Kev367th said:Of course the obvious question - What the hell were they thinking of, lol ?
Normal camo is intended to make the target blend into the background and thus hard to see in the 1st place. This black-and-white dazzle scheme, OTOH, assumed you'd see the target regardless (due to its size, it leaving a wake, and blowing smoke), so was intended instead to make it hard for you to hit it. It was invented in WW1 and used extensively on cargo ships, slow convoy escorts, and slow fleet auxilliaries like seaplane tenders. Faster warships stayed with various shades of gray to blend with the background instead. It fell into disuse during WW2 as radar came into more widespread use, because the dazzle scheme tricks the eyes, not electrons.
If you want to hit a ship, you have to determine its relative course, speed, and bearing, so you can figure out how much to lead the target. If you don't have radar, you have to do this by eye, using things like rangefinders and periscope stadia. The dazzle scheme made it very hard to do this, because it tricked the eye. It was hard to tell by looking at the target which way it was going, and it was hard to focus it in the rangefinder or line up the periscope stadia correctly.
It's use on PT boats was sort of a throwback to the WW1 era. As IJN shipping became scarse, PTs ran out of their normal targets. So then, instead of ambushing IJN ships at night with torpedos, they spent their time cruising the coasts of Japanese islands during the day and trying to shoot up barges they found along the shore. In this work, they would be shot at by concealed, optically aimed coastal guns and attacked by planes, also using the Mk1mod0 eyeball. So some of them started using the dazzle scheme to make the 1st Japanese shot miss, to give them time to punch it up to full speed and be able to dodge subsequent shots.
