SYMHC Classics: Dazzle Camouflage

Flashback to 2014! British Royal Navy lieutenant and artist Norman Wilkinson is usually credited with the idea of disruptive camouflage. But, another man, naturalist John Graham Kerr, claimed that he had the idea three years earlier.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. After we dropped that upbeat history playlist
into our feed not long after the declaration of the
COVID nineteen pandemic, listener Emily sent us a note with
suggestions for topics to include if we decided to do
another one. We are replaying one of those topics as
our classic episode today and I love this topic. It's

(00:22):
dazzle camouflage and it originally came out on September. Thank
you Emily for the suggestion. Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm colleague from and I'm

(00:44):
Tracy Vie Wilson, and we're going to deal a little
bit of military history today, world War One specifically, and
this particular little story combines military strategy with art and
even a little bit of a garudge match. You may
have seen photos of World War One ships painted with
what's called dazzle camouflage, and if you haven't, you are
in for such a visual treat because they look amazing.

(01:06):
It's all very geometric and cool. It will often show
up in lists where you know people are like, look
ten historical photos that aren't photoshopped and uh as sort
of a mind boggling why on earth is this so
amazing type of article stance? But and they are really
fabulous to look at. But most people do not know
that there is a lot more to the story than

(01:28):
meets the I, including some some angryness about who actually
should get attribution. There is a very popular version of
the whole Dazzle camouflage story, and that's where we are
going to start. Yeah. In v British Navy ships were
being sunk by German U boats in nothing short of
devastating numbers. It was an incredible challenge to conceal ships

(01:51):
on the open seas. Some of those was due to
the weather. Since the weather is constantly changing at sea,
you can't really make one camouflage that's going to effectively
disguise the ship, no matter what the conditions are like.
And another problem is that it's not just the ships,
the ship itself that gives its location away. The ship
leaves awake, there are smoke trails, all these other signals

(02:15):
betrayed the ship's positions. So you boats would identify their
targets and then they would plot their predicted courses. So
then after calculating the speed at which they were traveling
and confirming the ship's trajectory. It was torpedo time, so
they would aim their torpedoes into the predicted path of
the ship, and you know, the ship would intersect with

(02:36):
it and be sunk. And the German navy was very
good at identifying ships and predicting their movements. So, of course,
because it was facing huge losses, the British Navy wanted
nothing more than to figure out a way to thwart
the enemy and save the fleet from being attacked. But
this was really easier said than done. Even if they

(02:56):
could find effective camouflaged for as ships so that you
couldn't physically see it, that really only solved part of
the problem. The wake and the smoke would still give
the Germans away to target the ship. And uh, it
turns out and I love this that you know, art
came to the rescue. The man who's normally credited with

(03:18):
brain storring the solution to this problem was Navy lieutenant
and artist Norman Wilkinson, and he had this idea that
since they couldn't hide the ships, they could maybe at
least to do something to confuse the enemy. So his
idea was a form of disruptive camouflage, and that took
on the name dazzle camouflage. His idea was that painting

(03:40):
ships with wild geometric patterns would kind of bewilder the
sailors on the U boats as they tried to look
through the periscopes to find the targets. And of course
the ships would still be visible, but their disruptive geometric
paint patterns would confuse the eye so much that it
would be difficult to determine which direction the ship was facing,
what direction it was moving, and at what speed. Wilkinson

(04:04):
was given a ship to paint as a proof of concept,
and before long there were lots more ships being painted
with wild designs as well. There were hundreds of different
geometric schemes that were laid out for painting ships, and
each one was meant to trick the eye with one
or more optical illusions. Yeah. In some cases, curves along
the sides of the ships would be painted to create

(04:25):
sort of false wave patterns that kind of mirrored the
wake that was going in the opposite direction, so it
was a duplicate, but they were going in both directions,
so it was hard to know what was actually happening.
The smoke stacks were painted with tilted and asymmetrical bands
of color to make it look like the ship might
be going the opposite way than it actually was. Diagonal
lines were often painted in bright colors at either end

