Warships and Zebras would appear to have little in common except a deep seated desire to avoid the attention of the enemy.
However, if you can't make yourself invisible to the enemy at least you can confuse him.
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At first glance, dazzle seems an unlikely form of camouflage, drawing attention to the ship rather than hiding it.
The approach was developed after Allied navies were unable to develop effective means to hide ships in all weather conditions.
The British zoologist John Graham Kerr proposed the application of camouflage to British warships in the First World War, outlining what he believed to be the applicable principle, disruptive camouflage, in a letter to Winston Churchill in 1914 explaining the goal was to confuse, not to conceal, by disrupting a ship's outline.
Kerr compared the effect to that created by the patterns on a series of land animals, the giraffe, zebra and jaguar.
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Depiction of how Norman Wilkinson intended dazzle camouflage to cause the enemy to take up poor firing positions.
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