zebra-striped-camouflage.jpg

In WWI, German U-Boats were taking out British ships at an alarming rate. British artist and naval officer Norman Wilkinson conceived the idea to paint the ships with geometric shapes of opposing colors in an attempt to confuse the submarines. Although the tactic’s effect was debatable, it was adopted by the United States (where it was called Razzle Dazzle), and both navies used it into WWII.

Wilkinson, from a 1919 lecture on Dazzle:

The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked…. The colours mostly in use were black, white, blue and green…. When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater distortion.

Winston Churchill was said to consider deception in war an invaluable “element of léger de main, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.” Seem more ships here, here, and here.

Sources: RISD, Wikipedia, Twisted Sifter, via Publikhair

Grant Brissey covered everything from hard news and technology, to music, film, and visual arts during his time working for The Stranger. Grant's work has also appeared at Geekwire, and in Billboard,...

20 replies on “Dazzle Camouflage”

  4. I love that the US and British Navies employed surrealist and op-art artists to make their ships look perfectly comical. Where are they now? All the fun has gone out of war these days… boo.

  11. More modern ship camouflage is amazing to see in action. Up close it looks like a pointy mess of polygonal blues and grays, you wonder how anyone could miss this thing. But when you get far enough away with the sea or sky behind it, these enormous warships will just stop looking like much of anything at all. Try it sometime if you get the chance.

  15. @13 Earlier in the war (well the second one) the bombers were camouflaged, but it was realized that the bombing itself was actually having little effect on industrial production, but was resulting in a lot of destroyed German planes and dead pilots. So they stopped painting them so they’d be MORE visible to attract more enemy fighters for the escorts to shoot down.

  18. I’ve seen ships with a more recognizable standard Camo pattern on them, but in 50-plus years of reading about WW II, I’ve NEVER come across anything like this. I wonder if it’s a joke.

  19. Aiming a WW I/II era straight running torpedo is a trigonometry problem – misjudge the angle the ship is moving and you’re going to miss. Note how the angles make a fake bow just a bit behind the actual front.

  20. That’s actually an example of the Adaptor System of camouflage, not Dazzle. All of the other images on the twistedsifter.com site are Dazzle, though.

Comments are closed.