But it had occurred to him that if a black ship was broken up with white stripes it would visually confuse the enemy. “I knew it was utterly impossible to render a ship invisible,” Wilkinson later recalled, according to Forbes’ book. When he returned to the Royal Navy’s Devonport dockyard, he went straight to his superior officer with his idea. “For Wilkinson to come up with the ideas of redefining camouflage as high visibility, as opposed to low visibility, was pretty astonishing.”Īs Peter Forbes writes in his 2009 book Dazzled and Deceived: Mimicry and Camouflage, Wilkinson-who commanded an 80-foot motorboat used for minesweeping off the British coast-apparently was inspired during a weekend fishing trip in the Spring of 1917. Behrens, a professor of art and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa, who writes “Camoupedia,” a blog that’s a compendium of research on the art of camouflage. American artist Abbott Thayer, for example, advocated painting ships white and concealing their smokestacks with canvas in an effort to make them blend into the ocean, according to Smithsonian.ĭazzle camouflage, as Wilkinson’s concept came to be called, “appeared to be counter-intuitive,” explains Roy R. Wilkinson’s idea was a startling contrast to those of other camouflage theorists. The patterns would make it more difficult to figure out the ship’s size, speed, distance and direction. By covering ships’ hulls with startling stripes, swirls and irregular abstract shapes that brought to mind the Cubist paintings of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque, one could momentarily confuse a German U-boat officer peering through a periscope.
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