Introduction

In the First World War, battlefields became zones of technological experimentation. The innovations that engineers developed to address the reality of total war helped armed forces produce carnage on previously unimaginable scales. However, those inventions also influenced and derived from technological developments across a wide variety of disciplines, which shaped everyday life and conceptions of modernity. The introduction of ‘dazzle camouflage’ by the British Admiralty in October 1917 marked one such invention. Devised by the British painter and naval officer Norman Wilkinson, and implemented by teams of artists, military personnel and at least one member of the London Vorticist movement, ‘dazzle painting’ was designed to protect military and commercial ships from German U-boat attacks. Rather than attempting the ‘impossible’ feat of hiding a vessel against the sky and sea, dazzle patterns consisted of starkly contrasting geometric shapes and shades applied strategically to key areas of a ship in order to deceive the enemy rather than to disguise the vessel. Viewed through a periscope, the design could ‘break up’ a ship's ‘form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course of a ship’, thereby limiting the chance of a successful attack by disrupting the targeting calculations that U-boat crews had only a short time to complete. Wilkinson’s illustration for the 1922 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on naval camouflage illustrates how ‘violently contrasting’ dazzle patterns interfered with ‘the laws of perspective’, ‘making it extremely difficult to judge the accurate inclination of a vessel even at a short range’ (Fig. 1.1). In short, although enemies were more likely to notice a dazzle ship, they would be less likely to hit it with their one of their torpedoes.

The Vorticist artist Edward Wadsworth worked as an officer in Wilkinson's Dazzle Section supervising the dazzle painting of ships at Liverpool docks, including the RMS Mauretania, one of the fastest commercial vessels in the world at the time. Pictured setting sail in 1918, this photograph of the Mauretania captures a momentary confluence between military, commercial and avant-garde activity that resulted in dazzle camouflage, which first blazed across the world stage from 1917 to 1919 (Fig. 1.2).