USS St. George
A
common thought amongst those outside of the artistic community is that the works created by artists, whilst attractive and interesting to look at, don’t really serve much of a purpose in the grand scheme of things. It’s understandable though. It’s not like being able to paint can save peoples lives right? Well that’s not strictly true.
Three years into the First World War, Britain was being hit hard by the Naval onslaught courtesy of the German U-Boats that lurked beneath the waves of the British coastline. Their Primary targets were merchant ships carrying goods such as food an arms into the country; hoping that by halting the delivery of these items, the Brits could be starved into submission. This was a huge problem for the Allies and they were drawing blanks on how to combat the enemy campaign until a Royal Navy volunteer and artist Norman Wilkinson had an idea.
WW1 German U-Boat
At the time British ships were generally painted entirely in shades of gunmetal grey and blue and so Wilkinson’s first thought was to paint the ships like the waters in which they sailed – fine in theory but in practice, Britain’s ever changing weather conditions meant that at any one time, the ship was more likely to stand out than to blend in.
HMS Argus
Norman Wilkinson
The solution became known as Dazzle Camouflage; essentially a collection of brightly coloured shapes that form an abstract pattern on the sides of the ship. Whilst it seems counterintuitive to paint something you are trying to conceal in bright colour, it’s actually very clever. To understand why you have to know a little about firing a torpedo from a submarine. From the moment the U-Boat’s periscope emerges above the water, the captain has seconds to locate the target before being spotted and then fire the torpedo. And if this wasn’t enough, he also had to anticipate the travel time of the explosive because both vessels were moving. HMS Badsworth
USS Charles S Sperry
The idea was to confuse as opposed to conceal, making the U-Boat Captain’s job harder because the clashing patterns and shapes meant it was hard to determine the speed and direction in which the ship was moving and therefore considerably reduce the chance of the vessel being hit.
USS Siboney
Plans And Photograph of USS War Clover
The patterns weren’t random either, by painting patterns at the bow and stern (front and back) of the ship, determining which end was tricky and made even more difficult when curves were used to simulate false bow waves. Wilkinson and his team of artists and designers from the Royal Academy of Arts created hundreds of schemes that were tested by making scale models, placing them on a turntable and then viewing them through a periscope.
The designs were rolled out onto numerous military and merchant ships in Britain’s harbours, illuminating them with varying colours ranging from red to green, purple, lavender and mauve greys that are lost in the black and white photographs from the period.
Camouflage Plans HMS Furious
This technique of confusing the enemy worked, reducing the number of hits on British ships as a result of U-Boat torpedoes because their Captain’s couldn’t use a range finder accurately and as a result, miscalculated the distance and therefore time required for the torpedo to move from submarine to ship. Adopted by other nations, most notably the American Navy, dazzle camouflage survived until the invention of Radar in the mid 1930s as the technology didn’t rely on an optical process to locate the vessel but instead used radio waves.
USS West Mahone
Although short lived, Dazzle Camouflage is an example of an art form that genuinely saved lives during WW1 and potentially prevented the entire nation from being starved into submission by the Germans.