“It was exploiting the limited view of the periscope,” Behrens explains.
An art-lover today might assume that dazzle camouflage was the brainchild of a cubist painter, not someone such as Wilkinson, a
representational artist who liked to paint ships and seascapes. Claudia Covert, a special collections librarian at the Rhode Island School of Design and author of a 2007 article on Dazzle camouflage in Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, says that Wilkinson “was probably aware of these contemporary movements—Cubism, Futurism, and Vorticism. In fact, one of the Vorticist painters, Edward Wadsworth, oversaw ships being dazzled in Liverpool during the war.”
Additionally, “you have to remember that Wilkinson was not only a seascape painter but also a poster designer,” Behrens says. “So he had to work with abstract forms, colors and shapes.”
Though the British Admiralty probably didn’t include too many modern art enthusiasts, the losses from U-boat attacks were so devastating that they soon authorized Wilkinson to set up a camouflage unit at the Royal Academy in London. He recruited other artists, who were given Naval Reserve commissions, and they got to work.
Wilkinson made models of ships on a revolving table and then viewed them through a periscope, using screens, lights and backgrounds to see how the dazzle paint schemes would look at various times of day and night. He used one of those models to impress a visitor, King George V, who stared through the periscope and guessed that the model ship was moving south-by-west, only to be surprised to discover that it was moving east-by-southeast.
By October 1917, British officials were sufficiently convinced of dazzle’s effectiveness that they ordered that all merchant ships should get the special paint jobs, according to this 1999 article by Behrens.
At the request of the U.S. government, Wilkinson sailed across the Atlantic in March 1918 and met with Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt, and then helped to set up a camouflage unit headed by American impressionist painter Everett Warner.
By the end of the war, more than 2,300 British ships had been decorated with dazzle camouflage. How successful dazzle actually was in thwarting U-boat attacks isn’t clear. As Forbes explains, a postwar commission concluded that it probably only provided a slight advantage.
“When the US Navy adopted Wilkinson's scheme for both merchant and fighting ships there is statistical evidence to support Wilkinson's technique,” Forbes says. A total of 1,256 merchant and fighting ships, were camouflaged between March 1 and November 11, 1918. Ninety six ships over 2,500 tons were sunk; of these only 18 were camouflaged and all of them were merchant ships. "None of the camouflaged fighting ships were sunk,” he says
“It’s important to remember that ships didn’t just rely upon dazzle camouflage for protection from U-boats,” Behrens explains. “It was used in combination with tactics such as zig-zagging and traveling in convoys, in which the most vulnerable ships were kept in the center of the formation, surrounded by faster, more dangerous ships capable of destroying submarines.” The synergy of those measures was “wonderfully effective,” he says.
Dazzle camouflage was resurrected by the U.S. during
World War II, and was used on the decks of ships as well, in an effort to confuse enemy aircraft. Today’s electronic surveillance technology makes dazzle pretty much obsolete for protecting ships, but as Forbes points out, the concept of visually disruptive patterns is still used in military uniforms.