification methods towards the condensed architectural object of the monolithic bunker. Moreover, some late World War I examples display a variety of new and semi-industrialized construction methods (such as precast concrete, advanced concrete plants and scientifically managed construction sites). In conclusion, military design thinking is instrumental both in the dissemination of reinforced concrete on an unprecedented scale, as well as in its transformation to a modern material

Piecing together Fort Shinkakasa

During the initial stages of the Congo Free State (1885-1908), forerunner of the Belgian Congo, an impressive coastal battery with big caliber naval guns was installed just upstream of the capital Boma. Built on rocky heights overlooking the Congo river estuary, it was meant to protect the city against the threat of enemy gunboats and amphibious landings by rivaling colonial powers. From the very beginning, the situation of the battery raised doubts on its strategic relevance and its military architectural defaults were soon exposed. In the slipstream of the arms race between artillery and fortification technology at the turn of the 20th century and inspired by the zeal of major fortification programs in the Belgian metropole, it was soon decided to convert the open redan-shaped battery in brick masonry into a closed polygonal concrete fortress. After the First World War (during which the big caliber guns were stripped to serve in the war theatre of Lake Tanganyika) the fort was declassified and served as barracks and military prison until at least the 1990s. Primary sources on the history of Fort Shinkakasa and its layout are quite scarce (the archives of the former Congo Free State were mostly destroyed when it was transformed into Belgian Congo) and scattered over the African Archives at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Brussels (plan fragments and administrative documents), the archives of the Royal Museum of Africa in Tervuren (images and personal files), the archives of the Royal Museum of the Armed Forces and of Military History in Brussels (images), and the archives of the Royal Palace in Brussels (correspondence). Secondary literature is limited, but often provides often useful descriptive information or first-hand eye witness reports of the construction. Based on those archival fragments, an attempt is made to reconstruct a plan of the fort and its successive modifications. This search reveals not only an insight into the difficult – if not problematic – construction history of the fort and the early use of concrete technology in the tropics, but also frames Fort Shinkakasa in the context of colonial architecture, social conflict and rebellion in the Free State, and fortification typology and history