(04:48):
of the ship to make it difficult to discern the
four from the aft. Some of the ships were painted
in schemes of stripes that went in all different directions
and used a multitude of colors, and these basic tried
to prevent an observer from getting his bearings on exactly
what he was looking at. I feel like these were
colossally huge magic eye paintings. Yeah, I mean it's not

(05:10):
dissimilar from that. It really is just sort of so
much information thrown at your your eyes that you can't
really discern kind of what you're looking at. You stand
back and cross your eyes. I'm so good at magic eyes.
That's like my superpower. But before we get to an
alternate version of this story, do you want to pause
for a moment for a word from our sponsor. So,

(05:39):
now back to what was going on actually a few
years before Wilkinson. So, Wilkinson is often credited with the
idea of applying dazzle camo to ships. But the concept
had actually been floated several years prior by a man
who was named John Graham Care, and Care was a naturalist.
He actually made his name in lungfish embryology, so nothing

(06:02):
having to do with ships. But several years before Wilkinson
entered the picture as a proponent of disruptive camouflage, Ker
had approached the Admiralty with the idea because of all
his work as a naturalist, Care had witnessed firsthand the
success of naturally occurring disruptive coloration and animals so many
many years before World War One, when he was traveling

(06:23):
on an expedition in South America in he noted quote
obliterative coloring on many of the animals that he observed,
and he made these notes repeatedly in his field journals.
He was clearly really, really fascinated by it, and uh
in nineteen o two he became the Chair of Zoology,
although when he initially took the chair it was called

(06:44):
the Chair of Natural History and then changed the next
year at the University of Glasgow, and throughout his career,
even while he was working on his embryology projects, he
continued to study animal coloration sort of, it's just a
side interest. While as day jo job was all about zoology.
Care was also an avid yachtsman, and according to maritime

(07:05):
historians Hugh Murphy and Martin Bellamy, while Kerr was visiting
the opening of the Keel Canal in Germany, in the
contrast he noted between the monochromatic French and German vessels
and the multi color British ships got his mind thinking
about how you could apply obliterative coloring to a ship.

(07:27):
Even before Care there was an American artist named Abbott H.
Thayer who was also working on concealing coloration through the
use of counter shading, and he was doing that as
early as the Spanish American War in the late eighteen nineties.
And what that means is that darker colors would be
painted on the top of a vessel to counteract the
reflection of the sun, and then lighter colors would be

(07:49):
near the bottom and they would sort of be banded
in like a hardline ingradient. Care and they are actually
knew each other and they talked about their different ideas
and points of view on how to best to conceal
a large object through the deliberate use of paint color,
and September en was a particularly devastating time for the
British Navy. Uh In the course of just a few weeks,

(08:12):
German U boats sank the HMS Pathfinder, and then on
the same day a little bit later, the HMS Abuquir,
the HMS Hogue and the HMS Crescy, and on September
after all of these had taken place, Ker wrote Winston
Churchill a letter outlining three different ideas that he had
for camouflaging ships. The first method involved color matching the habitat,

(08:36):
but he also not that this was really a lot
better for small animals than large ships. And the second
approach that he mentioned was more in line with some
of the ideas that Thayer had had, although Care called
it compensation shading, and he basically described a gradient painting
technique that involved coloring the darkest and most shadowed parts
of the ship's bright white, and then the areas that

(08:58):
were exposed to the most light being painted the darkest
shades of gray, effectively creating sort of a monochromatic blob
that had no visible detailing, at least if you were
looking at it through a periscope. The third method outlined
and Cares letter to Churchill describes a paint application similar
to the dazzle coloring that Norman Wilkinson is associated with.

