Does anyone know what color the torpedos on PT boats were? I can’t seem to get the hue right from looking at the B&W pics I have found. [:)] Any Help would be great. The only color pics I have found have been of a restored museum PT boat and they have the business end of the torpedo painted bright red! Some how I don’t think thats quite right. I mean really… It does not seem to go with the camo scheme very well. Thanks for any help.
While this is not a photograph, it is from ptboats.org which is a good source for info on PTs. Check this site out. http://www.ptboats.org/index.html
Depends on the timeline for the torpedo. The longer they were carried, the more likely they were to be painted OD or whatever was handy. Freshly distributed torpedos would have been a mixed bag of raw metal or a dullcoat.
PT boat squadrons had to make do with what was available at the time. My dad, who served alongside some of those crazy guys, said that you wouldn’t have believed some of the colour schemes they would come up with.
The Mk-13 torpedoes carried in the roll-off rack from mid to late '43 on had a number of warhead colors. mostly some of the Navy Greens and Greys in use at the time. It was not uncommon to see a mix of warhead colors on a given boat. The bodies were pretty much natural metal with a varnish like coating that had yellowish tones with black streaks. Later I think some of the bodies may have been painted black. Some torpedoes were painted in the same camo colors and patterns as the boat.
Boat leaving the Elco factory in Measure 31/5P camo. Note painted torpedoes.
Here is a link to the pT171.org site with a photo of a camo painted torpedo.
http://www.pt171.org/PT171/action/target39.html
I’ve been told by vets that I got it pretty close. The photo flash washed out the slight yellow tint on the body.
Here is a photo of a torpedo used on a restored Higgins boat on the West Coast.
In this photo from '43, you can see the natural bronze finish of the torpedoes in their tubes.
I hope this helps.
Ed
Thanks for the great info guys. I think that I will go with them not matching. It makes sense really. I have always understood that under those conditions they would use any paint available but have tended to avoid doing that on my models. Time to break old habits. [:)]
It’s also probably good to remember that many of the WWII torpedoes were made by hand at the Torpedo Factory almost as “one offs.” Makes for fascinating reading in several books on the history of US torpedoes.
It’s also germane that torpedo shops often mixed and matched warheads to bodies to afterbodies, so a person who needed to, could justify entire lines of metalic or metalizer paints