This popped up on my news feed this morning,
I’m an old armor guy but I do like ships and have a fondness for the Dazzle camo
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Recently?
Ahem …
Swedish navy ships have had that type of splinter camouflage at least since 1987
This ship model was photographed 1987, the real ship was launched 1986
We did have similar patterns earlier, article, with photo, about the final cruise of HMS Göta Lejon 1963-64.
The Swedish coast has some rocky areas,
here is a splinter camouflaged cruiser under camo-nets tied up by a rock wall
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Now THAT’s impressive!
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There are quite a few contemporary accounts of the perceived effectiveness of “Dazzle” schemes. One problem for a statistical analysis is the sample chosen because in WW1 each ship (most of which were merchant vessels: 2,700 of the British merchant marine had been so adorned by the war’s end) had it’s own official individual scheme (the RN attempted some standardized designs for smaller vessels); the IWM retains not only a vast collection of drawings but also substantial numbers of models built at the time to illustrate the schemes.
I seem to recall at the time of the Falklands War the Chilean Navy adopted a form of “warpaint”…
Cheers,
M
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Yes, recently re-imagined for the Royal Navy. Prior to this they were in overall grey.
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This is the ship you didn’t see in the picture in my previous post, at sea, with splinter camo:
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Two photos of USS Isabel, PY-10 (later SP 521). Not intending to hijack the thread but I have a personal connection to this ship, which I will explain below. This is Isabel in 1917.
Both images came from USN’s Naval History and Heritage Command site. That site is, strangely, not functioning today. “Severer not found.”
The Isabel is personal to me because it was the ship on which my dad served the rest of WW2 after he escaped Java after his cruiser, USS Houston, was sunk at the Battle of Sunda Strait. Dad’s Navy Record Book shows that after the Houston went down, for a brief (24-48 hours) time he was on USS Tulsa, an Asheville-class gunboat, before transferring to Isabel. Isabel and Tulsa ran the Japanese gauntlet and made it to Austrailia with one or two other small ships, but USS Asheville (lead ship in her gunboat class) was overtaken and destroyed by the Japanese. I forget the problems on Isabel but in the book The Fleet the Gods Forgot, the chapter about Isabel is tilted The Expendable Ship USS Isabel PY10 . That book was written by Houston floatplane pilot and survivor Capt. Winslow. In his book The Ghost That Died at Sunda Strait, he includes the ship’s company roster and shows dad KIA.
Dad joined USN in 1939 with two friends because USN recruiters would give them rides to school during Minnesota winters, talked about exotic locales and great food, and told them they could all three serve on the same ship. Dad went to USS Arizona, his friend Dave went to Houston, and the friend who’s name I forgot went to a yard patrol boat and served his entire time in Pearl Harbor. Dad and Dave were radiomen, very popular with the crews because they got the “hot dope” like sports scores and news before anybody else. The three friends spend the next couple of years trying to arrange swaps with other crewmen. Dad & Dave arranged for a Houston radioman to go to Arizona, and dad and Dave went to war on Houston. From all my research and talking to Dave before he passed away, dad was the only survivor of Houston to not be killed or captured after Sunda Strait. Dave spent the war as a POW and worked on the “Hell Railroad,” per Bridge on the River Kwai. (Dave’s son runs two sites including usshouston.org .) Dave explained why dad was shown KIA in the book mentioned above. I also have Western Union telegrams to his parents from the War Dept. stating he was MIA, another later stated presumed dead, then dad’s cable from Austrailia that he was alive and well, then USN’s that he was okay.
Dad didn’t talk about the war other than a few fun stories such as introducing popcorn to the Australian family he stayed with, but did tell one story. In 1943, when victory was still not certain, he approached his CPO and said he signed up in 1939. CPO asked, “So?” Dad pointed out he signed up for four years and wanted to go home. He said after staring at him a while, the CPO opened his desk drawer, took out his pistol, leaned back in his chair, and polished the gun while he softly chuckled. Dad took that as his answer and went back to Isabel. Another story, a sub was preparing to depart on a war patrol. The radioman was AWOL. They asked for volunteers and dad did so. He had just dropped his seabag down the sub’s hatch when the SPs arrived with the drunk radioman, and dad returned to Isabel. The sub was never heard from again. I wonder which one it was?
One more story. I found a photo of Isabel tied alongside Houston off the Chinese coast in the 20s or 30s - pretty cool! But the best one is a photo of the ships crew in November 1945 back in the USA just before discharge. There’s my dad, back row, radioman insignia on his sleeve. The only photo I have of him in the service except for graduation from Great Lakes, and a portrait in Australia.
Thanks for letting me highjack the thread.
