In the spring of 2021, the British Royal Navy announced that one of their newest vessels,
HMS Tamar, would receive a new look: dazzle camouflage.
The idea behind the unique design is to confuse and mislead the enemy
regarding a ship’s course or a target’s range and speed.
Although this paint job with intersecting geometric patterns in black and four different
shades of gray may appear like a novelty, dazzle camouflage has been around for 100 years,
starting with a volunteer reserve soldier whose intellect impressed King George V himself.
The Royal Navy’s Worry
During World War I, one of Germany's most feared weapons was its fleet of U-Boats,
powerful submarines that would sneak up on British ships and destroy them
with torpedoes before their crews even realized what was happening.
For the duration of the war, the submarines successfully sank over 5,700 vessels,
taking the lives of almost 13,000 victims.
Amidst the chaos, the Royal Navy struggled to find a way to keep the Germans from attacking
their vessels. Camouflage paint jobs only worked for land warfare,
and hiding a massive cargo ship seemed impossible.
However, Norman Wilkinson, an English volunteer reserve lieutenant who had
been a painter, graphic designer, and newspaper illustrator back home,
came up with a bold but ingenious idea: dazzle camouflage.
The reasoning was that if you can't hide from the enemy, confuse them.
The Art of Confusion
Dazzle camouflage, also known as razzle dazzle in the US, consisted
of a series of geometric patterns painted in contrasting colors intersecting each other.
Unlike typical camouflage paint jobs, the intention was not to conceal the
vessels but to make it harder for the enemy to estimate a target's range,
speed, and heading, resulting in a poor firing position.
When the German U-Boats were underwater, their only way of sighting a British vessel was through
a periscope that poked out of the water for only a quick moment to avoid being detected.
With that brief coda, the Germans would then calculate where to aim their torpedo.
Dazzle camouflage would then interfere with the calculations,
making it difficult to discern the ships’ ends and the direction they were headed.
As the losses caused by U-Boat torpedoes continued to increase, the Royal Navy authorized
Wilkinson to set up a dazzle camouflage station at the Royal Academy in London.
He then recruited other artist friends, and they were all given Naval Reserve commissions.
Wilkinson first painted his designs on small-scale models
and viewed them through a periscope using screens, special lighting,
and background to test how his paintings would look at different times of the day.
When King George V paid a visit to the camouflage unit, Wilkinson invited him to
look through the periscope. His Majesty guessed that the model ship was moving south-by-west,
and was surprised to discover that he was wrong, as it was moving east-by-southeast.
In October of 1917, British officials ordered that all merchant ships be
painted with Wilkinson's designs. Each of the ships’ paint jobs was different
to avoid creating classes of ships that would be recognizable to the Germans.
By March of 1918, Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt invited Wilkinson
to travel to America. The Englishman helped set up a camouflage unit and taught
American impressionist painter Everett Warner how to design dazzle camouflage.
By the war’s end, over 2,000 ships had been painted with this unique technique.
World War II then witnessed several technological improvements,
including better rangefinders and radars. Still, dazzle camouflage returned and
remained in use in different kinds of vessels until the fall of Japan in 1945.
The paint scheme was then phased out by improvements in radar and optical devices.
A 21st Century Dazzle
On April 27, 2021, the Royal Navy announced that for the first time in over 70 years,
a British vessel with dazzle camouflage would be deployed.
The HMS Tamar, a Batch 2 River-class offshore patrol vessel commissioned in late 2020,
was painted during a maintenance period by shipwrights at A&P Group. They used
over 50 gallons of paint in four different shades of gray and black.
The ship, however, will continue to have her distinctive red lion emblems.
According to Tamar's Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Commander Michael Hutchinson,
the Royal Navy is [QUOTE]: "Really proud of our new paint scheme
and the historical significance that it comes with. Different styles of dazzle
were used by the Royal Navy on ships in various stations throughout the world,
and we are pleased to have been given an iconic new look before we deploy in the summer."
Commander David Louis of the Overseas Patrol Squadron stated that the Royal Navy's decision
to give the River-class ship the dazzle camouflage identity isn't military, but
rather a tribute to Wilkinson's legacy: [QUOTE]: "It is very much more about supporting the unique
identity of the squadron within the Royal Navy as part of their forward presence mission."
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other clever disguise methods used throughout both World Wars,
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