

WWI Ship Camouflage - taitems
http://twistedsifter.com/2010/02/razzle-dazzle-camouflage/

======
pvg
It's also not clear that it did much beyond look really striking.

 _"Dazzle's effectiveness is not certain. The British Admiralty concluded it
had no effect on submarine attacks, but proved to be a morale boost for crews.
It also increased the morale of people not involved in fighting; hundreds of
wonderfully coloured ships in dock was nothing ever seen before or since."_

~~~
Zilioum
Thats what I thought as well. I dont really get why they coloured them. The
destroyer with the stripes seems to be quite camouflaged in black and white,
it disrupts its shape. I understand that camouflage colours wouldn't work all
the time, but orange and purple?!

------
eru
Interesting. Though what really stopped the U-Boats sinking all that ships was
the humble convoy-system.

(And Tom Körner's excellent book "The Pleasure of Counting" has the math to
back it up. He has a knack for explaining.)

~~~
ZeroGravitas
In case anyone else was intrigued by this comment, I found some brief details
of why convoys work against U-Boats on Wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convoy#Analysis>

~~~
eru
Thanks. That explains most of it. Tom Körner uses the subject to introduce
some simple mathematics.

He also mentions the benefit of something invisible: In WWII the allies had to
relearn the U-Boat lesson. Some people were arguing that the limited planes
they have should be used to bomb more German sites, because they rarely
spotted an U-Boat. However --- that was part of their effect: They forced the
U-Boats to remain submerged for longer. (Those WWII-style U-Boats were
essentially unchanged from WWI. Think of them as submergable normal ships, not
as modern submarines. Their speed was severely reduced while submerged. The
battery technology of the time was crappy and atom-powered submarines were a
long way off. Surfaced they were somewhat faster than most merchant ships.)

Of course in WWII the breaking of the Enigma is closely related to the U-Boat
war. And it's also in Tom Körner's book. With stories about Turing and
Bletchley Park.

Edit: You can also tell an interesting story about Bayesian reasoning from the
anecdote that when the aircraft crews reprogrammed the depth-charges to
explode not where the U-Boat was most likely to be, but where the expected
value of damage was maximized. And that meant closer to the surface: Most
submerging U-Boats where already deeper by the time the charge hit, but those
that weren't were mostly destroyed.

The end of
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic_(1939%E2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Atlantic_\(1939%E2%80%931945\)#.27Happy_Time.27_.28June_1940_.E2.80.93_February_1941.29))
also has some things to say about convoys.

------
mikeryan
The Rhode Island School of Design has a library of Dazzle ship designs.

It's pretty neat

<http://www.risd.edu/dazzle/>

------
arethuza
On the subject of anti-submarine naval warfare, I would strongly recommend
"Three Corvettes" by Nicholas Monsarrat.

[http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Corvettes-Nicholas-
Monsarrat/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Three-Corvettes-Nicholas-
Monsarrat/dp/0304354449)

From WW2 rather than WW1 - but I don't think the North Atlantic had changed
much.

~~~
viggity
The depth of knowledge on HN will never cease to amaze me.

------
george_morgan
More on this from Tate Etc. magazine:
<http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue4/camouflage.htm>

------
leoc
> As sonar and radar technology improved, the once effective dazzle camouflage
> was rendered obsolete.

If Silent Hunter III is at all reflective of reality, WWII U-boats didn't use
either radar or sonar for torpedo targeting either, though unlike WWI boats
they did have the benefit of an analogue targeting computer which took input
from the periscopes and UZO ("U-boat targeting optic", the equivalent of a
computer-linked periscope for surface attacks).

~~~
ramchip
They slowly started to have them, at the end of the war, but they weren't that
popular: using the radar reveals the sub's position, nullifying its stealth
advantage.

There were also acoustic torpedoes, and all subs had passive sonar (the one
you can listen to, I'm sure it's in SH3). The XXI supposedly had an active
sonar for torpedo targeting, but Germany had barely started making them at the
end of the war, and again using it is like yelling your position.

------
Retric
Awesome, but, it's WWI ship camouflage not WWII.

~~~
hga
This article is indeed about WWI usage, but the US Navy used disruptive
designs in WWII as well, for example see
<http://www.shipcamouflage.com/camouflage_database.htm>

------
jcl
More explanation and pictures at Wikipedia:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage>

(...including the fact that Austria still uses dazzle on speed trap booths to
confuse motorists.)

