History

Dazzle: the war artists who painted ships to fool U-boats

The cargo ship USS West Mahomet painted in black and white dazzle camouflage, 1918

Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool by Edward Wadsworth, painted ships seen from below in a dry dock

The aircraft carrier HMS Argus in dazzle camouflage in harbour, 1918

Workers making and painting model ships to test dazzle camouflage patterns

In 1917 a marine painter persuaded the Admiralty to cover merchant ships in clashing stripes so that submarine officers would misread their course. Artists carried it out, Picasso claimed it for Cubism, and nobody has ever proved how well it worked.

A problem you could not paint away

Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare on 31 January 1917, and the following spring was the worst stretch of the war for Allied shipping. April 1917 was the single most destructive month of the U-boat campaign.¹ Hiding a ship from a submarine was out of the question. A steamer on open water, trailing smoke, could be seen from miles away whatever colour it was painted.

Norman Wilkinson understood that better than most. He was a professional marine painter who had worked for the Illustrated London News and designed travel posters, and at the start of the war he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a lieutenant, serving on submarine patrols and minesweepers.² In April 1917 he came up with a different approach. If a ship could not be made invisible, it could be painted so as "to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading."³

How it was meant to work

A submerged U-boat saw its target only through a periscope, and only for short glimpses, because a periscope left up too long could give the submarine away. From those glimpses the commander had to judge the ship's speed and heading, then aim the torpedo at the point where ship and torpedo would arrive together. An error of a few degrees in reading the heading was enough for a miss.⁴ Dazzle went after that judgement. Bold stripes, curves and sloping bands in black, white, blues and greens were laid across the hull and superstructure so the eye struggled to tell bow from stern or to read which way the ship was angled.²³

Wilkinson was not the first to think along these lines. The zoologist John Graham Kerr had written to Winston Churchill in 1914 proposing that ships be painted to break up their outlines, drawing on animal camouflage. In 1915 the Admiralty chose plain grey instead.⁵ Kerr spent years afterwards arguing that the idea had been his, and in 1920 an Admiralty committee told him he was not regarded as responsible for dazzle.⁵

A studio at the Royal Academy

The Admiralty let Wilkinson try it. A Dazzle Section began work in June 1917 in studios at the Royal Academy in London. Most of its staff were women students from the RA Schools and other art colleges, colouring plans and painting designs. For each type of merchant ship a small wooden model was made and painted, set on a turntable and viewed through a real submarine periscope against painted skies. The team found that the bridge area mattered most and that some bright colours were less useful than expected, because U-boat periscopes could be fitted with colour filters.²

By October 1917 the order had gone out that British merchant ships should be dazzle painted.⁴ Wilkinson later estimated that around 4,000 British merchant ships and over 400 warships were painted during the war.² In March 1918 he crossed the Atlantic at the American government's request and helped set up a US camouflage unit led by the painter Everett Warner. Between March and the Armistice in November 1918 the Americans dazzled 1,256 ships.⁴

Wadsworth in the docks

The designs were drawn in London and painted on in the ports, which is where Edward Wadsworth comes in. Before the war he had been one of the small group of Vorticists around Wyndham Lewis, who launched their magazine BLAST in July 1914. As a dazzle officer he worked first in Bristol and then in Liverpool, overseeing the painting of designs he had not drawn himself.⁷ He is credited with supervising the painting of more than 2,000 ships.³⁵

The job fed straight into his art. Wadsworth made a series of nine woodcuts of dazzle-painted ships⁷, and in 1919 he painted Dazzle-ships in Drydock at Liverpool, a canvas nearly three metres tall commissioned by the Canadian War Memorials Fund and now in the National Gallery of Canada.⁷⁸ The ships in it are hard to read as ships at all, which was the point of the paint and, for a Vorticist, also a pleasure.

Picasso's claim

The resemblance to modern painting was obvious at the time. Gertrude Stein recalled walking with Picasso on the boulevard Raspail on a winter evening in the first year of the war, when camouflaged cannon came down the street. Picasso stared and said "C'est nous qui avons fait ça", it is we who made that.⁶ He was talking about army camouflage in France, which came before naval dazzle, but the claim has stuck to dazzle ever since.⁵

Did it work?

Nobody could prove it then and nobody has since. An Admiralty analysis of losses in 1918 could not draw clear conclusions. Dazzled ships were actually attacked slightly more often than plain ones, though a smaller share of those torpedoed went on to sink, and the dazzled ships were larger on average, which muddies any comparison.⁵ A British committee in September 1918 found no clear evidence that dazzle had ever confused a U-boat, yet recommended keeping it because crews felt safer and morale was higher.³ American figures looked kinder. Of 96 ships over 2,500 tons sunk, only 18 were camouflaged, and no camouflaged warship was lost.⁴ The historian Roy Behrens argues that dazzle worked best combined with zigzag courses and convoys⁴, and convoys are the measure usually credited with turning the U-boat war around. The evidence is still argued over.

What is certain is that in 1917 the Admiralty, facing a real chance of losing the war at sea, gave a painter a studio at the Royal Academy and let artists decide what thousands of ships would look like. Whether or not the stripes saved a single ship, they left behind some of the strangest and best images of the war.