Tuesday
Jan062009
Failures in Camouflage
Tuesday, January 6, 2009 at 06:08PM 
Dazzle Camouflage was used during WWI and II on American Navy ships. After realizing they had no way of hiding their boats in open water, the Navy was all, "they'll never expect this shit," and painted them up all crazy like. The plan was to use these wacky lines and contrasting colors to make it difficult to pinpoint the ships' direction and speed. Confusion rather than concealment.
Ultimately, the ruse proved pointless as the ships still seemed to explode once enemy forces fired torpedoes at them.
Reader Comments (2)
Nice pic, giving a humourous perfect example of the reasoning behind dazzle camouflage. The concept of Dazzle paint schemes, or Razzle Dazzle as it was often coined, is credited to British artist Norman Wilkinson. It was in fact first adopted by the British Admiralty during WW1 to make it more difficult for U-boats to gauge ship-type, distance and heading, before being quickly adopted by numerous other Navies.
By WW2 as range-finding systems became more sophisticated, particularly with the advent of ship radar, it's usefulness quickly diminished, and dazzle camo became a thing of the past.
um... this is like wrong information, like not even true and all that...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage