Info needed: correct colours for WWII Aust vehicles

[Lang]

Gina

Just had a read of your link put up yesterday giving the RAAF side of camouflage. Talk about herding cats!

The instructions in the beginning of the file coming out in 1941 clearly laid out what is required for the army (until they modified them time and again).

The RAAF, who had thousands of vehicles, decided to do their own thing, coming up with their own colours and patterns and being continuously - or attempted to - brought back into line by Dakin and Co. They still modified his instructions.

Well into 1943 the RAAF had had enough of bad durability and wanted to have their own paint using "the Army Khaki Green J.3"

The Commander of North East Area (the biggest operational RAAF area) said as late as 1943 "We are not painting camouflage, all our vehicles will be overall green" And if you look at photos of RAAF vehicles, even in the islands, the great majority of them are.

Western Australian area wrote an indignant letter saying they had beautifully camouflaged their ambulances according to instructions to find bloody great white circles and red crosses on them!

I particularly like the camouflage painting of the hired Vacuum Oil tankers being used on airfields. Vacuum offered to paint them for the RAAF for $6 each. The RAAF replied no thank you we have a system going and will paint them in water based paint which can be removed when you get the vehicles back.

Hidden in the file is a note "Oops! we already painted them with oil paint before you told us to use water paint."

No plan ever survives the first shot!

An interesting point is the the air observation tests with various patterns came up with the best concealment being plain green trucks both on tree lines and in the open - better than the camouflage schemes.

I was personally involved in air observation of Australian vehicles testing the changeover from the plain khaki green to the current camouflage. Out of about 8 different schemes the plain green came out on top in almost every test. What a wonderful colour that slightly grey green was for the Australian bush, many is the time we stumbled around in the shrubbery trying to find where we had parked our Landrovers. They had an agenda so we now have the second placed camouflaged vehicles.

Lang