Burnell Poole, Painting of the USS Leviathan escorted by the USS Allen, 1918. They had to determine the target ship’s speed and direction with just a brief look through the periscope. Torpedoes in the Great War could only be fired line-of-sight, so instead of firing at where they saw the ship was at that moment, torpedo gunners would have to chart out where the ship would be by the time the torpedo got there. The strategy of this high-difference, Dazzle camouflage was not about invisibility. Conditions like the color of the sky, cloud cover, and wave height change all the time, not to mention the fact that there’s no way to hide all the smoke left by the ships’ smokestacks. They needed a way to fend off the torpedoes.Ĭonventional high-similarity camouflage just doesn’t work in the open sea. England needed to import supplies to fight the Central Powers, and these ships were sitting ducks in the Atlantic Ocean. Courtesy US Naval Historical and Heritage Command, NH 1733ĭazzle painting emerged in the 1910s as a design solution to a very dire problem - American and British ships were being sunk left and right by German U-Boats. Anon, photograph of the USS West Mahomet in Dazzle camouflage, 1918. When it comes to humans, the greatest, most jaw-droppingly spectacular application of disruptive camouflage was called Dazzle. The stripes also might make zebras less attractive to blood-sucking horseflies. It’s hypothesized that their stripes make it difficult for a predator to distinguish one from another when the zebras are in a large herd.
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