Glacial Errata, No. 64

One

A few newsletters back I casually mentioned “dazzle camouflage,” and a number of folks wrote back to say they’d never heard of it. Which surprised me? Once again, this speaks, I guess, to how broken my brain is, that I just sorta assumed everyone knew about dazzle camouflage.

Anyway, the idea behind dazzle camouflage came from Norman Wilkinson in World War I, in an attempt to solve a problem the Allies had: no camouflage could successfully disguise a naval vessel in every kind of weather. Wilkinson, inspired by zebras, hit upon a different idea: make the ships so visually cacophonous that targeting them or determining their heading would be difficult, perhaps impossible. By disrupting a ship’s outline, it would be hard for an enemy to gauge how far away a ship was, or where it was heading. By painting the bow and aft to look exactly alike, it could be difficult to determine even what direction it was heading in.

Two

It worked, sorta.

Three

Sometimes, a false bow wave would be painted on the ship to make it seem from a distance that it was moving faster than it actually was, as shown here on the HMS Olympic, the Titanic’s sister ship.

Four

Incidentally, dazzle camouflage is mentioned in Linda Barry’s novel, Cruddy, truly one of the funniest and darkest novels I’ve ever read. I don’t know if that’s where I first learned about it. Anyway, here’s the SS Osterley, another cruise ship converted to a troop transport, that made it through the war entirely unscathed, despite being predated on by German U-boats.

Five

Artists, naturally, were into it.

Eadward Wadsworth was a student of Roger Fry’s who had been heavily influenced by Picasso and Cubism. Originally associated with Filippo Marinetti and the Futurists, he (along with several other British painters) broke with Marinetti over the latter’s increasingly fascist ideas, and co-founded Vorticism.

Wadsworth enlisted when war broke out, but was recruited by Wilkinson and demobilized so he could be transferred to Liverpool to help with the dazzle camouflage scheme. Near the end of the war, Wadsworth was commissioned to create this incredible painting, which is now in Ottawa.