How the WWI Dazzle Ships Redefined Camouflage
In 1917, at the height of World War I, England was in deep trouble. Germany had established an advantage in the waters surrounding the British Isles, and its policy of unrestricted warfare meant that even merchant ships were targets. Vessels were being sunk at a rate that threatened to completely incapacitate shipping to England, cutting off all manner of supplies. For the British to avoid certain defeat, they would need to find a way to protect the outgunned and outmaneuvered cargo ships. In response, the Royal Navy developed a novel paint scheme for British vessels that practically reinvented the concept of camouflage. These “dazzle ships,” as they were called, were a unique defense tactic that gave new meaning to the phrase “the art of war.”
The German navy had one of the most fearsome attack vessels of World War I: the Unterseeboot, often referred to by the abbreviation “U-boat.” Unterseeboot translates to “under the sea boat,” and these vessels were some of the first submarines used in wide-scale military operations. During the First World War, U-boats were deployed in retaliation for England’s blockade of the North Sea and English Channel; Germany’s strategy was to attack all shipping to England, and in effect create its own blockade. Germany issued a tacit threat that “a U-boat cannot spare the crews of merchant ships, but must send them and their ships to the bottom of the sea. All shipping should be warned and all merchant shipping to England should be brought to a halt in a short period of time.”
Of course, halting all shipping trade was not a feasible action for England. The Royal Navy countered with Q-ships, which were war vessels disguised as merchant ships to bait U-boats into surfacing for an attack, at which point the Q-ship would reveal its hidden weapons and fire on the outgunned U-boat. The tactic depended upon surprise, so its success was temporary: The Germans adjusted by switching from attacking with surface guns to attacking with torpedoes while still submerged. Torpedoes were a more costly weapon, but Germany was investing heavily in U-boats, increasing its fleet sevenfold between 1914 and 1917 in an effort to swiftly defeat England.
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The expanded, torpedo-equipped U-boat fleet wreaked havoc. Between March and December 1917, 925 British ships were sunk by U-boats — a rate of approximately 23 per week. England needed countermeasures, but anti-submarine weapons were limited at the time. Depth charges (underwater bombs) were in use by 1916, but they were primitive; their effectiveness was also limited by the inability to accurately locate a submerged U-boat. The hydrophone could detect the presence of a submarine in the water, but it couldn’t indicate distance — sonar was still years away. England needed a way to protect its ships.
The U-boats’ targeting strategy was to locate ships by the smoke emitted from their smokestacks against the horizon. The submarine would then close in to a distance of approximately 1,000 to 2,000 feet from the target, in order to be in torpedo range. Achieving a hit with the torpedo depended on accurately determining the speed and heading of the target; at the distance the submarines kept, even a slight miscalculation would result in a miss. It was Royal Navy lieutenant and painter-designer Norman Wilkinson who realized that the narrow margin between torpedo success and failure provided a defense opportunity.
U-boats viewed their targets through a periscope for only a very short time, so as to avoid the periscope being spotted and giving away the location of the submarine. “I suddenly got the idea,” Wilkinson later recalled, “that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer — in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading.” The idea was to disorient and dazzle during the short amount of time a U-boat commander had to view the ship.
After the strategy was successfully pitched to the British Admiralty, 50 ships were ordered to be dazzle painted, and Wilkinson was tapped to lead a Dazzle Section to prepare the paint schemes, which Wilkinson described as being designed for “maximum distortion” — in other words, to create a distorted view of the ship when viewed through a submarine periscope.
No two ships had the same design, and each ship was painted differently on its port and starboard sides. When the Royal Navy asked observers for their impressions on whether or not the dazzle camouflage was effective, they made comments such as, “[It was] almost impossible to say how she was steering,” and “[It] sometimes appears to be going in the opposite direction.” Satisfied by that result, the Admiralty ordered all merchant ships to be painted in dazzle camouflage in October 1917. By June 1918, more than 2,300 ships were dazzle painted.
The concept made its way to the United States as well. When U.S. Navy Admiral William S. Sims visited England, he was so impressed with dazzle painting that he convinced the U.S. government to request that Wilkinson be brought to the United States in order to help establish a dazzle painting operation stateside. Wilkinson traveled to Washington, D.C., in March 1918 and met with Franklin D. Roosevelt (who was then the assistant secretary of the Navy). FDR expressed his enthusiasm for dazzle painting, while also noting, “We have no department of camouflage here.”
Wilkinson spent the next month establishing the American Camouflage Section, which consisted of two subdivisions: a research division at Eastman Kodak, composed of scientists, and a design division in Washington, D.C., composed of artists.
In both the U.K. and U.S., the dazzle designs were strikingly angular and futuristic. A 1918 issue of Popular Science suggested that the “crazy splashes of paint and freakish stripes” might be seen as “the whimsical color schemes of half-demented cubists and futurists.” Other critics called the camouflaged ships “a futurist’s bad dream,” a “flock of sea-going Easter Eggs,” and “a cross between a boiler explosion and a railroad accident.”
But was the dazzle painting effective? A definitive answer is elusive — additional defensive measures such as convoy escorts were put into practice around the same time, making it impossible to isolate the impact of dazzle painting. But the reduction in ships sunk by U-boats by the summer of 1918 does correlate with the widespread introduction of dazzle camouflage. And Wilkinson pointed out in a March 1920 issue of Journal of the Royal Society of Arts that the German navy also adopted dazzle camouflage, suggesting the enemy found value in the tactic. What’s more, according to a 1918 issue of Popular Science, the United States War Risk Insurance Board ordered that any ship that was not dazzle painted would be subject to higher premiums for maritime insurance — in a world where money talks, that may be the most telling of all.
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