Thursday, September 29, 2016
Dazzle Camo
For most of the four millennia surrounding the birth of Christ, fighting men around the World wore bright colored uniforms, but that ended about the time of the Boer War. The Brits took off the red tunics with crossed white equipment straps and put on khaki. The Germans had earlier put some elite troops in green. The real change came during WWII and it was spearheaded, like most innovations in war, by the Germans. They put on camouflage uniforms designed not to be seen -- as long as one stayed perfectly still. And the German innovators in camouflage looked at nature for inspiration in what to color their uniforms and equipment. Now all the World follows that lead. That's natural camo. But there are other kinds.
We won't talk about clown camo because it's not worthy of discussion.
But there is a thing called dazzle camouflage. It's not designed to hide what is "wearing" the camouflage but to make it difficult to focus on. Dazzle camo is also inspired by nature as you can see in the photo of zebras above. Here are some marine dazzle camo from WWI, the heyday of this form of camouflage, although some ships in WWII received similar paint jobs.
Nobody is sure if it worked or not and no one paints ships in dazzle camo anymore. The zebras have kept with it though.
Labels: Dazzle Camouflage; Ships; Zebras
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 7:23 AM 
