[Wustenfuchs]

Originally Posted by Kurttis Thomas

I always thought they were just black and white. because of the sky and the water.

Light colors match the sky well and dark colors match the sea. But in the open ocean a ship may be up on a swell one moment and down in a trough the next making the light color stand out against the dark and the dark colors stand out against the sky. I'm not sure why they decided on bright colors to make up for this, unless perhaps at a distance the colorful camouflage tended to blur into either background.

There's no way to really know if the color made any difference. By WW2 the color was dropped and ship camo did become shades of light and dark.