Dazzle was adopted by the Admiralty in the UK, and then by the United States Navy. Each ship's dazzle pattern was unique to avoid making classes of ships instantly recognisable to the enemy. The result was that a profusion of dazzle schemes was tried, and the evidence for their success was, at best, mixed. So many factors were involved that it was impossible to determine which were important, and whether any of the colour schemes were effective. Experiments were carried out on aircraft in both World Wars with little success.
Dazzle attracted the notice of artists such as Picasso, who claimed that Cubists like himself had invented it.[3] Edward Wadsworth, who supervised the camouflaging of over 2,000 ships during the First World War, painted a series of canvases of dazzle ships[b][4][5][6][7] after the war, based on his wartime work. Arthur Lismer similarly painted a series of dazzle ship canvases.
orchestral manoeuvres in the dark dazzle ships rar
At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it. The approach was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions. The British zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed the application of camouflage to British warships in the First World War, outlining what he believed to be the applicable principle, disruptive camouflage, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining the goal was to confuse, not to conceal, by disrupting a ship's outline. Kerr compared the effect to that created by the patterns on a series of land animals, the giraffe, zebra and jaguar.[9][10]
It was not until she was within half a mile that I could make out she was one ship [not several] steering a course at right angles, crossing from starboard to port. The dark painted stripes on her after part made her stern appear her bow, and a broad cut of green paint amidships looks like a patch of water. The weather was bright and visibility good; this was the best camouflage I have ever seen.[1]
In 2011, the scientist Nicholas E. Scott-Samuel and colleagues presented evidence using moving patterns on a computer that human perception of speed is distorted by dazzle patterns. However, the speeds required for motion dazzle are much larger than were available to First World War ships: Scott-Samuel notes that the targets in the experiment would correspond to a dazzle-patterned Land Rover vehicle at a range of 70 m (77 yd), travelling at 90 km/h (56 mph). If such a dazzling target causes a 7% confusion in the observed speed, a rocket propelled grenade travelling that distance in half a second would strike 90 cm (35 in) from the intended aiming point, or 7% of the distance moved by the target. This might be enough to save lives in the dazzle-patterned vehicle, and perhaps to cause the missile to miss entirely.[f][23]
Wilkinson, then a lieutenant commander on Royal Navy patrol duty, implemented the precursor of "dazzle" beginning with the merchantman SS Industry. Wilkinson was put in charge of a camouflage unit which used the technique on large groups of merchant ships. Over 4000 British merchant ships were painted in what came to be known as "dazzle camouflage"; dazzle was also applied to some 400 naval vessels, starting in August 1917.[9][g]
Dazzle's effectiveness was highly uncertain at the time of the First World War, but it was nonetheless adopted both in the UK and North America. In 1918, the Admiralty analysed shipping losses, but was unable to draw clear conclusions. Dazzle ships had been attacked in 1.47% of sailings, compared to 1.12% for uncamouflaged ships, suggesting increased visibility, but as Wilkinson had argued, dazzle was not attempting to make ships hard to see. Suggestively, of the ships that were struck by torpedoes, 43% of the dazzle ships sank, compared to 54% of the uncamouflaged.[8][33]
Similarly, 41% of the dazzle ships were struck amidships, compared to 52% of the uncamouflaged. These comparisons could be taken to imply that submarine commanders had more difficulty in deciding where a ship was heading and where to aim. Furthermore, the ships painted in dazzle were larger than the uncamouflaged ships, 38% of them being over 5000 tons compared to only 13% of uncamouflaged ships, making comparisons unreliable.[8][33]
With hindsight, too many factors (choice of colour scheme; size and speed of ships; tactics used) had been varied for it to be possible to determine which factors were significant or which schemes worked best.[34] Thayer did carry out an experiment on dazzle camouflage, but it failed to show any reliable advantage over plain paintwork.[35]
The American data were analysed by Harold Van Buskirk in 1919. About 1,256 ships were painted in dazzle between 1 March 1918 and the end of the war on 11 November that year. Among American merchantmen 2,500 tons and over, 78 uncamouflaged ships were sunk, and only 18 camouflaged ships; out of these 18, 11 were sunk by torpedoes, 4 in collisions and 3 by mines. No US Navy ships (all camouflaged) were sunk in the period.[36][h]
In the Royal Navy, dazzle paint schemes reappeared in January 1940. These were unofficial, and competitions were often held between ships for the best camouflage patterns. The Royal Navy's Camouflage Department came up with a scheme devised by a young naval officer, Peter Scott, a wildlife artist, which were developed into the Western Approaches Schemes. In 1942 the Admiralty Intermediate Disruptive Pattern came into use, followed in 1944 by the Admiralty Standard Schemes.[39] Dazzle patterns were tested on small model ships at the Royal Navy's Directorate of Camouflage in Leamington Spa; these were painted and then viewed in a shallow tank on the building's roof.[37][40]
Not all United States Navy measures involved dazzle patterns; some were simple or even totally unsophisticated, such as a false bow wave on traditional Haze Gray, or Deck Blue replacing grey over part or all of the ship (the latter to counter the kamikaze threat).[41] Dazzle measures were used until 1945; in February 1945 the United States Navy's Pacific Fleet decided to repaint its ships in non-dazzle measures against the kamikaze threat, while the Atlantic Fleet continued to use dazzle, ships being repainted if transferred to the Pacific.[42]
The abstract patterns in dazzle camouflage inspired artists including Picasso. He claimed credit for camouflage experiments, which seemed to him a quintessentially Cubist technique.[3] In a conversation with Gertrude Stein shortly after he first saw a painted cannon trundling through the streets of Paris he remarked, "Yes it is we who made it, that is cubism".[14] In Britain, Edward Wadsworth, who supervised dazzle camouflage painting in the war, created a series of canvases after the war based on his dazzle work on ships. In Canada, Arthur Lismer used dazzle ships in some of his wartime compositions.[51] In America, Burnell Poole painted canvases of United States Navy ships in dazzle camouflage at sea.[52] The historian of camouflage Peter Forbes comments that the ships had a Modernist look, their designs succeeding as avant-garde or Vorticist art.[17]
In 2007, the art of camouflage, including the evolution of dazzle, was featured as the theme for a show at the Imperial War Museum.[53] In 2009, the Fleet Library at the Rhode Island School of Design exhibited its rediscovered collection of lithographic printed plans for the camouflage of American World War I merchant ships, in an exhibition titled "Bedazzled".[54]
yo debo ser de los puristas de la primera etapa, me encantan los 4 primeros discos, me parecen imprescindibles y mi favorito es dazzle ships, luego de los tres siguientes destacaria crush pero ninguno termina de convencerme, demasiado inseguros y comerciales, canciones como we love you o shame me parecen insoportables aunque forever live and die me encanta, los viste en el summercase? -madrid-2007.html 2ff7e9595c
Comments