BOKEH Adverts

movements—Cubism, Futurism, and
Vorticism. In fact, one of the Vorticist
painters, Edward Wadsworth, oversaw
ships being dazzled in Liverpool
during the war.”
Additionally, “you have to remember
that Wilkinson was not only a
seascape painter but also a poster
designer,” Behrens says. “So he had
to work with abstract forms, colors
and shapes.”
Though the British Admiralty probably
didn’t include too many modern
art enthusiasts, the losses from
U-boat attacks were so devastating
that they soon authorized Wilkinson
to set up a camouflage unit at the
Royal Academy in London. He recruited
other artists, who were given
Naval Reserve commissions, and
they got to work.
Wilkinson made models of ships
on a revolving table and then viewed
them through a periscope, using
screens, lights and backgrounds to
see how the dazzle paint schemes
would look at various times of day
and night. He used one of those
models to impress a visitor, King
George V, who stared through the
periscope and guessed that the model
ship was moving south-by-west,
only to be surprised to discover that
it was moving east-by-southeast.
By October 1917, British officials
were sufficiently convinced of dazzle’s
effectiveness that they ordered that all
merchant ships should get the special
paint jobs, according to a 1999 article
by Behrens.
At the request of the U.S. government,
Wilkinson sailed across the
Atlantic in March 1918 and met with
Secretary of the Navy, Franklin D.
Roosevelt, and then helped to set up a
camouflage unit headed by American
impressionist painter Everett Warner.
By the end of the war, more than
2,300 British ships had been decorated
with dazzle camouflage. How successful
dazzle actually was in thwarting
U-boat attacks isn’t clear. As Forbes
explains, a postwar commission concluded
that it probably only provided
a slight advantage.
“When the US Navy adopted
Wilkinson’s scheme for both merchant
and fighting ships there is statistical
evidence to support Wilkinson’s technique,”
Forbes says. A total of 1,256
merchant and fighting ships, were
camouflaged between March 1 and
November 11, 1918. Ninety six ships
over 2,500 tons were sunk; of these
only 18 were camouflaged and all of
them were merchant ships. “None of
the camouflaged fighting ships were
sunk,” he says
“It’s important to remember that
ships didn’t just rely upon dazzle camouflage
for protection from U-boats,”
Behrens explains. “It was used in combination
with tactics such as zig-zagging
and traveling in convoys, in which
the most vulnerable ships were kept in
the center of the formation, surrounded
by faster, more dangerous ships
capable of destroying submarines.”
The synergy of those measures was
“wonderfully effective,” he says.
Dazzle camouflage was resurrected
by the U.S. during World War II, and
was used on the decks of ships as well,
in an effort to confuse enemy aircraft.
Today’s electronic surveillance technology
makes dazzle pretty much
obsolete for protecting ships, but as
Forbes points out, the concept of visually
disruptive patterns is still used
in military uniforms.
62 :: bokeh