Some were low contrast (ie, not very jazzy) and some high contrast. Sometimes they travelled much faster, at 20º a second, mimicking a land vehicle. Sometimes both rectangles travelled slowly, at just over 3º of arc a second from the observer's point of view, mimicking a ship. But the researchers varied the conditions in other ways, without telling the participants. In fact, in all cases, the two rectangles travelled at the same speed. Volunteers had to estimate which of the two was travelling faster. Each test involved a jazzy rectangle crossing the screen either before or after a plain one. Some, acting as controls, had no internal patterns. Some of the rectangles had horizontal stripes inside them. Nicholas Scott-Samuel, of the University of Bristol, and his colleagues came to this conclusion by asking volunteers to watch patterned rectangles cross a computer screen. Dazzle camouflage might well, however, have a role in protecting faster-moving vehicles, such as military Land Rovers. But now someone has actually tested it and the short answer is that it does work-but not in the way that Allied navies thought it did. At the time, it was only an educated guess that this so-called dazzle camouflage would work. These had to be pointed not at the target directly but, rather, at the place where the commander thought the target would be when the torpedo arrived. The idea was to distort an enemy submarine commander's perception of the ship's size, shape, range, heading and speed, so as to make it harder to hit with the non-homing torpedoes of the period. By 1918 more than 4,000 British merchant ships and 400 naval vessels were painted in dazzle schemes.IN THE second world war, many Allied ships were painted with dark and light stripes, and other contrasting shapes, making them look a bit like zebra. Designs were then drawn up on paper and sent for implementation to various ‘dazzle officers’ around Britain. This involved placing the models on a rotating turntable and viewing them through a submarine periscope under various lighting conditions. Paint schemes were designed and applied to scale-sized models that were then assessed in a ‘viewing theatre’, set up from the point-of-view of an enemy torpedo operator. In June 1917 Wilkinson’s ideas were backed by the Admiralty and he was given studios and 18 other artists to set up a ‘Dazzle paint section’. He wrote to the flag officer at Devonport proposing to ‘paint a ship with large patches of strong colour in a carefully thought out pattern and colour scheme … which will so distort the form of the vessel that the chances of successful aim by attacking submarines will be greatly decreased’. In April that year, artist Norman Wilkinson, then a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Reserve at Devonport, had an idea for a paint scheme that could protect merchant vessels from submarine attack. However in early 1917 Germany resumed a campaign of unrestricted submarine warfare, which was initially highly successful in sinking large numbers of merchant vessels. A soldier in the New Zealand army on his way to the Dardanelles in April 1915 ‘saw a good example of maritime camouflage – a town class cruiser painted grey and black and white to resemble a storm-tossed sea’. In September 1915 a Royal Navy commander reported that his ship was referred to as a zebra after it was ‘painted in a coat of striped camouflage’.Įarly in the war the effectiveness of the schemes was never proven and in 1915 the Admiralty decided that its warships would be painted a uniform grey. Kerr wrote to Winston Churchill, the first lord of the British Admiralty as early as September 1914 outlining his methods for ‘diminishing the visibility of ships at a distance, based on scientific principles’.Īt first the application of paint schemes was ad-hoc. Graham Kerr, Regius Professor of Zoology at Glasgow, was one who saw the further application of these principles in disguising ships at sea. This had its origins in natural scientists studying camouflage in animals. The idea, in essence, was to confuse U-boat captains by making it difficult to plot accurately an enemy ship’s movements when manoeuvring for an attack, causing the torpedo to be misdirected or the attack to be aborted.īefore WWI there had been some experimentation with camouflage for military purposes in the United States and Britain. The colour scheme was designed to confuse and deceive an enemy as to the size, outline, course and speed of a vessel by painting sides and upperworks in contrasting colours and shapes arranged in irregular patterns. The aim was to thwart German U-boat captains who had been destroying large amounts of shipping. Towards the end of World War I large numbers of merchant ships were brightly painted in bizarre geometrical patterns known as ‘Dazzle Painting’ later known as dazzle camouflage. Dazzle pattern on a merchant vessel during WWI.
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