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Lee Miller, Salvador Dalí, and Roland Penrose reporting for duty.

Not long ago, in a coffee table book about Surrealist and photojournalist Lee Miller, I spotted a curious photo of Miller sprawled naked on a lawn, her skin covered in greenish dirt and chunks of turf.

“Lee Miller in camouflage,” read the caption.

A brief passage casually explained that Surrealist artist Roland Penrose—Miller’s lover and later her husband—had used the photo in lectures on wartime camouflage. He and other Surrealists had, at the beginning of the Second World War, formed a camouflage services unit and were later absorbed into official camouflage roles in the British military.

Wait—what?A Surrealist camouflage unit? That must have been absurdity central, I thought, imagining Salvador Dalí holding court in a bunker, wearing a diving suit and a lobster hat. But when I researched the topic in earnest, I found that the work of the Surrealist camoufleurs was deadly serious, and even arguably helped to turn the tide of the war. Then, these past few weeks, with the horrific Russian war in Ukraine, the subject took on sudden urgency for me, with its David-and-Goliath theme of civilians doing everything they could to survive and help repel a brutal military assault on their country.

Thanks to their longtime obsession with mimicry and visual deception, the Surrealists had been peculiarly well suited to camouflage work, which became critical to WWII’s new era of aerial warfare. A passionate “camouflage evangelist,” Penrose was instrumental in getting Allied forces to see camouflage as a weapon that could help turn an overwhelmed underdog into a victor. “It was Penrose who got the army to take camo seriously,” says Rick Stroud, historian, filmmaker, and author of The Phantom Army of Alamein.

Recently the art movement has inspired a significant resurgence of interest. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate Modern in London have co-curated an ongoing, important exhibition on global Surrealism; fashion designers have rolled out Surrealist-inspired collections; Surrealist works have been fetching record prices at auction. Yet Surrealists’ important wartime activities appear to have been largely forgotten.

Antony Penrose—son of Roland Penrose and Lee Miller—is looking to help remedy that. On May 26, a five-month exhibit about Penrose, Miller, and Surrealist camouflage will open at the couple’s former home, Farleys House & Gallery, in Sussex, England. A goal of the exhibition: to help restore public memory of the wartime activities of Penrose, Miller, and their peers. Ahead of this show, the Lee Miller estate has generously shared with Town & Country several war-era photographs of the Surrealists engaged in camouflage work—some of them never previously published.

Here is the story of when the Surrealists went to war, how they used art to help thwart the fascist onslaught, and ultimately assisted in bringing Britain a desperately needed victory against Hitler’s armed forces.

At first glance, Roland Penrose does not seem like the most likely advocate for turning art into a guerrilla warfare tactic. Born in 1900 in London to a wealthy Quaker family, Penrose was a conscientious objector in World War I. As an ambulance driver in Italy during that conflict, however, he saw firsthand the horrors of war, and afterward “began to see art as the salvation of the world,” according to Antony Penrose.

After the war, Penrose eventually moved to Paris, where he met and worked alongside cubists like Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In Braque’s work especially, Penrose was drawn to the “technique of deception,” in which the artist painted objects to make them appear to be something else, such as marble or grained wood. Also of interest to Penrose: how cubist pattern disruption techniques had been adapted during the First World War to help camouflage warships.

In Paris, the Surrealists—who included Salvador Dalí, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Tristan Tzara, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, and Man Ray, among others—often gathered in cafés in St. Germain des Prés or Montmartre. Like Penrose, some of the other Surrealists had served in WWI, and together they despaired over much of Europe’s terrifying descent into fascism, which was “extinguishing one after another the liberties amongst which we have moved in our carefree way 10 years before,” recalled Surrealist artist Julian Trevelyan.

When Hitler’s forces invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, setting off the Second World War, Penrose was in France with Miller. They had met two years earlier at a Surrealist ball in Paris, where Miller—a photographer, Vogue cover model, former lover of photographer Man Ray, and Surrealist artist and muse—captivated Penrose at first sight. Luckily for him, the attraction was mutual.

Penrose and Miller hastily boarded a ship back to England. On the boat they ran into Trevelyan. The artists collectively acknowledged that there was no way to escape this “unbelievable nightmare,” said Trevelyan. “The war against fascism [had now been] brought to our doorstep. We [had to] participate, whether we liked it or not.”

