Reading a really interesting old Squadron book “D-Day to Berlin: Armor Camouflage and Markings of the US, British and German Armies June 1944 - May 1945.” Author, a Brit veteran named Terence Wise with some editorial help from Steve Zaloga and Bruce Culver in 1979. As the title implies, the book is entirely about camo & markings with 270 photos and 65 color prints well keyed to the points made.
Several points surprised me, but I’d like to start with this one. The author claims that when the Wehrmacht adopted the 3 color camo scheme in early 43 they began painting vehicles dark yellow at the factory. The whole system was based on the idea that lower level commanders should decide the exact pattern depending upon terrain, so the yellow tanks came to the front with 2KG tins of rotbraun, oliv and dunkel gelb for overpainting. (This accounts for the bewildering array of color combinations - and throw in gray if reserve vehicles came to the front. Every man’s an artist my old high school art teacher told us - guess it was true in the Wehrmacht.)
Wise maintains that vehicles were most often sprayed for camo. However, he maintains that hand painting was often used if the local commander wanted a “harder” pattern especially if the patterns were also outlined with one of the three colors. (There are several color prints to illustrate this - and they’re different and neat. And I think the color prints are designed to show a “brushed” texture on the camo.) When painting, I think airbrush entirely except for detail. If Wise is right, and I’d bet he is, it would make a lot of sense to follow actual practice and hand paint hard camo. (This does not imply hand painting the whole kit: just the camo pattern over the base color.) The effect would be quite obvious pre-weathering. Not sure if it would be noticeable after all the washes etc are applied. If not, it would save masking time if nothing else. In an old Compendium book I have on building armor, the authors suggest exactly the same for hard patterns.
Any opinions out there? Maybe this is old news and widely done by armor fans. But I’ve just not run into it on the photo builds I’ve looked at. Anyone think it’s a good idea to leave the airbrush aside and pick up a paintbrush to add camo to German armor? (Or some British patterns according to Wise.)
…based on my library of refs, I’d guess that about 75-85% of camo was done with spray guns (excluding whitewash)…You would be accurate if you chose to replicate hand-applied camo, but to assume it was as common as soft-edge sprayed patterns would not be true, IMO…
If you go that route, use a brush that would be scaled down to a handbrush in 35th, and be aware that the green and red-brown will probably be richer as it probably wasn’t cut w/ water or petrol as much as if it were sprayed–if it was cut at all…
Don’t doubt that most vehicles were sprayed, but in late war the Wehrmacht had several thousand vehicles so even 10% would mean a pretty good sized number and hence a legit modeling option. (Of course the allies had several thousand more than several thousand.) The color prints used do indeed make the colors look darker and with a different texture. The point is that it would look different - I’d think that a good idea if one built a lot of armor. Some of the hard patterns are interesting, especially those with outlining. The look, to my eyes anyway, is surpassed in complexity only by some of the ornate “ambush” camo schemes complete with little leaves (hand painted according to Wise.)
Wise points out that as time marched on, using petrol for anything other than running the vehicle was considered a bad idea. Indeed, he argues that German camo wasn’t as good in practice than in theory was that as commanders started to save gas and either slop their paint on straight or thin it with water the finish became very fragile and the pattern went to hades very quickly. And by early 45, Wise notes, the armor coming from factory was usually just painted gelb (or whatever was around) and left that way. There was always foliage or simple mud to provide fairly effective results.
I lifted some prints from the Wise book: the first three show hand painted camo; the last two spray painted. Note the difference between the two tank destroyers in “ambush scheme.”
I mix hand-painted camo with brush-painted camo all the time, and have refs to back it up as well… Their were spray guns at the kompanie-level maintnance section, but time was often an issue, and some tank commanders would just grab a couple brushes rather than wait in line for they spray gun (which is a crew job)… As stated, just use a small, 1/4-inch flat to replicate the 4-6" brush that’d probably be used…
Also, the shades of those paints varied widely as to how much they were thinned with gas… If they were applied straight from the can, they’d likley be very dark in scale color… The rot-braun would probably be a very dark brown, and the green would probably match Tamiya’s RLM Schwarz-grün…
Just to dispel one myth surrounding field applied paint. Paint chemistry was advanced enough already in WW2 where water AND petrol being used as solvents could produce long lasting coverage. Just because some field unit decided to use water instead of a petroleum product – this was not a hindrance. The paint pigments were designed to achieve paint opaqueness and adhere well regardless. One can suspect that water was probably the least preferred solvent but its coat would still be a pretty good grade.
And by the way Eric: you’ve interpreted the Tiger II incorrectly. That’s an attempt to reproduce a Tiger II of sPzAbt 503 which was clearly, clearly spray painted.
The author is also wrong in his assertion that vehicles in '45 were provided only in the DY color. By that point in time the standing orders were for factory schemes to be applied in three-tone (sometimes even 4 tone ala Hetzers) and only on very rare/isolated occasions were vehicles sent out to fight without the camo scheme.
Color plates are also things that often need to be taken with a certain grain of salt depending on the artist/author in question. [;)]
I beg to differ on this plate—the tank represented was sprayed, IMO…I have seen actual cine’ and pics of it…I also believe it would be a lot more difficult to brush paint a zimmed tank than to spray it…
Obviously I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the author’s conclusions. It was very clear in the text that many of the examples used in the plates were vehicles examined either by the author or one of his helpers. The tiger plate is curious. It is obviously based upon a famous photo (in custody of the Imperial War Museum) taken in late 1944. The photo is in the book and the caption lists it as sprayed. The caption with the plate, however, appears to be speaking of a specific vehicle. The note that the suspension is “heavily covered with mud” is curious because the photo is of a parade of new vehicles - they’re probably the most tidy tanks pictured in the volume. Indeed, anyone who argues that modern armor modelers over-weather their work will find no support in this book. The photos show a most untidy war with extremely untidy vehicles. What is very common in the sections from each army are vehicles sprouting all sorts of foliage. The Germans worried about allied air power: the allies worried about German anti-tank weapons in all guises. So, as noted by Wise, the front often resembled a “moving forest.”
Below are some quotes from Wise concerning objections raised by other posts:
towards the end of the war the short active service life of AFVs, combined with paint shortages and supply problems, meant athat man AFVs appeared only in dunkel gelb, and newly-issued vehicles rarely received any paint apart from their factory finishing coat…during the last stages of the war in German the shortages of all materials were so critical that almost all new vehicles received only their overall coat of dunkel gelb.
The olivgrun, rotbraun and dunkel gelb paints were in the form of a thick shoe polish type of paste, which could be thinned to the desired consistency by the addition of water or petrol. The type of thinner used, and the amount, naturally affected the tone of the paint, and the colours used in the field ranged from extremely dark shades, when paste was applied crudely and virtually straight from the tin, to very light ones. Thus olivgrun could range from almost black to a light pea green, and rotbraun from a deep maroon shade to a light brick red…The method of application also affected the tone of the colours. Tanks and other heavy vehicles were officially issued with a small spray gun as part of their equipment, the compressor run off the vehicle’s engine, but in practice few front line vehicles had a spray gun, and rarely used it if they had. However, some elite tank units did have sprayed patterns, either applied by the crews or by rear echelon repair shops, and in this method of application olivgrun came out as a dark green, which took on a more medium tone when applied over the dunkel gelb, and rotbraun appeared a choclate colour. The paints could also be applied by hand, using brushes, rags or even brooms for thin mixtures, and the tones varied considerably under the methods of application. The paints were more commonly applied by hand and this gave a hard edge to the patterns, whereas those applied by spray gun had a graded, merging line where two colours met.
