17 Facts About Dazzle camouflage

Dazzle camouflage, 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 and afterwards.

Dazzle camouflage was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy.

Dazzle camouflage attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like himself had invented it.

American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer had developed a theory of Dazzle camouflage based on countershading and disruptive coloration, which he had published in the controversial 1909 book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom.

Admiralty noted that the required Dazzle camouflage would vary depending on the light, the changing colours of sea and sky, the time of day, and the angle of the sun.

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Dazzle camouflage had a warm welcome from Kerr in Glasgow, and was so enthused by this show of support that he avoided meeting the War Office, who he had been intending to win over, and instead sailed home, continuing to write ineffective letters to the British and American authorities.

In 1973, the naval museum curator Robert F Sumrall suggested a mechanism by which dazzle camouflage may have sown the kind of confusion that Wilkinson had intended for it.

Dazzle camouflage, Sumrall argued, was intended to make that hard, as clashing patterns looked abnormal even when the two halves were aligned, something that became more important when submarine periscopes included such rangefinders.

Dazzle camouflage did indeed work along these lines is suggested by the testimony of a U-boat captain:.

Dazzle camouflage argued both for countershading, and for disruptive coloration, both as used by animals.

Wilkinson's dazzle camouflage was accepted by the Admiralty, even without practical visual assessment protocols for improving performance by modifying designs and colours.

Dazzle camouflage agreed that he had not suggested anywhere in his letters that his system would "create an illusion as to the course of the vessel painted".

Dazzle camouflage's effectiveness was highly uncertain at the time of the First World War, but it was nonetheless adopted both in the UK and North America.

Dazzle camouflage measures were used until 1945; in February 1945 the United States Navy's Pacific Fleet decided to repaint its ships in non-dazzle measures against the kamikaze threat, while the Atlantic Fleet continued to use dazzle, ships being repainted if transferred to the Pacific.

Dazzle camouflage claimed credit for camouflage experiments, which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique.

In Britain, Edward Wadsworth, who supervised dazzle camouflage painting in the war, created a series of canvases after the war based on his dazzle work on ships.

In civilian life, patterns reminiscent of dazzle camouflage are sometimes used to mask a test car during trials, to make determining its exterior design difficult.