Cargo Ship SS West Mahomet in Dazzle 1918
We posted earlier today about the USS Slater’s dazzle camouflage paint. Dazzle, sometimes referred to as razzle dazzle, is a very different approach to camouflage. Where most camouflage attempts to hide an object or person, dazzle camouflage on ships uses complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, to make it difficult to identity the ship and to determine which direction it is traveling. If successful, the dazzle camouflage will confuse the targeting of the guns or torpedoes.
Norman Wilkinson is usually credited with developed the widely used disruptive coloration that became known as dazzle painting. Dazzle reached its peak usage in World War I but continued to be used throughout World War II. The color schemes ranged from checker-board or stripped patterns to wildly abstract geometric imagery. Many dazzle schemes were black, white and gray, while some used brighter colors, including red, blues and purples and greens.
Did Dazzle work? It is difficult to tell as the adoption of dazzle color schemes coincided with the increased us of convoys. The number of ships sunk decreased though it is difficult to say whether the paint schemes or the convoys contributed most to the decreased losses. As noted in the Roads to the Great War blog :
Dr. Nicholas Scott-Samuel of the University of Bristol, however, recently expressed some skepticism about the benefits of dazzle — at least for ships. He reported in the Public Library of Science that participants in a recent series of experiments were not fooled by slow-moving rectangles, nor by low-contrast ones. Fast-moving, high-contrast shapes like the designs on dazzle ships, however, did befuddle them. On average, observers underestimated the speed of fast moving, jazzy rectangles by 7 percent. The point here is that oceangoing ships of the WWI period were not very fast and so the test results suggest the dazzle effect was not very helpful. The crews, however, were reportedly very proud of their flashy-looking ships.
USS Freedom in dazzle paint
Dazzle is not dead, however. The USS Freedom, the first navy Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is painted in a modified dazzle scheme, the first major US Navy ship to wear a dazzle paint job since World War II.