Only the Brits would do serious research in hiding a destroyer under an umbrella
Apparently, you could use thirty-one 14-foot umbrellas to break up a ship silhouette.
This photograph shows a Royal Navy ship using experimental camouflage. The photograph comes from the records of the Admiralty’s research laboratory. The idea was to camouflage ships against land backgrounds. The diagram shows how many umbrellas were needed to camouflage a ship. The purpose was to provide a quick solution. The structural camouflage (the umbrellas) would be used as well as painted camouflage. The umbrellas also broke up the outline of the ship. This made it difficult for an aircraft or a submarine to work out what kind of ship it was. The umbrellas would help the ships to avoid attack or even allow them to lie unobserved in order to ambush enemy shipping expected in the area. It was thought that such circumstances might occur in the Far Eastern theater of war.