The Admiralty noted that the required camouflage would vary depending on the light, the changing colours of sea and sky, the time of day, and the angle of the sun. of academic interest but not of practical advantage". His ideas were considered by the Admiralty, but rejected along with Kerr's proposals as being "freak methods of painting ships. Seeing the opportunity to put his theory into service, Thayer wrote to Churchill in February 1915, proposing to camouflage submarines by countershading them like fish such as mackerel, and advocating painting ships white to make them invisible. The American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer had developed a theory of camouflage based on countershading and disruptive coloration, which he had published in the controversial 1909 book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. It had made up its mind, and all Kerr's subsequent letters achieved nothing. Whether through this mixing of goals, or the Admiralty's scepticism about "any theory based upon the analogy of animals", the Admiralty claimed in July 1915 to have conducted "various trials" and decided to paint its ships in monotone grey, not adopting any of Kerr's suggestions. Kerr was thus hoping to achieve both a measure of invisibility and a degree of confusion for the enemy using a rangefinder. Similarly, he advised painting shaded parts of the ship white, and brightly lit parts in grey, again with smooth grading between them, making shapes and structures invisible. For example, he proposed painting ships' guns grey on top, grading to white below, so the guns would disappear against a grey background. However, in the same letter, Kerr also called for countershading, the use of paint to obliterate self-shading and thus to flatten out the appearance of solid, recognisable shapes. Hiding these would make ships less conspicuous, and would "greatly increase the difficulty of accurate range finding". Taking up the zebra example, Kerr proposed that the vertical lines of ships' masts be disrupted with irregular white bands. The target's masts are especially useful for rangefinding, so Kerr proposed disrupting these with white bands. Eyepiece image of a warship in a naval rangefinder, image halves not yet adjusted for range. Kerr compared the effect to that created by the patterns on a series of land animals, the giraffe, zebra and jaguar. The British zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed the application of camouflage to British warships in the First World War, outlining what he believed to be the applicable principle, disruptive camouflage, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining the goal was to confuse, not to conceal, by disrupting a ship's outline. The approach was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions. Intended purposes Depiction of how Norman Wilkinson intended dazzle camouflage to cause the enemy to take up poor firing positions Īt first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it. Arthur Lismer similarly painted a series of dazzle ship canvases. 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. Experiments were carried out on aircraft in both World Wars with little success.ĭazzle attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like himself had invented it. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the colour schemes were effective. 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. ĭazzle was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that he had intended dazzle primarily to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so cause them to take up a poor firing position. Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, 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 (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, is a family of ship camouflage that was used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. For the OMD album, see Dazzle Ships (album).
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