Kerr wrote to Winston Churchill, the first lord of the British Admiralty as early as September 1914 outlining his methods for ‘diminishing the visibility of ships at a distance, based on scientific principles’.Īt first the application of paint schemes was ad-hoc. Graham Kerr, Regius Professor of Zoology at Glasgow, was one who saw the further application of these principles in disguising ships at sea. This had its origins in natural scientists studying camouflage in animals. The idea, in essence, was to confuse U-boat captains by making it difficult to plot accurately an enemy ship’s movements when manoeuvring for an attack, causing the torpedo to be misdirected or the attack to be aborted.īefore WWI there had been some experimentation with camouflage for military purposes in the United States and Britain. The colour scheme was designed to confuse and deceive an enemy as to the size, outline, course and speed of a vessel by painting sides and upperworks in contrasting colours and shapes arranged in irregular patterns. The aim was to thwart German U-boat captains who had been destroying large amounts of shipping. Towards the end of World War I large numbers of merchant ships were brightly painted in bizarre geometrical patterns known as ‘Dazzle Painting’ later known as dazzle camouflage. Dazzle pattern on a merchant vessel during WWI.
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