Razzle-dazzle.

This dude's got him some razzle-dazzle. 

By that I don't mean the first definition of razzle-dazzle from Merriam-Webster, that being "a state of confusion or hilarity," which dates back to 1885. I'm thinking of the second definition, "a complex maneuver (as in sports) designed to confuse an opponent," or the third, "a confusing or colorful often gaudy action or display." That's because this crickety fellow shares a tactic that was developed by the United Kingdom and the United States during World War I, which was called razzle-dazzle, or the dazzle system.

The April 1919 issue of Popular Science Monthly noted:

When the German U-boats began their depredations, it became desperately necessary to provide some protective coloration for transport, food-ships, and the hundreds of vessels that were carrying munitions to Europe. 

Battleship gray had been devised to help ships blend into the sky and sea, but as the article notes, it had "proved utterly useless". What the artists came up with instead was the dazzle system, a means of painting ships not to render them invisible, but to use odd patterns of stripes to make it difficult for a U-boat to tell which way a ship was facing and at what speed it was traveling. The class of the ship (battleship, cargo, etc.) would be more difficult for the enemy to pinpoint as well. 

More than 2,000 ships got the dazzle treatment, but I don't know if it's possible to say how effective it was. Since U-boats would not act and betray their position unless they were positive of a hit, there's no telling how many shots they didn't take because of the dazzle system. 

The illustrations from the Popular Science article certainly make it seem impressive:

However, there's at least one sailor's story that questions its effectiveness:  

It was quiet sometimes and sometimes you were… once or twice we lost a couple of merchant ships. I can remember I was on watch one afternoon and we were coming up the east coast and I said to the signalman, ‘Hey, I said, look at that ship over yonder.’ And I says, it was the first ship we saw with the dazzle paint on. And lo and behold, not a couple minutes after, we heard a bang and a flash and we look across and it was this ship that was dazzled – sunk.

I guess by the time the Big One, WWII, broke out, they decided just to go back to battleship gray because you couldn't dazzle the enemy with just visual tricks anymore. Airplanes would not be fooled by stripes, and unlike in the First Big One, airplanes were used heavily in sea combat. 

Anyway, that's a thought for today, brought up by the bug. I'll have more to write on battleship gray tomorrow.