by Tracy White » Fri Dec 21, 2012 11:34 am
Dana gave me copies of some of the documents he found (I don't know if he found more after the fact, etc.) and I read through them. I actually don't have them with me on my laptop so I can't reference them while writing this, and I don't want to say too much and steal any thunder that he may have planned for future releases.
Put simply, there was a desire for US forces to be able to tell similar ships of the same class (at the very least) apart from each other, while hiding their identify from foreign forces. You wouldn't want an enemy fleet to be able to determine which was your flagship, for example. Experimental paints were developed, as he noted, but there were difficulties with viewing them as well as problems with the paint itself. There was some experimentation on the individual ships with the filters - unsanctioned and unofficial from what I remember, but they reported on it.
There are other photos showing these markings - I scanned in one back in October that they're visible on.
There was a notion or "common sense" that the Navy didn't do much with Camouflage between WWI and WWII, but this is another hint that this notion is not as true as we thought. There is an interesting story to discover here.
Dana gave me copies of some of the documents he found (I don't know if he found more after the fact, etc.) and I read through them. I actually don't have them with me on my laptop so I can't reference them while writing this, and I don't want to say too much and steal any thunder that he may have planned for future releases.
Put simply, there was a desire for US forces to be able to tell similar ships of the same class (at the very least) apart from each other, while hiding their identify from foreign forces. You wouldn't want an enemy fleet to be able to determine which was your flagship, for example. Experimental paints were developed, as he noted, but there were difficulties with viewing them as well as problems with the paint itself. There was some experimentation on the individual ships with the filters - unsanctioned and unofficial from what I remember, but they reported on it.
There are other photos showing these markings - I scanned in one back in October that they're visible on.
There was a notion or "common sense" that the Navy didn't do much with Camouflage between WWI and WWII, but this is another hint that this notion is not as true as we thought. There is an interesting story to discover here.