(09:19):
He described this idea of party coloring in the following way.
It is essential to break up the regularity of the outline,
and this can easily be affected by strongly contrasting contrasting shades.
The same applies to the surface. Generally, a continuous uniform
shade renders conspicuous. This can be counteracted by breaking up

(09:40):
the surface by violent, violently contrasting pigments. A giraffe or
zebra or jaguar looks extraordinarily conspicuous in a museum, but
in nature, when not moving, is wonderfully difficult to pick up,
especially at twilight. The same principle should be made use
of in painting ships. I had to kind of chuckled
of myself when I was reading that initially that he

(10:03):
only placed animals in museums like, not in any sort
of live viewing enclosure like a zoo. At the time time,
it just maybe chuckle as an aside. Uh Care very
specifically described the need to break up the continuity of
a ship's outline with these high contrasting white shapes UH
including masts with the irregular banding of white striping. This

(10:27):
letter was actually well received, Kara gotta thank you note
and the assurance that this information and ideas would be
shared with the rest of the fleet, and they were indeed.
In fact, the contents of Care's letter were included verbatim
as part of a general order issued on November tenth
of that same year. The order, which went out with
the title Visibility of Ships Method of Diminishing, went out

(10:50):
with the instructions that the use of the information included
was at the discretion of the officers on their various commands,
and several of them did opt to try these ideas out.
It was through a personal connection that John Graham Care
found out his camouflage concepts were actually being put into use.
A former pupil of his was serving on the HMS

(11:10):
Implacable and wrote Care a letter telling him that everyone
on all levels of naval service agreed that these were
good ideas, and that the student had seen another ship
employing the disruptive painting style. And I would just like
to have a side note that I love that there's
a ship called the HMS implacable is pretty charming. Exactly

(11:30):
how many ships ended up adopting this disruptive painting technique
that was based on Cares instructions is really pretty hazy.
Since the practice was at the discretion of individual commands,
there really wasn't a system in place to account for
its usage, like nobody had to report in that they
had painted their ship this way. And additionally, there's evidence
that some crews were actually using very similar techniques on

(11:53):
their own prior to the general order on visibility of ships.
As more and more ships started to adopt the whole
party color paint schemes, Care was actually able to see
some of them. He wasn't exactly delighted, though. He really
felt that the spirit was there, but the actual execution
was not quite what he had in mind. So in
nineteen fifteen he wrote another letter to the Admiralty, and

(12:16):
this time he suggested that these new camouflage paint jobs
could be even better with a bit of guidance and
advice from him. He got no reply, so he wrote
again and again, only to learn that Churchill had moved
on to a new post. And then he wrote to
Churchill's successor Arthur Balfour. Yeah, he was big on writing

(12:37):
the letters. I feel like this is like when the
person writes does with like really really pedantic something, and
we answer back and then the person just keeps writing
it again and I'm like, please I stop. Well, initially
he wasn't getting a reply, but he really felt like

(12:58):
they needed to listen to him and let him help
some more. Uh, and all of this writing kind of
fell on deaf ears. He finally received a polite thanks
but no thanks style letter informing him that there had
actually been a decision made that they were going to
go back to painting all of the ships a uniform
gray and stop all this crazy color variations. I have
a feeling this just disturbed him immensely, which it's probably

(13:21):
carried out by the fact that then he redoubled his efforts.
He wrote some multiple office officers of the military, he
wrote to his friends in academia, to anybody he knew
who had any connection to the Admiralty. So when Abbott
Thayer was visiting from the US, he wrote the Admiralty
again and begged for a meeting so both he and
theyer could share their information. All of those roads led

(13:43):
to dead ends. Yeah, he really didn't. They kind of
uh just went nowhere. He did allegedly have some luck.
He also wrote about someone else about camouflage on airplanes
and got some ground there, but no nothing with the
ships ever again. So when the decision was made to

(14:08):
adopt Wilkinson's dazzle coloring in n it was much more
organized than previously. So instead of leaving it up to
each individual command to adopt some kind of geometric camouflage,
this time it was a uniform order. And in addition
to the order, Wilkinson was actually put in charge of
a new Dazzle department, and as a consequence, while he

