You’re standing on the deck of a German U-boat in 1917. The North Atlantic is a grey, churning mess. Through the periscope, you spot a British merchant ship. But something is wrong. Instead of a solid grey hull, the vessel is covered in jarring, jagged stripes of black, white, and blue. It looks like a Picasso painting had a head-on collision with a zebra. You can’t tell where the bow ends. You can't tell if it’s coming toward you or moving away.
That was the point.
Dazzle ships World War 1 didn't use camouflage to hide. You can’t hide a massive steel ship emitting a giant plume of black coal smoke on a flat horizon. Instead, they used "Razzle Dazzle"—a high-contrast, geometric paint scheme designed to break up the ship's silhouette and mess with a torpedo officer’s math.
The Artist Who Tricked the Kaiser
Norman Wilkinson wasn’t a career naval strategist. He was a marine painter and a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. By 1917, the situation for Britain was dire. German U-boats were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons of shipping every month. Traditional "low visibility" grey paint wasn't working. Wilkinson realized that since you couldn’t make a ship invisible, you had to make it impossible to aim at.
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Targeting a moving ship with a torpedo in 1917 wasn't about "locking on" like a modern missile. It was a geometry problem. A U-boat commander had to estimate the ship's speed, its distance, and, most importantly, its heading. If you miscalculate the angle of the ship by just eight or ten degrees, your torpedo misses by hundreds of yards. Wilkinson’s "Dazzle-painting" used bold shapes and contrasting colors to create optical illusions. A painted "false bow wave" could make a ship look like it was going ten knots faster than it actually was. Slanted stripes on the funnel could make it look like the ship was turning left when it was actually steaming straight ahead.
Honestly, it looked ridiculous. The British Admiralty was skeptical at first, but when you’re losing the war, you try the weird stuff. They set up a Dazzle Department at the Royal Academy of Arts. Wilkinson led a team of "camoufleurs," including Edward Wadsworth and several women from the Royal Academy, to design specific patterns for every vessel. No two ships were painted exactly the same. They even used tiny wooden models and viewed them through periscopes in a laboratory to see which patterns were the most disorienting.
Why it Actually Worked (Sorta)
People often ask if the dazzle ships World War 1 era were actually successful or if it was just a giant art project. The data is kinda messy. If you look at the raw numbers, the sinking rates for dazzle-painted ships weren't drastically lower than those for grey ships. However, there’s a nuance most people miss.
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Insurance records and naval logs suggested that while dazzle ships were still being hit, they were being hit in less vital areas. Because the U-boat commanders were confused about the ship's exact position, they were often firing "behind" the engine room or hitting the bow instead of the midsection. More importantly, the psychological effect on the crew was massive. Sailors felt safer in a "dazzled" ship. It gave them a sense that the Navy was actually doing something proactive to counter the "invisible" threat of the submarines.
It wasn't just the British, either. The U.S. Navy jumped on the bandwagon once they entered the war. They established their own camouflage district under the direction of Everett Warner. By the end of 1918, over 2,000 British ships and hundreds of American vessels looked like floating avant-garde galleries. Even the legendary RMS Mauretania—sister ship to the Lusitania—was decked out in a wild checkboard and stripe pattern.
The Science of Disruption
What Wilkinson was doing is now called "disruptive coloration." You see it in nature all the time. Think about a zebra. A single zebra standing in a field is easy to see. But a hundred zebras running in a pack? Their stripes blend together, making it impossible for a lion to pick out where one animal starts and another ends.
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On the high seas, this was vital because of the "coincidence rangefinder." This was the tool U-boat officers used to determine distance. It worked by aligning two halves of an image to form a complete picture. Dazzle patterns, with their broken lines and mismatched scales, made it incredibly difficult to align those images. If the lines of the ship's railing were painted to lead the eye in three different directions, the rangefinder became almost useless.
The End of the Rainbow
The era of the dazzle ships World War 1 style didn't last long into the next conflict. By World War II, technology had caught up. The invention of radar meant that a submarine didn't need to look through a periscope to "see" a ship. An optical illusion can't trick a radio wave. While some dazzle-style painting was used in WWII to confuse pilots during dive-bombing runs, the glory days of the wild, hand-painted cubist destroyers were largely over by 1945.
Today, you can still see the influence of dazzle in the most unexpected places. Car manufacturers use "dazzle" wraps on prototype cars during road tests. Those weird black-and-white swirly patterns you see on "spy shots" of the next BMW or Ford are there for the exact same reason Wilkinson painted ships: to hide the curves and lines of the body from cameras and competitors.
Actionable Ways to Explore Dazzle History
If you're fascinated by this weird intersection of fine art and naval warfare, don't just read about it. You can actually see the remnants of this history if you know where to look.
- Visit the HMS Caroline in Belfast: This is the last surviving light cruiser from the Battle of Jutland. She has been restored and occasionally features dazzle-themed exhibits that show exactly how the patterns were applied to her hull.
- Check the Imperial War Museum (IWM) Archives: They hold the original wooden models Wilkinson used. These models are tiny, hand-painted masterpieces that were once used to decide the fate of thousands of sailors.
- Look at "Leith Dazzle Ship": In 2016, artist Ciara Phillips painted the MV Fingal in a modern dazzle pattern to commemorate the centenary of the war. It's a great way to see the scale of these designs in person.
- Search for "Everett Warner Camouflage Designs": The U.S. National Archives has digitized many of the original American dazzle plans. You can see the specific color codes—often including "Omega Blue" and "Thistle Gray"—that were used to confuse the Germans.
The story of dazzle ships reminds us that sometimes the most effective solution to a high-tech problem isn't more armor or bigger guns—it's a bucket of paint and a bit of creative thinking. It was a brief moment in history where art literally went to war. It didn't win the war on its own, but it certainly made the North Atlantic a whole lot more interesting to look at.