Weird (But Effective) Naval Disguises - Masters of Disguise

[@nigelmorroll3343]

The sight of two disguised ocean liners firing on each other must of have been a strange sight for any other ships nearby to see.

[@jacktyler2880]

USS Canopus (AS-9), a submarine tender "sunk" in Manila Bay during the Japanese "blitzkrieg." During the month of December, she worked tirelessly by night to keep her own submarines plus any other fighting craft in action, while by day, smoke pots were used to disguise her as a bombed out hulk (she had been hit twice). This was successful in keeping her safe from further damage until the navy abandoned the bay shortly after New Yeasr's.

[@emilpetersen3365]

Dummy Prinz Eugen is another great fun one. Dummy Eugen was built while the real Prinz Eugen was in Brest and helped against the British for the Channel Dash. The British were busy looking at Dummy Eugen, while the real Prinz Eugen sailed up the channel with the others. There exist a few old newspapers and photos of Dummy Eugen. Dummy Eugen was also used as a R.A.F. target to lure the attackers away from the real Prinz Eugen. Like you said with some of the vessels in your video, up close, one could easly spot the diffence between Dummy Eugen and the real Prinz Eugen, but like you said, the goal was to confuse the airplanes from the sky, which she did pretty well. So yeah, thanks Dummy Eugen for helping giving us one of the greatest naval moments in ww2 - the channel dash!

[@SuperGeert123]

Hahahaha that ship covered in bush ! That ships crew did great job to survive , awesome !

[@oldhifi8820]

I enjoyed the video. RMS Carmania's other claim to fame is that she was the turbine powered ship that answered Cunard's question on what to power the Lusitania & Mauritania, turbines or quadruple expansion engines? She had an identical sister ship RMS Caronia but it had quadruple expansion engines. The turbines of the Caarmania were faster and burned less fuel. the question was answered.

[@JohnD-scaledecks]

An unintentional camouflage, perhaps, is the ex-battleship USS Utah serving as a remote controlled target ship out of Pearl Harbor. With her wooden target deck she was mistaken for an aircraft carrier and sunk during the Dec 7 attack.

[@Hardcase_Kara]

I think an interesting one would be Graf Spee not sure if they mught count or not but they added a set of fake barrels and a dummy funnel to disguise her as another ship.

[@ut000bs]

My most favorite camouflage pattern will always be Measure 21. All vertical surfaces are Navy Blue and horizontal surfaces, like decks, are Deck Blue which is a dark, grayish blue. I'm so goth. My favorite picture of the battleship _New Jersey_ when she was first commissioned and she was painted in Measure 21. She looked all dark and badass. The French battleship _Richelieu_ is in the background if you know the picture.

[@grahamepigney8565]

Trinidad was a British colony from the beginning of the 1800s. Prior to that it was a Spanish protectorate/colny it never seems to have been Brazilian/Portugese.

[@skyneahistory2306]

Different islands. Trindade (as opposed to Trinidad) is a small island much further to the south.

[@grahamepigney8565]

@@skyneahistory2306 thanks for making that clear after the event.

[@MartinCHorowitz]

Does USS Robin count?

[@lordwintertown8284]

G'day Skynea, Hm interesting video for these four vessels, but for your point on what I can think of hmm. • SMS Emden, Dresden class cruiser. Dummy funny that fooled the British & allies from distance & resulted in a few ships lost & caused watchers to think it was an allied ship. • HMS Campbelltown I42 Town class 1940 Ex USS Buchanan DD-131 Wickes class, expended in Operation Chariot while disguised as a Type 1924 torpedo boat with heavy reconstruction to make it look the part. Sidenote, I nearly typed HMS Leamington G19 Ex USS Twiggs DD-127, for she played the Campbelltown late in the film Gifthorse 1954 (heh its pennant was GH-19). Strange I was just reading about the successor namesake of the Buchanan yesterday a Charles F Adams class.

[@rm6330]

Would that battleship in Chers video clip "Turn back time" count as a weird disguise with her draped over the cannons? 😂

[@howardmaryon]

Is that the one where she is wearing a “costume” made of black duck tape?

[@rm6330]

@howardmaryon Yeah 😄

[@jimihendrix991]

USS Missouri

[@notshapedforsportivetricks2912]

Missouri caught something very nasty from that.

[@beverlychmelik5504]

How about an episode on making of target ships and how they were used, IE fired upon without sinking them?

[@karlstreed3698]

Many years ago I helped build, test and deploy the special operations MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft. I had to sit through a five-day meeting on paint! Since the aircraft were to be used worldwide, day or night, we had to figure out what was the best paint and paint scheme for it. The choices ran from flat black, gray, two color, three color, four color, and lizard. The meeting got fairly heated as groups pushed their choice. I never knew how paint effects how well you can hide or highlight a plane. I am sure navies go through the same ordeal for their ships & boats.

[@burningsky23]

In a deleted sequence from Apocalypse Now, the crew of PBR Street Gang use vegetation to conceal their boat from Kilgore's searching helicopters after Willard steals the Col.'s best surfboard.

[@thinaphonpetsiri9907]

Kinda poetic that HMS Centurion was the King George V-class battleship and she’s also disguised as a ship of the new King George V-class battleship.

[@Tal-q3r]

there was a ship in a dispersed Archangel convoy that disguised itself as a small iceberg, but i cant remember the name ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@rodofiron100]

Drach did a video on that one. They pulled Sherman tanks out and placed them on the deck to give them something to shoot back with. It was a US liberty ship, part of pq17 (I think) the convoy that got scaterd because the British thought tirpitz was coming for it.

[@Tal-q3r]

@@rodofiron100 ill see what Drach did, but that sounds about right 👊

[@Cyberleader135]

Weren’t there also merchant ships in Scapa Flow which were disguised as battleships?

[@OtherWorldExplorers]

Off topic. I think I know why the Japanese sunken ships during world war II suffer more than the US Navy. If I'm not mistaken the Japanese were facing shortages of raw materials including lead. And I know the US Navy was using lead paint to paint their ships. That might be a factor why the Japanese ships after being sunk began the rest much worse than the US Navy. I don't have any hard data to back that up. Other than a couple of questions I asked chat GTP. What are your thoughts?

[@rm6330]

Correct, off topic. 😄

[@herptek]

Face paint is actually effective unlike arguably dazzle camouflage. Or at least if the color of the scenery is greatly different from the colour of the skin, which it usually is for white skinned people in summer and everyone in a snowy environment. Dazzle camouflage has the opposite idea, not to blend in the environment, but to try to make it difficult to judge distance and heading, at the cost of being possibly even easier to spot from the background.

[@williamdaniel4081]

HMS Iron Duke was also disguised as a Revenge class BB in WW2

[@XOsubmariner]

Speed angle and distance you need angle on the bow to work out a firing solution for a torpedo attack

[@alephalon7849]

I see no fake ships here. Only HMS Hermes, HMS Anson, an Indonesian island, and Carmania. Perhaps you can cover modern ships made to look like older ones, like the ships used for Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor movie? But I understand KZbin would react harshly to lifting photos from movies...

[@seldonplanB-24]

You left out the "Philadelphia Experiment" 😁

[@jeffblacky]

Do video of hms wi lo More decorated little ship in the navy