10 
LAND 6? WATER 
December 12, 1918 
The Art of Dazzle-Painting 
By jan Gordon, Lieut. R.N.V.R. 
"THE INDUSTRY" 
The first dazzle ship — contrast this pattern with the "Olympic," one of the latest developments 
"Say! You should see our Fleet! It's camouflaged so, 
it looks like a flock of sea-going Easter eggs. If you shut 
your eyes good and tight, and stand behind a wall, you can't 
see a ship a cable's length away. It was an English guy 
thought of it first, and his name's the first toast now at all the 
paint-makers' social reunions." — Extract from an American 
paper. 
CAMOUFLAGE is the oldest of the human arts. 
The first record of it is to be found in the early 
chapters of the Book of Genesis, and so salutary 
a lesson did humanity receive on that occasion 
that it has never ceased from practising since. 
The first military use of it appears to be the famous horse 
of Troy, at which time also the ships were painted with eyes 
forward and reddened cheeks, so that naval camouflage lias 
also a respectable antiquity. The true art of camouflage is 
to make an object appear to be what it is not, by means of 
grefen and brown patches, cut up by white or black lines. 
The military camoufler endeavours to turn guns, tanks, 
motor cars, and such-like objects into bits of scenery more 
or less appropriate to their locality ; but this is not the art 
of the naval painter ; and so the word camouflage, with its 
associations, has been dropped in favour of the more appro- 
priate word "dazzle-painting." 
|[^The unrestricted submarine warfare instituted by the 
Germans naturally brought about enormous efforts to counter- 
act the danger, and all the earliest efforts at a camouflage 
scheme had in view the object of making a ship an invisible 
object, or, at least, one very difficult to see. Unfortunately, 
most of the men who experimented in these directions were 
not sailors. A week of careful observation at sea would 
have shown them their error. The average sky value of the 
Atlantic, for instance, does not mean that the Atlantic is 
ever of that value. It varies from almost the blackest of 
clouds, upon which even a black ship in sunlight may shine 
as a light spot, to the glowing radiance of after sunset, upon 
which background a white ship becomes a black silhouette. 
The problem of producing an invisible ship upon this variant 
background is insuperable, especially when it must be remem- 
bered that the illumination of the ship is received from the 
sky itself, and therefore, except in direct sunlight, can never 
be as strong. Another drawback to the attempt to produce 
invisibility is the presence of coal-srnoke and of masts and 
shrouds, and as long as none of them could be got rid of there 
was little value in seeking a mere invisibility for the hull ; 
though some joker did suggest that a well-known American 
inventor had made a ship so invisible that nobody had seen 
it come or go. 
The solution of the naval problem was happily found in 
dazzle-painting. The idea of the work is to produce an 
effect which shall confuse the observer at the periscope to 
disguise from him, firstly, the type of ship he is dealing with ; 
secondly, its size and speed ; thirdly, its course ; and as the 
art of submarine attack depends upon a knowledge of these 
various constituents, dazzle-painting, if it did nothing else, 
would tend to make periscope observations enormously pro- 
longed, with the chance of the ship spotting the menace, and 
either attacking it or of escaping. 
The scheme was invented by Lieutenant-Commander 
Norman Wilkinson, R.N.V.R., O.B.E., R.I., when in command 
of a coastal motor launch. ' He had had the advantage of 
being a practical seaman and of having seen a goodly mass of 
our transports at sea, for he was at Gallipoli. He saw, 
firstly, that our huge black-painted ships, with white upper 
works, or even the naval grey ones, presented the easiest of 
targets to the enemy's torpedo. It were as though the 
painting were designed to help the enemy, the dark hull 
severely outlined against the white, giving the exact angle of 
the ship's course, the white upper works marking clearly 
out the shadows beneath the boat and bridge decks, the yellow 
funnels. and masts, which gleamed for miles ; and it suddenly 
occurred to him upon a train journey how if all this were 
broken up into large masses of divergent colour form and 
value what a great difference would be effected. 
Tlie seekers after invisibility had, to a great extent, ignored 
the fact that a ship is not a plain silhouette ; they had missed 
the accumulation of small matter along the deck — winches, 
capstans, bollards, donkey-engines, etc. — which make a sort 
of deep-tinted fuzz, outlining the whole of the forward and 
after parts of the ship as clearly in most weathers as though 
it -were drawn with a black chalk pencil. They ignored the 
shadows beneath the flying bridge, beneath the boat decks, 
beneath the bilges of the boats, and even in the cowls of 
the ventilators. All these things arfe of immense importance 
in estimating the exact course of a ship for submarine attack, 
and Commander Wilkinson realised that with paint these 
things could to some extent be distorted ; their positions 
could not be altered, but they could be added to, made 
definitely misleading. He saw how by strong contrasts the 
fore side of the bridge could be displaced, and how, in general, 
by means of strongly contrasted blacks with lighter colours 
the whole tendency of the ship could be twisted and altered. 
Upon these points there has, 1 believe, been a general 