Yet they were determined to find a way to fight this overwhelming existential threat without literally fighting. “I was never a born hero,” Penrose said later, “[and] I knew I would never be much good at killing people.”

There on the boat to Southampton, the little group decided that they would fight fascism with art. More specifically, they would try to put their Surrealist outlook and skills to practical use in camouflage work.

This decision was whimsical and practical at the same time. After all, camouflage was the practice of disguising objects or making them seem to disappear altogether. Artists from all backgrounds would ultimately become wartime camoufleurs, but the Surrealists had already been experimenting with such visual trickery for years.

“All through the 1930s, the Surrealists were fascinated by anything in the natural world that pretended to be something else,” says Samantha Kavky, art historian and author of the article “Surrealism, War and the Art of Camouflage.” “There’s an obsession with deception, and this idea of pretending to be something other than what you are.”

Art could be the salvation of the world, Penrose once thought. Now came the hard work of figuring out how to translate this theory into practice. He and his friends prepared to help bamboozle the enemy.

When Penrose, Miller, and Trevelyan arrived in London, the city was already on wartime footing. An air-raid siren was blaring. Barrage balloons hovered in the sky above. The city was like “some huge, disturbed ant heap,” recalled Trevelyan.

Along with surrealist artist Stanley William Hayter, who had seen camouflage in practice during the Spanish Civil War, Penrose, Trevelyan, and several other artists founded the Industrial Camouflage Research Unit, a commercial operation that would create camouflage designs to hide factories and other concerns. The British were steeling themselves against imminent aerial assaults from Hitler’s Luftwaffe, and panicked civilians attempted slap-dash DIY attempts at camouflaging factories, homes, and depots, painting unconvincing decoy designs across roofs.

“People seemed to think that … [a] rash of squiggly green patterns … were a charm that somehow bought them immunity from the unknown hazards of war,” Trevelyan said. Yet he and his colleagues at the newborn Industrial Camouflage Research Unit were also still amateurs. The problem: “We had none of us done much flying,” said Trevelyan, “and the pattern of the world from above is read very differently from the way in which we had supposed.”

Undeterred, they used the Camouflage Unit as a laboratory, mocking up designs for disguising guns and other military equipment. The Camouflage Unit folded in June 1940, just as Paris was falling to the Germans. Penrose and others from the team were soon called up for military service and absorbed into official camouflage operations.

Unsurprisingly, the transition to army life was not easy some of the artists, who had long railed against the establishment and often embraced flamboyance. (Dalí, for example, had recently shown up to a surrealist show in London wearing a diving suit—complete with a helmet—and flanked by two huge, white borzois.) “It took much time to get the hang of the military machine,” as filmmaker-turned-camoufleur Geoffrey Barkas dryly put it.

This was certainly true for Trevelyan, a noted eccentric who had donned large black felt hats and carpet slippers during his Cambridge days. Nicknamed “Lofty” by one sergeant, Trevelyan brought his own flourishes to military life (“I tried hard to take it seriously,” he later said), festooning his uniform with a “little cane to carry and an ornamental black and gold walking-out cap.”

After completing a six-week basic training and camouflage course, Trevelyan was assigned to a unit that disguised large concrete “pillbox” forts being built across the British Isles to halt German tanks in case of an invasion, which now seemed inevitable. (Just several months earlier, following the disastrous defeat and retreat of British forces at Dunkirk, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had given his “Fight on the beaches” speech, rallying his countrymen and women to arm themselves and prepare to fight the enemy on their beaches, streets, and fields.)

To disguise the pillbox structures, “we camouflage officers were given full rein to our wildest fancies,” Trevelyan said later. He and his colleagues transformed the pillboxes into houses with thatched roofs, caravans, haystacks, and cafés. His designs became increasingly elaborate: “I had erected garages complete with petrol pumps [and] ‘Closed for the Season’ [signs], public lavatories, cafés, chicken-houses, and romantic ruins.”

