Dazzle camouflage

razzle dazzle / dazzle painting
2026-09-10 add · 430 words

A type of paint scheme applied to the entire hull of ships during the First World War, consisting of complex geometric patterns in contrasting colors. In English it is called dazzle camouflage, and in the United States also razzle dazzle; Japanese has a coined translation, genwaku meisai ("bewildering camouflage"). Unlike ordinary camouflage, which "hides" by blending into the background, it used deliberately conspicuous patterns to break up the outline of the hull, aiming to make it hard for the enemy to judge heading, speed, and ship type.

Purpose and mechanism

German submarines of the time estimated a target's course and speed from visual observation through the periscope before firing torpedoes. Dazzle camouflage did not aim to make the ship invisible, but to lower the enemy's aiming accuracy by making it difficult to tell bow from stern and to grasp the outline.

Origins

It is said to have been devised in 1917 by the British marine painter Norman Wilkinson. Wilkinson, who belonged to the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, submitted the scheme to the Admiralty in the spring of that year and was permitted to test it in August. The first ship to receive the paint scheme is said to have been HMS Industry, a small supply vessel launched in May 1917. After adoption by the British Admiralty it spread to the US Navy as well; rather than standardizing patterns by ship type, each ship was given its own unique pattern so that the type could not be guessed from the pattern. By November 1918 more than 2,300 ships are said to have been painted in dazzle camouflage, and it was used to a limited extent in the Second World War.

Assessment of effectiveness

In the Royal Navy of the time it was said to have raised crew morale, while whether it actually prevented hits and sinkings was debated even then. Recent research is also divided. Studies around 2011 showed experimentally that dazzle patterns distort an observer's perception of speed, while studies in the 2020s (Aston University and others) found no evidence to support the speed-misjudgment effect at distances expected in actual combat, suggesting that it may not have been as effective as originally claimed.

To verify

The theory that the zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed a similar camouflage scheme before Wilkinson, and the details of how far the two proposals overlapped
The difference between the loss rates reported on the British and American sides, and the validity of their interpretation
How far the conclusions of several recent studies agree on whether the effect exists

References

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