Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle (in the U.S.) or dazzle painting, is a type of ship camouflage that was used extensively in World War I, and to a lesser extent in World War II and afterwards. Credited to the British marine artist Norman Wilkinson, though with a rejected prior claim by the zoologist John Graham Kerr, it consisted of complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colours interrupting and intersecting each other.
Unlike other forms of camouflage, the intention of dazzle is not to conceal but to make it difficult to estimate a target's range, speed, and heading. Norman Wilkinson explained in 1919 that he had intended dazzle primarily to mislead the enemy about a ship's course and so cause them to take up a poor firing position.
Dazzle was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy. Each ship's dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly recognisable to the enemy. The result was that a profusion of dazzle schemes was tried, and the evidence for their success was, at best, mixed. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the colour schemes were effective. Experiments were carried out on aircraft in both World Wars with little success.
Dazzle attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like he had invented it. Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the First World War, painted a series of canvases of dazzle shipsMarter, Joan M. The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art, Oxford University Press, 2011, vol. 1, p. 401.Saunders, Nicholas J.; Cornish, Paul. (eds). Contested Objects: Material Memories of the Great War, Routledge, 2014. Jonathan Black: A few broad stripes': Perception, Deception, and the 'Dazzle Ship' phenomenon of the First World War", pp. 190–202.Newbolt, Sir Henry John Newbolt. Submarine and Anti-Submarine, Longmans, Green and Co, 1919. p. 46. "You look long and hard at this dazzle-ship. She doesn't give you any sensation of being dazzled; but she is, in some queer way, all wrong".Deer, Patrick. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford University Press, 2009, p. 46. after the war, based on his wartime work. Arthur Lismer similarly painted a series of dazzle ship canvases.
Intended purposes
At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it. The approach was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions. The British zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed the application of camouflage to British warships in the First World War, outlining what he believed to be the applicable principle, disruptive camouflage, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining the goal was to confuse, not to conceal, by disrupting a ship's outline. Kerr compared the effect to that created by the patterns on a series of land animals, the giraffe, zebra and jaguar.Forbes, 2009. pp. 87–89
Taking up the zebra example, Kerr proposed that the vertical lines of ships' masts be disrupted with irregular white bands. Hiding these would make ships less conspicuous, and would "greatly increase the difficulty of accurate range finding". However, in the same letter, Kerr also called for countershading, the use of paint to obliterate self-shading and thus to flatten out the appearance of solid, recognisable shapes. For example, he proposed painting ships' guns grey on top, grading to white below, so the guns would disappear against a grey background.
Similarly, he advised painting shaded parts of the ship white, and brightly lit parts in grey, again with smooth grading between them, making shapes and structures invisible. Kerr was thus hoping to achieve both a measure of invisibility and a degree of confusion for the enemy using a rangefinder. Whether through this mixing of goals, or the Admiralty's scepticism about "any theory based upon the analogy of animals", the Admiralty claimed in July 1915 to have conducted "various trials" and decided to paint its ships in monotone grey, not adopting any of Kerr's suggestions. It had made up its mind, and all Kerr's subsequent letters achieved nothing.
The American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer had developed a theory of camouflage based on countershading and disruptive coloration, which he had published in the controversial 1909 book Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom. Seeing the opportunity to put his theory into service, Thayer wrote to Churchill in February 1915, proposing to camouflage submarines by countershading them like fish such as mackerel, and advocating painting ships white to make them invisible. His ideas were considered by the Admiralty, but rejected along with Kerr's proposals as being "freak methods of painting ships ... of academic interest but not of practical advantage".
The Admiralty noted that the required camouflage would vary depending on the light, the changing colours of sea and sky, the time of day, and the angle of the sun. Thayer made repeated and desperate efforts to persuade the authorities, and in November 1915 travelled to England where he gave demonstrations of his theory around the country. He 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.
The marine artist and Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve officer Norman Wilkinson, agreed with Kerr that dazzle's aim was confusion rather than concealment, but disagreed about the type of confusion to be sown in the enemy's mind. What Wilkinson wanted to do was to make it difficult for an enemy to estimate a ship's type, size, speed, and heading, and thereby confuse enemy ship commanders into taking mistaken or poor firing positions. An observer would find it difficult to know exactly whether the stern or the bow was in view; and it would be correspondingly difficult to estimate whether the observed vessel was moving towards or away from the observer's position.Glover, Michael. "Now you see it... Now you don't" The Times. 10 March 2007.
