Info needed: correct colours for WWII Aust vehicles

[Lang]

Tony and Mike

The effort you blokes are putting in is great.

In your latest collection of carrier photos I can see 5 different patterns - 6 if you count the two different patterns on the same vehicles, presumably from the same unit, in the last photo - (and the actual colours seem to be in doubt with the experts as well).

The field photos look like an exercise - Puckapunyal? Carriers running through a prelaid corduroy bog hole with a bunch of "observers" looks like a visit from the boss and his staff or a PR shoot. What makes you think it was a camo field trial?

I am really interested in what actually happened and am hard pushed trying to follow the changes in the patterns. The dates, numbers and various orders and instructions went past me long ago and I will leave that to you!

Gina's RAAF file is a great read (there would have been similar Army files). Unfortunately many researchers take correspondence on these files at face value and use them to back an argument but unless you have worked in a Headquarters you can not read between the lines.

Without that background most people do not understand the relationship between various ranks and particularly jobs. You see this a lot on MLU. It is not a straight rank line and much more collegiate than outsiders think. I spent 15 years in the Army and never once had a senior officer say to me like in the movies "And that's an order!"

Armies are made up of people with opinions, prejudices and various abilities. Pieces of paper may be guidelines of intent but nearly all final results are achieved by people talking to each other of which there is little record.

Not all correspondence carries the same weight. A researcher may not realise a letter from a Captain may have far more significance than one signed by a General. There is often a story between the lines. There are contests between personalities, many letters are just going through the motions with little intent to proceed further and whole pictures can be built up from a few words in letters weeks apart.

As mentioned before, it is easy to read into things but once you start saying the date in the photo is wrong - you may well be right - but without real evidence you may as well say any annoying contradiction is wrong and offer the cleansed evidence as perfect proof.

All the research on dates, numbers, colours and instructions in the world is not going to overcome the fact that at no time did the entire Australian forces vehicle fleet actually carry a standardised colour scheme. There were so many changes that the factory colours may likely be tracked but the new schemes may have been retrofinished on very small numbers of issued vehicles or large numbers according to the period but certainly not all.

There appears to be some idea that there were huge groups of vehicles available for repaint jobs. That may be true for transport companies, artillery and armoured units but half the army vehicles were spread throughout hundreds of smaller units ranging from headquarters vehicles to Infantry battalions to many 1-3 vehicle operators.

Getting all those random vehicles into somewhere to repaint them was impossible. Most could not afford to lose their vehicles because they had no back up and the Chaplain did not know which end of a paint brush to hold when they decided not to bring him in but sent him a can of paint and a drawing for his single vehicle.

Trying to track paint dates from photos in the field (not factory lines) is a pretty hard ask as I would hazard a guess that the further away from Victoria Barracks the units were, the less likely they would be to have brought their vehicles in for their weekly repaint.

I think the whole target of this exercise should be to find what were the actual colours - the mystery colour chip. Trying to put written instructions for patterns and colours against field photos, neatly into date boxes is impossible. You could say a scheme could not be before a date but certainly not after.

You have a big job in front of you.

PS I just had someone say they had the full WW2 period paint chip books from both the Ford and GMH factories. Should he just throw them out?

Lang