This three-colour system should have given perfect camouflage painting, but in practice it did not always do so. …First, and most important, the pastes themselves proved unstable when mixed with water, and even light rain and could cause the colours to run together and even wash off completely. This meant that petrol had to be used to obtain a durable finish, but at this time petrol was in very short supply…Patterns painted with water-diluted pastes might only last for a few days and would quickly wear off round entry points. Similarly, the sun or rain and frost could blister and crack the best paint finishes. However, mud and dust, oil and petrol stains, all contributed to create a generally indeterminate pattern which in many cases acted as effectively as the paints themselves. On the eastern front, mud was often daubed on vehicles as a natural camouflage, and although the practice was not so widespread in northwest Europe, certainly in late 1944 and early 1945 some examples of this did occur.
Might add that Wise, along with Bruce Culver and Steve Zaloga who are credited with editorial assistance on the German and US chapters respectively, have between them nearly 100 squadron-type books in print. Wise makes some first person observations so he was either there or fibbing. (As most of his 30 books were written in the 70s through about 1990 that would make it very possible that he was a veteran.) This is important because Wise often refers to veterans’ testimony. On the following I can only speak for myself. Inside the world of military history, writers are very divided on the issue of the relative value of veterans’ testimony especially when it seems to contradict a written document. I’ve written a lot of military history and come down squarely in the middle. If vets talk about events at a specific time or place, I’m looking hard for supporting evidence. The things where I have found vets to be most useful, and I believe generally very accurate, are on matters of “look and feel.” If a German vet told Culver that he painted his tank with a broom, I’d believe him. If his crewmate said their tank’s water-based finish dripped off in the rain, I’d believe that too. If the same guys were relating a combat engagement they might have things spot on or they might be mixing up events at Caen with those at Falaise or even Arnhem. And they might be throwing in some of their friends memories as well. There is much to be lost and gained as we move away in time from an event. More documents come to life as eager grad students or writers get deeper into archives of astounding size. (At the National Archives there are three full time military historians to help military historians find documents from the 20th century alone: or at least there were a few years back.) What is lost increasingly is the difference between the war of the “regs” and real war. On one thing I think you’d find near uniformity among veterans looking at their war - a scorn with which men at or near the front treated directives concerning how things should be done. Soldiers most certainly would follow orders if it meant risking their life. If a directive from on high interfered with the task at hand, however, it was often ignored or “misinterpreted”. (This was not, I might add, not always good. The “wastage” in the logistic system of US forces was enormous in both WWII and Vietnam. A lot of stuff was simply stolen. One reason there was a shortage of gasoline at the front in the late summer of 1944 in US units was that thousands of GIs were selling the stuff to gasoline starved Frenchmen on the black market and receiving wine and women in return. A lot of stuff was simply “redirected.” If a boatload of plywood, intended to build sanitary facilities in New Guinea, ended up serving as the materials for wooden floors and walls for US aircrew, hell with malaria.) I think the ever growing historiography of WWII may be better than we’re used to. Starting in the 1990s, the Library of Congress and a number of other entities started programs devoted to preserving the memories of large numbers of those who served - the kind of stuff any Civil War historian would kill for. Anyway, there’s no such thing as a perfect source. But this volume strikes me as a very good one. I’ve read dozens of Squadron/Osprey type books and they certainly have their place. But rarely do they so frequently note how field behavior so often differed from the war as seen from HQ. And it often connects practice with operational factors. For instance, Wise claims that the most elaborately painted AFVs were the tank destroyers. Why? Because when the allies closed on the Rhine they were used as semi-stationary strong points to slow down the allied advance and allow German tanks to reorganize for the Ardennes offensive. It has the ring of truth to me.
You have to take a look at when this book was written. A lot of ideas and interpretations have changed since 1979. Tons of new information have surfaced to dispel what was thought to have been fact in 1979 in regards to German camoflage practices. This is not to say that everything written in it is wrong, but there are now better references on German camo practices than this book today.
