Devising Dazzle Camouflage | Series 2018C

Hypothetical Dazzle Camouflage © Roy R. Behrens (2018)

Above Hypothetical dazzle ship camouflage schemes devised by Roy R. Behrens by isolating details from pre-existing photographs. These are not actual examples of historic ship camouflage, but suggest that there may be alternative, more expedient ways to devise confusion patterns.

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Unsigned, HEROES OF THE TRANSPORT SERVICE. Glorious Story of American Sailors May Never Be Told. Dakota County Herald (Dakota City NE) April 18, 1918, p. 7—

Then all at once a whisper ran through tho ship…The destroyers were coming. Somewhere out of that gray, cruel sea the American war boats were sweeping down on the convoy. Our destroyers, our men, they were coming to see their brethren safe through the war zone.

I shall never forget the way they came. It was a gray afternoon, when the maintop reported the flicker of a blinker signaling far out over the waves. We didn't see them [the camouflaged ships] when they came. They seemed to materialize suddenly out of nothing.

All at once, we saw the first one. She was only a few hundred yards off our bows, and we had to watch her closely to see her at all. That sounds foolish; but It Is literal fact. She was camouflaged—streaked and dotted and splashed in a dozen colors, and she melted away Into the background of the sea as though she weren't made of steel, but of mist.

Then we realized that they were all around us. Eight of them. All dappled and harlequin-patterned, all practically invisible at half a mile.