About merchant ship wartime colours

[kapuhy]

Originally Posted by iambecomelife

Interesting photos of colored sketches below, showing how ship camouflage changed from WWI - they are of the standard "War" class merchantman "War Drake" in 1918 and the long bridge deck merchant "Clearpool".

It seems they decided in WW2 that the complicated dazzle camouflage was not very effective

Description of second image says:

"Dazzle painting was not used as she would almost always be sailing in convoy"

...which kinda makes sense: dazzle does not help to hide a ship, only obscure its AOB, but if your target is in convoy accompanied by several rows of ships all sharing same course and speed, you have more ways to gather data then eyeballing a single target?

No idea if this was really the reasoning behind dropping dazzle of course.