Dazzle Camouflage: Hiding in Plain Sight

Unlike a submarine that can lurk beneath the waves, or an artillery tank that can camouflage itself among trees and the surrounding terrain, there is no hiding for a smoke-belching ship in the open waters of an ocean. So how does one go about camouflaging a ship during wartime? That was the question that troubled Britain during World War 1. Germany’s U-boats were creating havoc in the Atlantic sinking merchant ships in alarming numbers. Ideas that were proposed included covering them with mirrors, disguising them as giant whales, draping them in canvas to make them look like clouds, or making them appear like islands. But Norman Wilkinson, a Royal Navy volunteer reserve lieutenant came up with an ingenious solution—instead of trying to hide ships, make them conspicuous; paint them with odd shapes and violent contrasts of colors so as to “dazzle” the enemy. Dazzle camouflage on a World War 2-era ship. “Since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer – in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as the course on which she was heading,” Wilkinson, who was a painter, graphic designer and newspaper illustrator before the war, later told about his invention. Dazzle camouflage, as Wilkinson’s concept came to be called, comprised of a variety of geometric shapes and curves—stripes, swirls and irregular abstract—in contrasting colors such as black and white, green and mauve, orange and blue. These shapes and colors can befuddle the captain of a U-boat peering through a periscope making it hard for him to determine the ship’s actual shape, size and direction. Bold shapes at the bow and stern can make it difficult to tell apart one from the other.