Again, I stand by my statement that paints were formulated to accept water for good adhesion. I’ve studied RLM (German air ministry) documents and US wartime paint specs and both lay down the requirement for the paint producers – that WATER be an acceptable solvent – not some wash away last resort item as Wise states. Bollocks.
You may be finding more documents but that doesn’t mean necessarily you’re learning more. This is exactly what I was speaking about in my long-winded response. I’ve been dealing with this type of thing my entire adult life - it’s the dialectic that can move history along, but also move history down the wrong road. A researcher finds a new directive - something that has been misfiled, overlooked or (this has happened with German materials) something people thought destroyed. One such document about the Schlieffen Plan threw the field of WWI strategic history into a loop. Had this been available in 1950, we could have asked an old German officer about it. Now we can’t. So does it mean anything? I think it doesn’t; many disagree. It works the other way. A good bud of mine, Jon Parshall, rewrote the history of the battle of Midway in “Shattered Sword” because he challenged the accuracy of our main Japanese source - Captain Fuchida. One vet’s memories do not a battle make (especially if he was covering Yamamoto’s rear end) now the “Miracle” looks a lot less miraculous. As far as German armor goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. We’ve got thousands of photos and they’re not going away. I reproduced some plates, I didn’t show any of the 250 photos that were nicely keyed to the text and they were powerful argument for the points made by Wise. I’ve got books by Culver inbound and will look at them with interest. Zaloga has an Osprey modeling “Master Class” from Osprey on US WWII armor. As a modeling book it’s a little over my head, but you can see his historical influence on Wise’s book, as well as a couple of points where, as Wise notes, they disagree.
Wise talks about a Luftwaffe connection. German green was in good supply because it was widely used for LW ground installations. What might work on the inside of a hangar might not be a bang-up success on a tank in open weather. Just because a directive says an item must be an acceptable solvent does not mean it was. That’s exactly the kind of evidence that’s very tricky. And if water was so great, why make provision for the use of petrol - a material that was precious to the Wehrmacht. As for the US, Zaloga’s new book repeats something that appears in Wise. (Wise notes he disagrees with Zaloga on some points and Zaloga takes up the same point about whether early war US armor ever appeared in a kind of dark olive green.) Prewar finishes, which favored a gloss or satin green, were used because they looked nicer (if you’ve only got a couple hundred tanks, they might as well look pretty). They were also very durable. However, the move to matte olive drab - which Zaloga thinks was pretty much all she wrote for US vehicles - was accompanied by an inevitable decline in the ability of the new rendition of a very old color to resist scuffing. Bad for “spit and polish” but not so bad for wartime use. Zaloga then traces what you might call the battle of the directives as the definition and practice of applying the “approved” shade of olive drab finally got worked out - in 1943. (The battle included some brushes with the USAAF.) That sounds like the Army I know.
Are you Wise’s agent? You speak about more documentation not meaning anything, and that is sometimes true, but you really seem overly excited about this one person’s interpretations…what’s the back story on your post?
Eric: I’m not some super interpreter of b/w photos. But I know something about bureaucracy and if the friggen RLM and the US Quartermaster corps sets a directive that they need water soluble paint – and then issue field manuals as to how to mix and apply them – I can be pretty assured that the RLM and US Quatermasters didn’t just accept what any paint manufacturer shipped to them.
Granted, I’m speaking about Luftwaffe and US requirements – but my point was that paint procurement was already at a stage where suitable water soluble pigments were in the system. Therefore I logically can surmise that the OKW would accept nothing less. Sound reasonable?
All I’m saying is that I take issue with Wise’s statement about water dissolved german paint just melting away after a good rain or two. Do I know how much better petrol solvents were than water ones? Nope. I’m not a chemist. But I think Wise’s statement about poor paint adhesion is more of the authoritative-sounding statement that turns out to be braggadocio.
But all this aside, I agree w/your original point that as modellers of German equipment, we don’t see that many hand painted camo schemes. Maybe an aesthetic preference?