Trevelyan was then dispatched to North Africa, where camouflage was about to play a huge role in helping British forces there turn the course of the war. He and his fellow soldiers “were all made to wear little identification discs round our necks. On these we were required to inscribe our name, number, and religion.” For religion, Trevelyan proudly wrote “Surrealist.”

“I have often wondered,” he said later, “what rites would have been performed by a conscientious Commanding Officer.”

Soon Surrealists around the globe were acting as “evangelists” of camouflage, as Trevelyan put it. In Australia, Max Dupain became a member of the Sydney Camouflage Unit. In New York City, Arshile Gorky taught a camouflage course. “An epidemic of destruction sweeps the world today,” he told his students. “What the enemy would destroy, however, he must first see. To confuse and paralyze this vision is the role of camouflage.”

Also safely ensconced in America, Dalí wrote an article for Esquire arguing that the Surrealists had long shown how objects could be rendered invisible and advised Allied military forces to take note. (In this article, Dalí also tried to take the lion’s share of credit for the movement’s work in mimicry, and brag-hinted that he personally had unlocked the secrets of total camouflage but couldn’t reveal them due to national security concerns.)

Yet even though defensive camouflage (however ineptly implemented at first) had been embraced on the home front, Allied military leaders still needed to be convinced that the camouflage game must be upped on battlefields. Since the end of World War I, the British military had cut camouflage budgets and failed to develop new camouflage units and practices.

“When [the war] started, the army had completely forgotten about [camouflage], and thought it was a question of putting twigs in your hair and hiding your vehicles under bushes,” says Peter Forbes, author of Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage. Roland Penrose, some experts say, was a key player in convincing the British military to take camouflage seriously. “Camouflage is no mystery and no joke,” he asserted. “It is a matter of life and death— of victory or defeat.” After his commercial camouflage operation closed, Penrose became a camouflage expert and teacher, first with a guerrilla training operation and then for the War Office. He lectured across the country, often on a merciless schedule. Training soldiers, most of whom were not exactly artistically inclined, in the art of camouflage proved challenging. To help advance his cause, Penrose conscripted his most exciting asset: Lee Miller.

Miller—then busy photographing blitzkrieg devastation in London—actively supported Penrose’s camouflage work. She photographed his camouflage models in the British Vogue studio, so he could use the images in lectures. When he needed to test new green camo makeup, she gamely stripped down and covered her face and entire body with it. She also posed for color photographs, naked except for full-body camouflage cosmetics, net stretched loosely over her body, and some strategically placed turf across her thighs. “If camouflage can hide Lee’s charms,” Penrose told soldiers, “it can hide anything.”

His lectures subsequently became extremely popular, with soldiers returning two or three times, suddenly bursting with enthusiasm about the art and importance of camouflage. Miller later talked “about these camouflage activities with pride,” says Antony Penrose.

“She realized that Penrose was doing something significant and important,” he adds. “And this work underlined the fact that she wanted to make a contribution to the war effort as well.”

Miller would indeed soon make an indelible mark as one of just four female photographers credited as official war correspondents with the U.S. armed forces. She documented their advance across Europe, capturing on film D-Day’s aftermath in Normandy, the liberation of Paris, horrific scenes at German concentration camps, and Hitler’s destroyed former retreat in Berchtesgaden, flames still soaring from the structure.

Penrose became a gamechanger in 1941, when he published the Home Guard Manual of Camouflage (which will be reissued this month for the first time since the war). In its pages, Penrose showed how to accomplish seemingly impossible visual deceptions: how to create dummy guns and human decoys; how to perfect the art of the booby trap; how to make shadows from vehicles “vanish”; how to create a “phantom platoon” that could patrol and yet “remain practically invisible.”

While Penrose drew on influences ranging from ancient warfare to camouflage in the natural world, his Surrealist passion for mimicry was apparent throughout the book. Patterns, textures, shading: all these artistic devices now took on serious military currency. In true avant-garde artist form, Penrose advised on how junk, rubbish, and scavenged natural materials could be repurposed to create dummy trucks, tanks, and buildings. He made drawings of various vision-baffling sniper suits that would help sharpshooters appear invisible against their backgrounds.