(14:29):
was heading that department, approximately four thousand merchant ships and
four hundred navy vessels were painted in this manner to
try to avoid uh U boat attacks. For his part,
care stated publicly that he was happy to see the
camouflage scheme being implemented, but he also enlisted the assistance
of fellow academics to once again contact the Admiralty and

(14:51):
suggest that he, being the only man who had years
of study of this type of visual disruption, should be
advising them on it. I sound weary because because you
can imagine getting like seventeen letters in this same guy
that because we do get seventeen letters from the same life. Yeah,
where it's like you're doing it wrong, you can just
you can just contact me the next time you want

(15:13):
to do a podcast on Paraguay and I will help
you out, which is awesome. I mean, we certainly appreciate
when people want to be helpful. It's the doggedly non
letting go of it, yeah, which happens, not just to
I mean in life. That happens. It's like when you
have a relative who is like, hey, you can sow.
Will you make me some pants, And it's like, I
don't really have time for them. Oh, it would be

(15:34):
great if you'd make me some pants. You know you
need pants. I'll tell you how to make them, like
I've had those. I'm sure you've had similar When people
know you can sow, there's a point where you have
received the information and saying it more. Doesn't I understand
you want some pants. I am not giving them to you.
It's similar. So care probably wor some people down. Um,
but the military really felt even though Kier made his

(15:58):
case over and over, the designers that they had put
in charge of dazzle camouflage, so they came from a
design background rather than a natural sciences background, had things
well in hand. They felt like they had it covered
and eventually Care gave up on trying to be involved
in the process as an advisor and he did stop writing.
While Care gave up on trying to offer his assistance,

(16:21):
he did remain quite irritated that Wilkinson got all the
credit for what he felt like was his idea from
years prior. It became a big issue between the two men.
Uh yeah. Wilkinson's claim was that his designs had nothing
to do with biology or nature and that Care just
simply did not understand the visual principles that his approach employed.

(16:43):
That he was working from a design background, this is
not about replicating nature, and Care's counter argument was that
Wilkinson could not have invented dazzle camouflage because no man
could have invented dazzle camouflage, because they were merely replicating
what existed in nature already. I raised my eyebrows. I
know my heart goes out to him, but I just

(17:06):
if he were alive today, he would just be leaving
comments all over the internet. Yes, he would be an
Internet commenter for sure, Care even went back to his
favorite addresses of corresponds to a correspondence Winston Churchill to
try to convince him that he should make sure people
understood their correspondence of n Yeah, he wanted Churchill to
come out and say, oh, no, I did talk to
this guy. He had this idea before. But eventually what

(17:31):
happened was that a Committee of Inquiry was established to
investigate the competing claims. And it's unclear whether Churchill had
anything to do with that or not, or if people
were just so tired of getting letters from Care that
they were like, we have to figure out some way
to resolve this um. But the committee, because Cares to work,
was based in nature. It seemed that they really felt
that his end goal for the paint scheme must have

(17:52):
been invisibility, because to them, camouflage and nature is about hiding,
even though a lot of Care's right on the matter
clearly states that he felt that invisibly invisibility was going
to be impossible, whereas they felt that Wilkinson's approach was
geared towards distortion and uh. The committee basically favored Wilkinson

(18:14):
and their findings and it was still not over. No,
it's never over. Care took his claim next to the
Royal Commission on Awards and Inventors, and while Care took
great pains to assemble an extremely thorough brief filled with evidence,
the Commission found in favor of Wilkinson again in ninety two,
and this decision was based almost entirely on Wilkinson's testimony

(18:37):
that he had no prior knowledge of ships painted to
care specifications, although Care and his lawyer continued to assert
that the statement was completely false. Yeah, there was some
evidence that Wilkinson had been in places where ships that
were painted with the designs that Care had suggested were
and that he would have been basically blind to have

