Dazzle camouflage
The biggest danger facing the ships that transported soldiers and supplies between Canada and Britain were the German submarines patrolling the waters.
Germany tripled its U-boat fleet between 1916 and spring 1917, threatening to sever the crucial transatlantic supply route. From April to October 1917, Uboats sank 56 Allied ships off the east coast of North America and dozens more near the British Isles.
A British artist and Royal Navy volunteer named Norman Wilkinson came up with a bold idea — and it involved bold paint jobs. It was impossible to sneak these giant ships past the Germans, but what if you could confuse them through the art of optical illusions? He put this question to the admiralty in 1917, and they gave him a chance to test his idea for dazzle camouflage. Wilkinson knew that U-boat commanders had to work quickly to locate and fire on their targets, and they had to aim their torpedoes just ahead of the fast-moving ships. He thought dazzle camouflage would make this feat more difficult: swooping shapes and clashing patterns painted in highcontrast colours would break up the lines of a ship, making it harder to tell which way and how fast it was travelling.
Wilkinson’s team at the Royal Academy of Arts in London created hundreds of patterns, testing them on scale models of ships. Then the real ships were painted at British ports — with a different pattern on each side — under the supervision of Wilkinson-appointed dock officers.
One of the bedazzled boats was the RMS Olympic, a sister ship to the Titanic that became a troopship during World War I. The Olympic ferried reinforcements from Halifax to Liverpool and brought home wounded men, more than 200,000 Canadian soldiers in total. Its dazzle paint job can be seen in a famed Arthur Lismer painting, Olympic with
Returned Soldiers.
So did dazzle camouflage actually work? It was never scientifically proven, but crews did report those bold curves and stripes made them feel safer at sea.