It’s 1910 and the height of the Great War. You are manning the periscope of a German U-boat, a naval submarine targeting merchant ships in the Atlantic. You are constantly scanning for possible targets. These are the days before radar so your keen eyes are the main tool to detect enemy ships. Suddenly, a strange form comes into view. It’s hard to see its contours and as it comes closer, the form remains unclear. You’re in the middle of the open ocean, so it must be a ship, but you can’t tell its type, speed, or the direction of movement because of the stripes painted across it. You’ve encountered a ship with dazzle camouflage, also called razzle dazzle.
A periscope view comparing a ship painted with dazzle camouflage with one painted a standard solid color, 1922.
Painting by Arthur Lismer captured the return of the troopship SS Olympic (the Titanic’s sister ship) painted in multi-coloured dazzle camouflage, added in 1917 at the height of the German U-boat threat.
We can all agree that it’s impossible to make a 5,600 ton, 400 foot long ship invisible. Instead, the British military in World War I decided to make their ships even more visible but also harder to interpret. U-boats would target British ships and torpedo their hulls, but not all hits were as damaging as others. If damage could be more limited, fewer ships would sink, they thought. So they began to paint these giant ships. The effect was not unlike a herd of zebras. When they are standing all together, it’s hard to tell where one ends or the next begins. For the ships, the black and white or multi-colored paint jobs confused the U-boat operators enough so that they could not tell if it was one ship or several and made it harder to detect the hull of the ship accurately.
USS West Mahomet painted in dazzle camouflage, 1918.
But did it work? This is harder to determine. Over 2,000 British ships were painted in dazzle camouflage with the United States military following suit after entering the war. There were many factors that went into whether or not a ship was hit or sunk. Although around the same number of dazzle ships as non-camoflagued ships were hit, fewer razzle dazzle ships sank. The tactic was resumed again in a more limited way during World War II with some airplanes also painted to more limited apparent success.