Protecting the Fleet

in Charlestown

(awaiting installation)

Painting crew applies a fresh coat to the USS Raleigh in a Charlestown Navy Yard dry dock.

1929 photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

The Paint Shop behind you was built in 1906. It was a secure facility for storing and mixing marine paints. It also housed offices, break rooms, and restrooms for the painting staff. The Paint Shop was strategically located between Drydock 1 and 2 where many ships were painted. Smaller vessels, under 2,000 tons, were often painted after being hauled out on the Marine Railway located behind the Paint Shop. Completed in 1919, its remnants are visible today.

Before radar was invented, paint also played a strategic role. During World War I, the threat of German U-boats targeting Allied supply lines led the U.S. Navy to adopt a British camouflage technique. Dubbed “dazzle-painting,” thousands of ship hulls were painted in a riot of contrasting colors, jagged lines, and abstract geometric patterns, making it difficult for enemy submarines to determine a ship’s size, speed, and direction. Its effectiveness in protecting the fleet is hard to assess, but the U.S. Navy reported that more than 18,000 ships crossed the Atlantic safely while painted in these striking patterns.

While docked at the Charlestown Navy Yard in 1944, the USS Norman Scott was among the ships painted not just with a standard protective coating but with the “dazzle” technique. The patterns created optical illusions designed to confuse enemy U-boats trying to track their movements. Torpedoes missed their targets.

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service

In 1918 the Navy established a department called the Camouflage Section, comprised of artists and scientists, to further anti-submarine camouflage for Navy warships. Dazzle-painting was widely used again during World War II, not only for ships but for planes as well.

Image courtesy of the Naval History and Heritage Command

“It was not until she was within half a mile that I could make out she was one ship [not several] steering a course at right angles, crossing from starboard to port. The dark painted stripes on her after part made her stern appear her bow, and a broad cut of green paint amidships looks like a patch of water. The weather was bright and visibility good; this was the best camouflage I have ever seen.”

U-boat captain, quoted in Camouflage by Tim Newark

1930 photo of the painting crew with the USS Ericsson on the Marine Railway. Smaller naval vessels from tugboats to submarines were brought ashore on a wood cradle. Once the vessel was securely in position, the cradle would be pulled out of the water up the railroad tracks by a winching system. The navy yard marine railway was in use for almost 50 years.

Photo courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

Sign Location

More …

Community activists. Colonial law. Political will. New state regulations. The combination created the 43-mile Boston Harborwalk–a public path, stretching from Logan Airport through seven neighborhoods to the Neponset River. In 1978, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management (CZM) sought to improve public access to the waterfront. They succeeded by integrating early Colonial laws into new state regulations.

In the decades that followed, community activists, city and state government, and developers of shoreline projects have worked together to ensure the Harborwalk is always constructed along the waterfront. Some sites also provide public amenities–bathrooms, meeting places, kayak launches,
etc. The result is a fabulous path welcoming residents and visitors to our vibrant clean harbor.

Early Colonial laws established public right of access along tidelands to protect citizens’ rights to fish, hunt, and navigate at sea and along the shorefront. These laws go back even further: They stem from Roman law, which was incorporated into English law and brought over to Massachusetts by English
settlers. Then, in the 1640s, Massachusetts Bay Colony passed laws permitting private docks in the intertidal area (between low and high tide) as long as public access was retained. Almost all of Boston’s waterfront is filled land that was once the intertidal area. This, together with the centuries-old legal right of access, served as the underpinnings for the 1978 CZM regulations.

Resources

Acknowledgments

Warm thanks to Roy Behrens for his advice and sharing so much information about dazzle-painting.

We are deeply grateful for NPS historian Steve Carlson’s careful review of all our Charlestown Navy Yard signs.

Reviewed by Steve Carlson, NPS historian Our gratitude to the Perkins School for the Blind and Thomasine Berg for their partnership in creating the audio files.