(18:57):
not seen them. Um, but even so, just by virtue
of saying nope, I never saw those before Wilkinson went
out in the end. But what really sort of makes
it all kind of funny to me in a morose
sort of comedy, is that it really didn't matter who
came up with the idea, because a study of the
efficacy of dazzle camouflage that was conducted in nine determined

(19:22):
that it really had no measurable impact on evading attack.
It really didn't help in terms of military strategy, and
that it's the greatest benefit was that it had probably
just raised the spirits and morale of the men, which
there's something to be said for that, But in terms
of like claiming it as an invention, they were fighting
over nothing, basically. Yeah. Well, and I think part of

(19:43):
the reason that he irritates me so profoundly is that
he reminds me of younger me, who would just doggedly
pursue a matter of principle that did not actually matter.
Oh yeah, much that. But but you are wrong, and
I am right. Why don't you understand this? Yeah, And

(20:04):
that was the thing. He didn't really want money out
of it. He did have to make a financial claim
in that second committee hearing like he had to make
a claim that he needed something out of it, but
really he didn't want any money. He just wanted people
to acknowledge that it was his idea. And really there
had actually been cases of ships, like I said, that
had been painted like that even before him, some of

(20:26):
which kind of happened just accidentally because the ships were
being repainted and paint was flaking off, they had started
to kind of accidentally do some of that and then thought, oh,
that might be interesting and they would continue it. So
he was. They were just fighting over nothing. Well, and
as we have talked about frequently, anytime there has been
science or invention in the podcast, almost always progress. Its

(20:51):
developments build on the things that happened before them. They
don't come out of thin air. Yeah, there are very
few true Eureka moments where someone just thinks of something
no one has ever thought of before. Um. Earlier this year,
German artist to Bias rend Burger and Venezuelan artist Carlos
Cruise Diaz were actually commissioned by the Liverpool Biennial Tate

(21:13):
Liverpool in the World War One Centenary arts organization called
fourteen eighteen Now to recreate dazzle camouflage designs on several
ships and the work that these artists were commissioned to
do as part of a series of events marking the
hundred year anniversary of the start of the war. Rend
Berger painted the HMS President, which was a two hundred

(21:33):
and sixty five foot Flower class sloop originally named the
HMS Saxifrage and built in nineteen eighteen for anti sub warfare.
The President is permanently kept in London and was painted
with down with dazzle camouflage during World War One. I
love that there is such thing as a flower class sloop,
and I particularly love that it was named the Saxifrage. Yeah,

(21:55):
that's this. Those are both fun words to associate with ships.
Uh remb Burger's painting turned the ship into a really
fabulous optical illusion, so that it looked like piles of
almost eschuresque kind of modern pipe works. Um And he
was actually a perfect choice for this project because he
uh In interviews, he commented that he had discovered or

(22:18):
found out about dazzle camouflage like twenty years ago, and
it's just been fascinated with it ever since, so much
so that in two thousand nine he actually when he
was commissioned to design this cafe. He based the entire
design on the principles of dazzled design and visual confusion,
which may or may not make for um a fun

(22:39):
dining experience. If you like visual stimulation, it's probably super
fun and Liverpool Cruise. Diaz worked on the Edmund Gardner.
This one is more basic but still visually stimulating design,
consisting of red, yellow, black and green striping. Yeah, it's
In one of the links in the show notes that
will have it, Um, they have a time lapse of

(23:02):
the Edmund Gardner being painted, and it's kind of wonderful
because it goes from being a flat kind of Matt
gray looking like this really wonderful rasta adventure ship because
of the colors that he chose. And we'll pen stuff
up on our Pinterest so you can see what these
look like. Oh yeah, Pinterest is going to be a
busy place with the Dazzle because there's a lot of
good pictures of dazzle right now. It's really busy in

(23:24):
our unearthed board because there's just been a lot going
on in the unearthing in the last few weeks. There
always is, but it's been a really high concentration of
fascinating things being pulled it on, which is great. Thank
you so much for joining us today for this Saturday classic.

(23:45):
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(24:08):
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