I love Dark Roasted Blend. I could (and do) spend hours wandering and wondering through their vast archives of the bizarre, banal and sublime.
One particular entry, though has some crossover relevance to this blog – it’s all about the weird and wonderful dazzle camouflage designs painted on merchant and military ships during the World Wars, which provided effective deception against optical range-finding and target tracking, until seaborne radar was adopted.
The Camo Side of Dominic Hyde 
Apparently, a slightly different pattern on each end of the ship was found to be most effective. That would be like wearing a jacket and trousers of two different camouflage patterns and not just wearing one camouflage pattern.
I don’t think you (or they) quite did your homework on this one. After WW1 the British Admiralty studied Dazzle painting very craefully and were unable to find ONE incident in which it threw off a U-boat’s aim. Thus they decared it a failure from a visual point of view.
They did, however, find that the crews had a major boost in morale because they felt they were somewhat better protected. So they kept it specifically for the morale boost.
Not entirely true, Jon. The Brits couldn’t prove it worked, but they found it didn’t make the vessels more of a target, either, so as it didn’t do any harm, and could be said to be a morale booster, as you mention, it was kept. Proving its effectiveness was always going to be difficult though – the idea was to prevent or delay an attack in the first place, not throw the submarine’s aim off. Since a vessel would have had no idea it was being targeted until it saw torpedo tracks in the water, the Admiralty could only measure reports of actual attacks, not attempts.
Conversely, the US Navy decided Dazzle WAS effective!
I disagree. The report I am talking about worked with U boat records and U boat captains to look at incidents where a torpedo was fired- and why it missed. So it was done looking at it from the firer’s point of view as well, and if U Boat Captain’s who had fired at ships said they had no problem spotting and fixing and hitting the target- or felt they missed for some other reason (and would it not make them look better to actually blame it on the dazzle/) then I’d have to say it was not effective.
Well, you have me at a disadvantage – I’m going by info available on the internet. Specific quotes from this ship camouflage website do not refer to dazzle as ‘a failure’:
Whereas the US Navy said:
It would be helpful if you would provide some references, published either online or in print, that we can refer to for corroboration.