Thousands of miles away, at a British camouflage operation in Egypt, camouflage expert Geoffrey Barkas was about to use these lessons to help change the course of the war. He had trained briefly alongside Penrose and Trevelyan in England, calling himself “the cuckoo in a nest of creative artists.” Now in Africa, Barkas elevated the art of camouflage and military decoys, observed Trevelyan, who himself arrived in Egypt in early 1942.

On September 17, 1942, Barkas was summoned by headquarters to discuss an imminent top-secret military operation. British Field Commander Bernard Montgomery was planning an offensive against German forces under Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who had forcefully reversed an early British advance across North Africa. The attack would take place in the northern Egyptian desert, near the town of El Alamein.

Barkas and his team were told to mastermind a massive camouflage and deception campaign that would distract and confuse German forces during “Operation Bertram.” The challenge was irresistible yet unenviable, “because the desert is so open, so pitiless in exposing troop positions,” says Peter Forbes.

While Operation Bertram was going to be Barkas’s show, many of the tactics and lessons that Penrose had outlined in his book would come into play, from drawing enemy forces away from “vital points” to using salvage materials in creating dummy forces to covering telltale military vehicle tracks.

“I’m certain that Barkas read [Penrose’s manual],” says Rick Stroud, the historian. Many of the elements outlined in Penrose’s manual “would have been in Barkas’s mind,” he says. But Barkas was now charged with putting it all into action.

“He went out and flew out over the desert,” says Stroud, “and he began to work out that it’s not just camouflage that’s needed, but storytelling. It’s deception. And deception is the grown-up sister of camouflage.”

In just six weeks, Barkas and his team created two dummy armored divisions— an outsized version of the “phantom platoon” Penrose had visualized in his manual— in a south position in the desert, in hopes of luring German forces to attack them. Some 500 dummy tanks, 150 dummy guns, and 2,000 dummy transport vehicles were hastily constructed.

Barkas’s team also went into overdrive to disguise the full strength of the real British forces situated to the north of the dummy force. Hundreds of tanks and huge guns were camouflaged as trucks. Although weapons, strategy, and brute military force would ultimately determine the course of the battle, equally crucial elements included wire, nets, fabric, and miles of cotton string.

“It was the biggest physical camouflage operation of the war,” says Stroud, “and pretty much all time.”

The enormous subterfuge worked. Unsure of which army was real, Rommel attacked both the real force in the north and the dummy army in the south, dividing and depleting his own forces. The victory at El Alamein was still painfully earned, despite this camouflage coup, yet Montgomery’s forces prevailed, giving Britain a victory at last and a desperately needed morale boost. Churchill celebrated the role that deception had played in helping the Allies turn things around, telling the House of Commons shortly after the battle, “By a marvelous system of camouflage, complete tactical surprise was achieved in the desert.”

Barkas modestly stated that although the battle had not been won by “conjuring tricks with stick, string and canvas,” he was glad that he and his team had helped “purchase victory at a lower price in blood.” Less directly, El Alamein was also a victory for Penrose, Trevelyan, and the Surrealists around the world who had been promoting, teaching, and delighting in military camouflage since the beginning of the conflict.

“They just loved crazy juxtapositions, loved deception,” says Forbes. “They knew that they were at war, and that war is very serious business, but they also somehow retained their artistic playfulness.”

The war ultimately took an immense toll on the Surrealist community. After the liberation of Paris, many of the survivors, including Miller and Penrose, reunited there. But “amid joyful reunions there were ghosts,” says Antony Penrose. Miller had seen horrific sights in battle, hospitals, and concentration camps and turned to alcohol to help drown out painful memories and experiences. Trevelyan suffered a nervous breakdown and was discharged from the military.

Ironically, Surrealism itself—which had risen from the ashes of the First World War and played a small role in propelling the Allies to victory in the second one—was also dealt a death blow.

“Surrealism lost much of its impetus during the war,” said Trevelyan. “It became absurd to compose Surrealist confections when high explosives could do it so much better … Life had caught up with Surrealism or Surrealism with life, [and] we … lived the irrational movement to its death.”

Antony Penrose says that Miller rarely spoke with him about the war: her trauma was too deep. Yet while Roland was also relatively reluctant to reminisce about his wartime service, it was “evident that he did have a sense of pride in what he had achieved,” says Antony. “He felt that it was a job well done.”