I have no self-interest in a book published forty years ago by someone I’ve never met: trust me on that one. It is true that never in my professional career did I have any need to study armor camouflage and this was the first book I’ve ever read that deals specifically with the subject. I was interested in it because it does have implications for model building. I started the thread asking whether other modelers had used hand painting to lay down a camo painting over an airbrushed base. I’ve only seen the technique recommended in one pretty old book. I was thinking that airbrush is king and along comes a voice says that maybe for some kits it might be both interesting and historically legit to try a techniques leading to different results. So I thought I’d ask the modelers here - people that know more about modeling that I do. As a very prolific author on military subjects who has written extensively for a venerable publisher put the idea into my head, I thought the point worth bringing up. (BTW: used copies are for sale on Amazon for under $10.) As the work was proof read by two younger but even more prolific authors in armor and modeling that only added some weight. Ultimately I if Wise is right it does support the case made by some modelers that a pretty heavy hand in weathering is good history if not good modeling. I tepidly brought up the same point after watching again my series of DVDs on German weaponry derived from German wartime propaganda films. A secondary point that suggests itself is that some techniques are not widely employed by modelers that would be good history - how many people try to put snow (not whitewash) on their kits and in the tracks? The use of foliage is pretty rare as near as I can see. There may be good modeling reasons for that (I haven’t the foggiest idea how you’d simulate either snow or a goodly collection of local shrubbery and put it on a model tank without making it look silly) but if may be some unexplored territory for those trying to capture a minute of time. That’s all. Promise. And if I got onto tangents, all I can say that teaching and writing military history (specializing in WWII and Vietnam) has been my job for thirty five years and it’s an occupational hazard. Source analysis is central to any serious history it’s a tough topic to leave alone even when I should. Doesn’t help me a bit with modeling unfortunately.
So while we’re at it I’ve noticed something very interesting. I’ve been buying tank books and have the Chamberlain/Ellis volume on allied AFVs, the Hart/Hart volume on German tanks and one of the Jentz/Doyle volumes on German armor. All of these volumes have a lot of photos but the authors were looking for clarity probably to accompany their very nice diagrams. That means photos taken in training or perhaps at the factory. Very good way to learn what the vehicle looked like with all of its pieces on. But few pictures from the front (very few in Chamberlain/Ellis - hardly any soldiers in that book). All of Wise’s photos come from the front lines from a period of combat as vicious as any in the war - eastern front style nasty. The quality of the photos suffer but the picture of war you get is drastically different.
As far as the paint goes obviously I don’t know. Zaloga very interesting chapter on Olive Drab in his Master Class book gives a blow by blow attempt by the army to get the color they wanted and after two years they succeeded. However, as previously noted, if the paints carried by German vehicles were perfectly water soluble why would they also be suited for petrol in a petrol starved army? Wise claims that petrol worked better - that’s a very feasible answer.We’ll see what Culver, the uber-guru has to say.
As for hand painting, I’m going to try it on a Dragon Jagdpanther: one of those ambush schemes looks neat.
Yupper… Shep was the guy that started me on the diorama path way back when they first came out, with his M-48 Patton inspiring my first one about 1972 or 73…
A little backstory about Shep’s dioramas for Monogram – often he was under tremendous deadline pressures to crank out his work. All the more amazing when you consider how groundbreaking his work was for most of us in armor modeling.
A local collector has the Calliope “Screamin’ Mimi” diorama undergoing whitewash and the M3 Lee in the desert w/a crewman defusing a land mine. They’ve been displayed at my local hobby shop. It’s great to see them up close and personal.
Very cool…there was an FSM article awhile back that tried to track down all of those dios–most were located but some are MIA or have been “scavenged” over the years…most were at the Monovell HQ… A often told story of the Desert dio with the Lee/Grant in it was the Mk IV that is knocked out is so detailed becuase he was waiting on the test shots for the Lee/Grant and spent his time waiting tricking out the MK IV…
