Ship Shape, a Dazzle Camouflage Sourcebook

Book excerpt: This is an anthology of twenty-seven World War I-era essays, by various authors, on ship camouflage from that time period. It focuses primarily on American and British camouflage, and especially on "dazzle camouflage," a counter-intuitive method in which brightly colored abstract shapes were applied to the ship's surface. The purpose of such camouflage was not low visibility, but to make it difficult to aim a torpedo at a distant, moving ship from a submerged submarine (U-boat), while peering through a periscope. The book includes 275 drawings, diagrams and vintage photographs, and a 40-page camouflage bibiliography, the largest ever.