DAZZLE SHIPS

I remember Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark's 1983 Dazzle Ships LP with confused affection. Largely because it seemed so fucking odd at the time - following up an album as internatiionally successful as Architecture & Morality (home to both of their massive Joan Of Arc singles) with something so ugly, awkward & leftfield seemed admirably brave at the time but clearly misguided commercial suicide with a quarter of a century's worth of hindsight (though it's probably worth bearing in mind that a band could be recording a Peel session one day & appearing on TOTP the next at this juncture) - but also because it tanked so spectacularly that it was essentially written out of musical history for a couple of decades, seemingly considered an embarrassment alongside even the horrific depths of OMD's subsequent, pointedly commercial direction (which is saying summut). What I didn't realise, until comparativley recently anyway, is exactly what a dazzle ship is/was, & why the terrific semi-Vorticist sleeve of the original vinyl LP looked the way it did. Well, I do now...


Dazzle Camouflage, also known as Razzle Dazzle or Dazzle Painting, was a camouflage paint technique used on ships, extensively during the First World War and to a lesser extent in WWII. Credited to artist Norman Wilkinson, it consisted of a complex pattern of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, interrupting and intersecting each other. At first glance it seems unlikely camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it, but this technique was developed after the Allied Navy's failure to develop effective means to disguise ships in all weather. Dazzling did not conceal the ship but made it difficult for the enemy to estimate its speed and direction. The idea being to disrupt the visual rangefinders used for naval artillery, it's purpose was confusion rather than concealment. An observer would find it difficult to know exactly whether the stern or the bow is in view; and it would be equally difficult to estimate whether the observed vessel is moving towards or away from the observer's position.All British patterns were different. First tested on small wooden models viewed through a periscope in a studio, most of the designs were painted by women from London's Royal Academy Of Arts, a foreman then scaling up their designs for the real thing. Painters, however, were not alone in the project - creative people including sculptors, abstract artists, and set designers all helped design camouflage. The Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth supervised the camouflage of over two thousand warships, and his post-war canvases celebrated his dazzling ships (that's his 1919 painting Dazzle-Ships In Dry Dock At Liverpool above).

In a 1919 lecture, Norman Wilkinson explained: "The primary object of this scheme was not so much to cause the enemy to miss his shot when actually in firing position, but to mislead him, when the ship was first sighted, as to the correct position to take up. [Dazzle was a] method to produce an effect by paint in such a way that all accepted forms of a ship are broken up by masses of strongly contrasted colour, consequently making it a matter of difficulty for a submarine to decide on the exact course of the vessel to be attacked.... The colours mostly in use were black, white, blue and green.... When making a design for a vessel, vertical lines were largely avoided. Sloping lines, curves and stripes are by far the best and give greater distortion."

Winston Churchill considered deception in war to be an indispensable "element of leger de main, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten." What an absolute bounder, eh?