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Razzle Dazzle Camouflage

By Glen Taylor - April 20, 2006

in Object Culture

Early on in World War I, artists were brought in to custom paint camouflage on war ships and large passenger liners. Based in part on the artistic fashions of the time, particularly Cubism, this soon became known as "Dazzle Painting" and continued to be used until the end of World War II.

U-boats did not aim their torpedos directly at a ship to sink it. Because the target was moving, it was necessary to aim ahead of its path in order for the torpedo to arrive in the correct spot at the same time as the ship. If the torpedo is too early or too late, it will miss. The primary goal of dazzle painting was to confuse the U-boat commander who was trying to observe the course and speed of his target.

Pictured above, the USS Mahomet and the French cruiser Gloire.

via: designobserver

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Joseph L.

13 years ago

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It's interesting to see how open-minded and creative WWII forces on both sides were when it came to psychological warfare and supernatural experimentation to ensure victory.
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Alex Griffioen

16 years ago

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The Dutch design collective Experimental Jetset used the razzle dazzle camouflage to successfully decorate a tower at the Lowlands music festival. Looked pretty damn amazing from a distance.

http://www.experimentaljetset.nl/archive/scale4.html

As far as the warships go, I think it also obfuscates not only location, direction and speed, but also quantity.
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glenn

17 years ago

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beautiful designs!
that they were also functional is an added bonus.
before sonar and radar made visual recognition (and thus deception) obsolete, these patterns allowed a ship to hide in plain sight, by confusing the information about its location, direction and speed.
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Ben

17 years ago

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I stumbled upon this stuff while researching camouflage and I have to say that it seems almost bizarre that people resorted to this to evade subs.
Now days it seems most ships or a drab grey or drab bluish-grey which would make more sense.
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