Wilkinson advocated "masses of strongly contrasted colour" to confuse the enemy about a ship's heading. Thus, while dazzle, in some lighting conditions or at close ranges, might actually increase a ship's visibility,Forbes, 2009. pp. 90–91 the conspicuous patterns would obscure the outlines of the ship's hull (though admittedly not the superstructureForbes, 2009. p. 97), disguising the ship's correct heading and making it harder to hit.Forbes, 2009. p. 96
Dazzle was created in response to an extreme need, and hosted by an organisation, the Admiralty, which had already rejected an approach supported by scientific theory: Kerr's proposal to use "parti-colouring" based on the known camouflage methods of disruptive coloration and countershading. This was dropped in favour of an admittedly non-scientific approach, led by the socially well-connected Wilkinson.Forbes, 2009. pp. 98–100 Kerr's explanations of the principles were clear, logical, and based on years of study, while Wilkinson's were simple and inspirational, based on an artist's perception. The decision was likely because the Admiralty felt comfortable with Wilkinson, in sharp contrast to their awkward relationship with the stubborn and pedantic Kerr.Forbes, 2009. p. 92.
Wilkinson claimed not to have known of the zoological theories of camouflage of Kerr and Thayer, admitting only to having heard of the "old invisibility-idea" from Roman times.
It was Wilkinson's social connections that brought the scheme to fruition. Captain Clement Greatorex, the Director of Naval Equipment was introduced to the idea in April 1917 and coined the term "dazzle painting". The following month, an auxiliary stores vessel, , was experimentally painted to Wilkinson's design. The Admiralty refused Wilkinson any facilities to further the project, but the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood arranged for the use of studios at the Royal Academy of Arts in Burlington House. Assembling a team of art students and artists in Royal Naval Reserve uniform, including the Vorticist Edward Wadsworth, Wilkinson experimented with models mounted on a turntable which could be observed through a periscope. He then outmaneuvered the reluctant Admiralty by going straight to Joseph Maclay, the Minister of Shipping, resulting in the British Merchant Service adopting dazzle painting in October 1917 and the Royal Navy following suit shortly afterwards.
Possible mechanisms
Disrupting rangefinding
In 1973, the naval museum curator Robert F. Sumrall (following Kerr) suggested a mechanism by which dazzle camouflage may have sown the kind of confusion that Wilkinson had intended for it. Coincidence rangefinders used for naval artillery had an optical mechanism, operated by a human to compute the range. The operator adjusted the mechanism until the two half-images of the target lined up in a complete picture. Dazzle, 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. Patterns sometimes also included a false bow wave to make it difficult for an enemy to estimate the ship's speed.
Disguising heading and speed
The historian Sam Willis argued that since Wilkinson knew it was impossible to make a ship invisible with paint, the "extreme opposite" was the answer, using conspicuous shapes and violent colour contrasts to confuse enemy submarine commanders. Willis pointed out, using the dazzle scheme as an example, that different mechanisms could have been at work. The contradictory patterns on the ship's funnels could imply the ship was on a different heading (as Wilkinson had said). The curve on the hull below the front funnel could seem to be a false bow wave, creating a misleading impression of the ship's speed; additionally, the striped patterns on the bow and stern could create confusion about which end of the ship was which.
That dazzle did indeed work along these lines is suggested by the testimony of a U-boat captain:
In 1920, a student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Leo Blodgett, experimented with ship models to evaluate the effect of dazzle patterns on observers, finding that they did work to some extent. The experiments were repeated in 2025 by Tim Meese and Samantha Strong at Aston University; the team found that there were two effects: the "twist effect" in which the pattern misleads the observer about the ship's heading, and a horizon effect in which a ship seen on the horizon seems to be travelling along the horizon even if its course is 25° towards or away from the observer. Dazzle's twist effect, as Blodgett had reported, exists but is quite small; the horizon effect is far stronger.
Motion dazzle
In 2011, the scientist Nicholas E. Scott-Samuel and colleagues presented evidence using moving patterns on a computer that human perception of speed is distorted by dazzle patterns. However, the speeds required for motion dazzle are much higher than were available to First World War ships: Scott-Samuel notes that the targets in the experiment would correspond to a dazzle-patterned Land Rover vehicle at a range of , travelling at . If such a dazzling target causes a 7% confusion in the observed speed, a rocket propelled grenade travelling that distance in half a second would strike from the intended aiming point, or 7% of the distance moved by the target. This might be enough to save lives in the dazzle-patterned vehicle, and perhaps to cause the missile to miss entirely.
World War I
Royal Navy