It was applied in various ways to British warships such as HMS Implacable where officers noted that the pattern "increased difficulty of accurate range finding". A general order to the British fleet issued on Novemadvocated use of Kerr's principle. In 1914, British scientist John Graham Kerr persuaded then-First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill to adopt a form of disruptive camouflage which he called "parti-colouring". Painting of Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, by Edward Wadsworth, 1919 Broken colour systems which present units so small as to be invisible as such at the distances considered are neither advantageous nor detrimental to the dazzle effect the visibility of the camouflaged vessel at a given distance would depend entirely upon such scientifically measurable factors as the mean effective reflection factor, hue and saturation of the surface when considered at various distances. This led to more scientific studies of colour options which might enhance camouflage effectiveness. The dazzle camouflage strategy was adopted by other navies. As an additional feature, the dazzle pattern usually included a false bow wave intended to make estimation of the ship's speed difficult.ĭazzle camouflage was accepted by the Admiralty, even without practical visual assessment protocols for improving performance by modifying designs and colours.
This became more important when submarine periscopes included similar rangefinders. Dazzle was intended to make that hard because clashing patterns looked abnormal even when the two halves were aligned. The operator adjusted the mechanism until two half-images of the target lined up in a complete picture. Rangefinders were based on the coincidence principle with an optical mechanism, operated by a human to compute the range. An observer would find it difficult to know exactly whether the stern or the bow was in view and it would be equally difficult to estimate whether the observed vessel was moving towards or away from the observer's position. Its purpose was confusion rather than concealment. The idea was to disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery. While dazzle did not conceal a ship, it made it difficult for the enemy to estimate its type, size, speed, and heading. a giraffe or zebra or jaguar looks extraordinarily conspicuous in a museum but in nature, especially when moving, is wonderfully difficult to pick up." John Graham Kerr, who first applied the principle to British warships in WW I, outlined the principle in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining that disruptive camouflage sought to confuse, not to conceal, "It is essential to break up the regularity of outline and this can be easily effected by strongly contrasting shades.
Dazzle camouflage series#
The vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the First World War, painted a series of canvases of dazzle ships after the war, based on his wartime work.įurther information: Camouflage: dazzle patterningĪt first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it, but this technique was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to disguise ships in all weathers. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the colour schemes were effective.ĭazzle attracted the notice of artists, with Picasso notably claiming cubists had invented it. The result was that a profusion of dazzle schemes was tried, and the evidence for their success was at best mixed. Each ship's dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly recognisable to the enemy. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that dazzle was intended more to mislead the enemy as to the correct position to take up than actually to miss his shot when firing.ĭazzle was adopted by the British Admiralty and the U.S. Unlike some other forms of camouflage, dazzle works not by offering concealment but by making it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed and heading. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other. USS West Mahomet in dazzle camouflage, 1918ĭazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle or dazzle painting, was a family of ship camouflage used extensively in World War I and to a lesser extent in World War II.
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