Dazzle camouflage
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Dazzle camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle painting, was a camouflage paint scheme used on ships, mainly during World War I. It consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colours, interrupting and intersecting each other. At first glance it seems like an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it. Dazzle camouflage had a very specific purpose, however, which was to make it difficult to estimate the target ship's speed and heading and so disrupt the performance of the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery at the time.
The rangefinders were based on the co-incidence principle with an optical mechanism, operated by a human being to compute the range. The operator adjusted the mechanism until two half-images of the target displayed lined up into a complete picture. Dazzle camouflage was intended to make it hard to do this job because the clashing patterns wouldn't look "right" even when the two halves were correctly aligned. This became even more important when submarine periscopes were developed which included similar rangefinders. As an additional feature the dazzle pattern usually included a "false bow wave" painted on which was intended to make a true estimation of the ship's speed difficult.
The invention of dazzle camouflage is credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, who was on Royal Navy patrol duty in the English Channel. Dazzle camouflage was first implemented on the merchant ship SS Industry, and HMS Alsatian became the first dazzle painted Navy ship in August 1917. The US Navy adopted the technique the next year.
Dazzle camouflage's effectiveness is not entirely certain. The British Admiralty came to the conclusion that the scheme had no material effect on submarine attacks, but proved to be a morale boost for crews. American naval leadership expressed the dissenting opinion that dazzle camouflage was effective. Dazzle camouflage continued to be used until the end of World War II.
William MacKay, the creator of a popular scheme of camouflage approved by the Naval Consulting Board during World War I, wrote:
- The structural and characteristic lines and angles of a ship can be either softened or destroyed. According as the ship is viewed through [a] red or green or blue filter the ship presents three different images and through none of them an image so definite as a ship painted with a flat pigment gray.
However effective the scheme was in WWI, it eventually became completely obsolete as rangefinders became more advanced, and, by the time it would have been put to use again in WWII, the advance of widespread naval aviation and radar made it useless. The airplanes could observe the ships from the sky, and the radar could aim guns much farther than the eye could see.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- The Development of Naval Camouflage 1914 — 1945 - Part I
- DazZLe CaMOuFlage: High Difference Camouflage (Hodge Podge)
- Razzle Dazzle Camouflage
‘Dazzle’ camouflage is related to ‘Measure 32 ‘crazy quilt’ camouflage pattern’, of Pale Grey, Haze Grey, Navy Blue and Ocean Grey. [ref. Elliot, P. American Destroyer Escorts of WW2, Almark, ISBN 0 85524 161 6, 1974]
