Examples of 
disruptive or dazzle camouflage and its corollary, coincident disruption (consisting of blending and dazzle combined), are found throughout the natural world (in both plants and animals). Such tactics have also been widely applied throughout human history.

The specific term dazzle painting was coined in 1917 by its British originator, a Navy lieutenant and marine artist named Norman Wilkinson. He devised the method in response to the use of torpedoes by attacking German submarines, called U-boats. It was Wilkinson’s idea to apply bewildering, geometric shapes on the sides of ships, both military and merchant.























Above WWI-era British postcards of paintings of various dazzle camouflaged ships.

•    •    •

The purpose of dazzle painting a ship was not to make it invisible (indeed, at times the dazzle pattern made it more visible), but simply to divert the aim of the submarine gunner, who was required to "aim ahead" of a distant, moving target, under less than ideal viewing conditions, and who thus depended on critically accurate estimates of the ship's speed, direction and location.






Camouflage artwork 
© David Bower












Camouflage artwork 
© Harvey Opgenorth

From time immemorial the philosophers and other scene painters have daubed the sky with dazzle paint.

—Wallace Stevens

































DazZLe CaMoUflage:
High Difference Camouflage
(hodgepodge)

compiled by Roy R. Behrens
Copyright © 2006. All rights reserved.
 
British and American ship camoufleurs faced the problem during WWI of having to invent hundreds of new dazzle ship painting schemes. Initially, they not only wanted to make a unique pattern on each dazzle-painted ship, they also preferred that each side of any ship be one-of-a-kind. They couldn't do it, and they settled instead for a "template" approach, in which certain patterns became standard and were adapted for use on comparable ships.
 
US Government photographs above show the its naval camouflage team (c1918) in the process of making ship models, then applying dazzle patterns, for subsequent testing purposes. In the top photograph, Frederic Waugh is seated second from the right, painting ship models with other members of the camouflage team. In the lower photograph, the person on the left is apparently not Everett Warner (earlier, I mistakenly said that it was). Reproduced at right is a photograph of a dazzle-painted ship model on the left, as compared with a monochrome gray model.  
 
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[A dazzle-painted ship] was like an enormous cubist painting with great sheets of ultramarine blue, black, and green, sometimes parallel but more often with sharp corners cleaving into one another, and although you don’t quite make it out, you can divine a reason, a plan, a guiding principle, a scheme.
Everett
Warner
Frederic Waugh
John Gregory
Gordon
Stevenson
M. O’Connell
M. Nash
Everett
Warner
Frederic Waugh
In this photograph [above] of Warner’s team of camouflage artists, the identity of each person is indicated. At far right on this page is a detail from another photograph of Warner (possibly taken the same day). More dazzle painted ship models are shown at right, courtesy of Thomas Warner.
Everett
Warner
Frederic Waugh
John Gregory
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• Dazzle Camouflage • Dazzle-Painted Ships • Everett Warner • More Dazzle • Abbott H. Thayer Bio • Camouflage Bibliography • Gestalt and Camouflage • Camouflage Artists & Scholars Home