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That’s not a hijack, it’s inspiration! But USS Isabel’s camo!!! Rather than deceiving an observer as to direction it seems to have taken things up a notch and attempted to napalm their visual cortex… Attempts to reproduce it in, say, 1:700th scale would require dedicated decals and a kamikaze graphic designer on illegal hallucinogens.
Cheers,
M
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Amen to the hallucinogenics part of it. You’d have to be obliterated to design or even work with stuff like that especially in one 700th scale
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I’m surprised the camouflage was completed before the war ended! That looks highly labor-intensive.
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There are scores of examples of dazzle patterns particularly from WW1, and more from WW2…
From what I recall from research several years ago, the pattern didn’t fool any WW1 U-boat commander, which is why it wasn’t a big thing by WW2. Even the Bismark tried it & look what happened.
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I had plans to do the 1/35th. PT boat in the zebra dazzle but alas the kit didn’t make the shipment to Israel when we moved back here. And to buy that kit here would have created very costly divorce proceedings for me.
Man makes plans and God and his wife with her lawyers laugh at him 
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Could it be that when the observer is close enough to have his her eyes confused by the dazzle the observer is close enough to see the ship properly?
The b&w merchant ship seems to have a bow leaning backwards and to the side but if I were half a mile away at sea I would probably not be able to see the stripes and it would blur into some
medium grey. The torpedo boat has narrower stripes so they would blur at even shorter distances.
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This is the same issue levied against most of the ‘digital camo’ uniform patterns that became popular after the adoption of CADPAT – that the pattern is too small, and blends into a monochrome blob at any significant distance, rendering the camouflage pattern pointless. Later camouflage pattern designs like Multicam were intended to counteract that problem, with camouflage markings at different levels of detail to preserve the breakup of the wearer’s silhouette at different ranges, increasing the depth of range at which the camouflage is effective.
I think the designs used in the WWI dazzle camouflage were intended to be viewed through a telescopic lens, such as binoculars or a periscope, rather than naked-eye viewing. At the ranges a sub would spot ships, naked-eye spotting would see the boiler smoke and a blob of hull, rather than the dazzle camouflage, but the sub commander would need accurate bearings and a range estimate to do the torpedo setup, which would require a binocular mount with a bearing circle or the bearing indicators on the periscope, where the magnification of the image would pull up the dazzle pattern – it won’t affect the “there’s a ship in that direction”, but it would help against working out range, course, and speed.
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I’ll stand corrected but I think that most identification through a periscope relied on superstructure – guns, funnels, towers, masts & gantries etc….which are seen against the horizon or in silhouette. Nothing painted on the hull can disguise any of that, and it doesn’t disguise the bow and stern limits either.
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I think that was primarily for range finding which is why the RN turned masts into Barber’s Poles, and rigged canvas shapes to break up prominent vertical edges. It was effective against their co-incidence rangefinders, unfortunately the Germans used stereoscopic devices…
Which is why even simple camo schemes colour the ends of the hull much darker, and paint false bow waves and stern wakes on the “shortened” portion. This is especially effective at night, when the ship is moving slowly, or at anchor.
Cheers,
M
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If I recall, the main aim of these schemes was to make it harder to estimate speed, course, and range of the target (as seen from a U-boat periscope) so torpedoes were less accurately aimed. Not sure how effective it really was, but the idea seemed sensible at the time!
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Many things seem sensible and then reality may or may not prove otherwise …
Worth a reading:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33lxdd/did_dazzle_camouflage_used_on_ships_ever/?rdt=34111
" (Captain Bartlett, SS Millais)
But RN submariners were more scathing about it, claiming that it had little effect on their ability to attack in trials. Dazzle painting had little effect when the ship was silhouetted against the sky, as they usually were when observed from a periscope. In addition, they usually used the masts and funnels of the ship to determine its course or range. These were less affected by dazzle camouflage than the hull shape, and so it had little effect. "
"The Admiralty set up a committee to determine the effectiveness of dazzle painting. This consisted of the Director of Naval Equipment, the Director of Statistics, and representatives from the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Assistant Chief of Naval Staff. Reporting their findings on the 31st July 1918, they found little statistical evidence for the effectiveness of dazzle camouflage. Their report states that “no definite case on material grounds can be made out for any benefit in this respect from this form of camouflage”. However, they recommended that its use be continued, as it had a great effect on the morale of the crews of ships with it, and had no disadvantages beyond cost. "
"Dazzle camouflage appears, from the available sources, to have impressed surface observers, but to have had little effect on submarine attacks. "
I fully agree that the schemes are visually interesting (and difficult to paint) and if I built a largish
ship model from the appropriate time span I would be very tempted to try it.
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