My favorite camouflage approach of all time. Actually, it's more of an 'anti-camouflage', but it worked for a while. The birth of this style of maritime camouflage is attributed to Briton Norman Wilkinson. The British Admiralty was frustrated by the fact that they were losing so many supply ships to German U-boats, and by the fact that different weather conditions, and different lighting scenarios, made it difficult to come up with a camouflage scheme that would make it possible to make a ship harder to see under all possible conditions. Wilkinson came up with the idea of disregarding the idea of visual stealth, but instead painting a ship so that it was more difficult to see exactly which angle a ship might be steering towards. This was a brilliant idea, because most submarines and enemy surface ships used very complicated optical-mechanical sighting systems to estimate range towards the target, angle of deflection, and speed. The gunner (or whoever was sighting the torpedo) would then 'lead' the moving ship, and fire ahead of it (much like a hunter with a shotgun does). The idea behind what the British called 'Dazzle' painting, and what the Americans called 'Razzle-Dazzle', was to make it harder for crewman using optical rangefinders (which used a 'split-screen' much like some SLR cameras) to focus properly, and who had to estimate angles, as well. The British used dazzle painting on their ships all through WWI. The Americans used it starting in 1918, and through WW2. The British admiralty was not convinced of it's effectiveness, although it was good for morale (and I have read several British officer's excerpts from ship's logs which would, in fact, seem to indicate it's visual efficacy). The American navy had more confidence in it's effects. What brought the end of dazzle painting was the development of more effective targeting technologies, such as radar. Dazzle paint designs frequently used color, as shown by numerous surviving official designs, but unfortunately, there do not seem to be any existing color photos from WW1-era ships.This example is the French cruiser 'Gloire'.
This is fascinating. A real-world application of some of the inherent kinks in human vision. (I wonder if it would extend to other animals with binocular vision as well).
ReplyDeleteIf the U-boat crew suffered from migraine auras, as I do, dazzle would have the additional quality of reminding them of their headaches. I can't look at anything like this for too long without becoming nauseous or even getting a migraine.