One of Germany’s most feared and effective weapons during
World War I was its fleet of submarines—known as U-boats—that roamed the Atlantic, sneaking up underwater on British merchant ships and destroying them with torpedoes. During the course of the war, they sank more than 5,700 vessels,
killing more than 12,700 non-combatants in the process.
The British weren’t sure what to do. Camouflage worked in land warfare, but it was another matter for an object as big as a cargo ship to blend into the ocean, especially when smoke was billowing from its stacks.
But a Royal Navy volunteer reserve lieutenant named Norman Wilkinson—a painter, graphic designer and newspaper illustrator in his civilian life—came up with a radical but ingenious solution: Instead of trying to hide ships, make them conspicuous.
By covering ships’ hulls with startling stripes, swirls and irregular abstract shapes that brought to mind the Cubist paintings of
Pablo Picasso or
Georges Braque, one could momentarily confuse a German U-boat officer peering through a periscope. The patterns would make it more difficult to figure out the ship’s size, speed, distance and direction.
Wilkinson’s idea was a startling contrast to those of other camouflage theorists. American artist Abbott Thayer, for example, advocated painting ships white and concealing their smokestacks with canvas in an effort to make them blend into the ocean, according to
Smithsonian.
Dazzle camouflage, as Wilkinson’s concept came to be called, “appeared to be counter-intuitive,” explains
Roy R. Behrens, a professor of art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, who writes “
Camoupedia,” a blog that’s a compendium of research on the art of camouflage. “For Wilkinson to come up with the ideas of redefining camouflage as high visibility as opposed to low visibility was pretty astonishing.”
As Peter Forbes writes in his 2009 book
Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, Wilkinson—who commanded an 80-foot motorboat used for minesweeping off the British coast—apparently was inspired during a weekend fishing trip in the Spring of 1917. When he returned to the Royal Navy’s Devonport dockyard, he went straight to his superior officer with his idea.
“I knew it was utterly impossible to render a ship invisible,” Wilkinson later recalled, according to Forbes’ book. But it had occurred to him that if a black ship was broken up with white stripes it would visually confuse the enemy.
“The idea had precedent in nature, with the pattern disruption in the coloration of animals,” Behrens says. As a
study by British and Australian researchers nearly a century later would reveal, zebras’ stripes seem to serve that purpose, turning a herd into what appears to be a chaotic mess of lines from a distance, and making it tougher for lions and other predators to intercept them.
As Behrens explains, when submerged, the Germans’ only way of sighting a target was through the periscope, which they could only poke through the water for a fleeting moment because of the risk of being detected. They had to use that tiny bit of visual data to calculate where in the water to aim the torpedo, so that it would arrive at that spot at the same moment as the ship they were trying to sink.
Wilkinson’s camouflage scheme was designed to interfere with those calculations, by making it difficult to tell which end of the ship was which, and where it was headed. With torpedoes, there wasn’t much margin for error, so if the dazzle camouflage threw off the calculations by only a few degrees, that might be enough to cause a miss and save a British ship.