"Did "dazzle" camo really work?" Topic

I know it's cool to paint, but…

Good point. I think it's like a lot of military activity. It makes the men feel like something is being done. Way back during our "late unpleasantness" both the blockade runners and blockaders found the most useful all-around color was light gray.

In the book "Clear the Bridge" Richard O'Kane, Skipper of the submarine USS Tang, writes about a night time rendezvous with another sub that was painted in a dazzle scheme. IIRC he couldn't spot the other sub until within a few hundred yards of it.

Until that point O'Kane had thought the dazzle scheme worthless; this incident made a believer of him.

Depends how you define 'work'. My understanding is that it was not intended to be a stealth system as much as throw off the opponents ability to classify the size, speed and bearing of the target. Those types of intangibles are difficult to measure.

I asked an uncle the same question years back. He served on an escort carrier in the Pacific.

He said that lookouts were trained to spot silhouettes and the black and white dazzle pattern would break up the lines of the ships pretty effectively at certain light levels and distances.

DM

It depends on the threat. Against surface detection, in particular as regards range, bearing and speed, not bad if in the conditions it was designed for such as lighter schemes in northern waters. Against aircraft, the solid blue or grays probably worked better. As radar gets better, camouflage for ships gets less important or useful.

'just did.

It seems to have made it somewhat harder for subs to get good torpedo solutions in some light conditions.

So, yes – it worked. It wasn't spectacular, but every little bit helps.
-Kle.

It also (significantly) makes it difficult to use stereoscopic range finders that "align" the image to get ranges. The mathematics of ballistics require that measurement, making the target harder to hit

KAM

Who cares? I even paint spaceships with it, it looks so cool.

To be serious, as mentioned, it apparently did make it harder to identify ships profiles and optically range objects, so I would have to say it had some benefit. Once you have RADAR, though …

Doug

I read that dazzle worked as well as off setting lines. I've seen pictures of German WW1 aircraft that had lines that came togeather away from the engine and pilot. It was to throw off the aim of the enemy.

As ever,

Haggis

Historically dazzle did work to confuse the enemy.
During the Seminole War , we wonder how brightly colored calico can hide warriors. The Fort Dade battlefield park has a painting and diorama that shows the effect of the dazzle. The warriors are easily hidden in the high brush.

I have seen a few WW2 dioramas showing similar effects of dazzle in broken ground and under trees. it was especially effective at hiding tanks from airplanes.

used on a street racer here in the US :), car was chased 3 different days and not IDed, they did not get the make, model, or color of the car right and even thought it was a pick-up one day. it was 3 shades of blues.

so yes it does work

Ouzel,
Could you post a source for that story?
thanks

I discuss dazzle camo in the perception class I teach.

The term "dazzle" is applied to a number of different camouflage schemes, some of which worked very well and are still in use today.

Note that high frequency dazzle, implemented as a large number of very thin black and white stripes, fades to a neutral grey at s distance (just as it gets hard to read the smaller letters near the bottom of an eye chart). So some forms of dazzel do not make a ship stand out once it gets out beyond a certain distance. Within shorter ranges dazzle makes it more difficult to determone the speed and direction of travel, or whether or not the target is moving at all, and thus it is more difficult to hit the target.

Here's and interesting recent application of something like dazzle camo
link

…and car manufacturers sometimes use it to hide the details of upcoming models

carblog.co.za/tag/bmw-x3

I thought the solution for U-boats to dazzle was a coloured filter over the periscope lens?

Camouflage can be broken down into types.

DAZZLE. This is not intended to hide the ship. Instead it is accepted that ship will be seen and cannot be hidden. Therefore the dazzle effect is to confuse the viewer as to which ship it is, how far away it is, what course it is steaming on, what speed it is doing. These things are all important for a submarine commander when looking through his periscope in a series of quick looks at the target. If he gets the estimate of course wrong, speed wrong, distance to the target wrong, these all effect the computing of the torpedo intercept. Thus dazzle can make his job very hard even though he may be able to see the target easily.

HIDE. This is intended to make it hard to even see the ship at all. Because it is very hard to do, there were few types of camouflage that attempted it. In WW1 it involved an application of soft colours blended together to provide a sort of anonymous look that fitted the background. Unfortunately the background changes and so does the light, hence what is suitable in one condition can be glaringly wrong in another.
WW2 camouflage intended to hide is mostly based around what was known as the WESTERN APPROACHES scheme. It was found that in Atlantic conditions there were nearly always clouds in the background, patches of sky, and that these varied in changes of light and weather. White or very pale grey became the basis of the scheme and it was broken up by patches of pale blue or green mostly from the waterline up on the hull, but some applied in the superstructure. Masts were 'painted out' by always being white or very pale grey. The effect of this was that even at night, a U Boat (or E Boat) trying to attack a convoy would find it difficult to spot the escorts. This gave the escorts a chance to in turn, surprise the attacker. It was very effective.
Japanese HIDE schemes were for stationary ships only and were pretty much agreed to be some of the most clever of all. Aircraft could fly into an anchorage and report no ships present, yet when its photographs were examined they revealed there were actually ships there, but very well camouflaged. Because they involved making the ship appear to be part of the background these schemes did not work when the ship moved.

HIDE WITH DAZZLE schemes are those intended to conceal ships that spent a lot of time in harbour and others for ships that spent a lot of their time in coastal waters. Some examples of these are the type of dazzle schemes the Germans used in WW2 for ships serving off Norway. Instead of accepting that the ship will be seen and thus applying a dazzle, these provided a dazzle that would blend in against wintery fjords and dark coastal scenery. The schemes accepted that the vessel would nearly always be observed from someone on the seaward side (submarine or aircraft) that would need to pick it out against the coast.
There were others that tried to make ships blend in with the confusion of colours and objects seen in harbour. These were intended against low level air attack where an attacking aircraft had only seconds in which to pick out a target.

CONFUSE WITHOUT DAZZLE. To avoid attracting attention through the numerous colours used in early dazzle schemes, this one was simple. We still accept that the ship will be seen, so to confuse the enemy the hull or lower hull is painted in a dark colour, while the upper works are painted in a much lighter colour. With British schemes this included foreshortening the dark hull into a panel of dark shade. The intended effect of all variations of this scheme was to make the hull blend in with the sea, the superstructure blend in with the sky, and thus make it a difficult to determine exactly how far away the target was, or its bearing etc.

The last mentioned scheme sometimes also had the effect of hiding the ship when viewed at long distances. That depended on light conditions, but in general it did make the ship less obvious.

After WW1 the Germans claimed Dazzle had not effected their submariners at all. Yet soon after WW2 started their ships adopted some of the most elaborate camouflage schemes of all, so one must consider the WW1 claims with a pinch of salt.