Tracy White is a USN fanatic who collaborated with Snyder and Short on the indespensible USN WWII Ship Camoflauge web site:
http://www.shipcamouflage.com/index.htm. I write military history and have a lot of color books on WWII subjects and am sure White and Snyder/Short are spot on. Here's the deal. After Pearl Harbor and the instant importance of aircraft, not to mention submarines, became obvious, the wartime Navy began to shift to and redefine wartime color schemes. This was all done in a wartime context of limited materials. In addition, ships at sea and pounded by salt air/water for long periods - increasingly the case in WWII - were painted bit by bit more or less all of the time. (Some of the 1944-45 USN Pacific ships are a riot of colors thanks to fading, rust and a common flirtation with splinter camo.) What this meant was that the USN settled on ships painted in a kind of Purple Blue Hue that vary basically with the amount of white put into them. Tracy said every ship had cans of a very thick very dark purple paint that they mixed with other cans of very thick white paint. (Not sure about the solvent. I do know the very rugged pigment cadmium was not available because it was needed for making armor plate - this meant all colors were less than idea when fighting salt water. And that "purple" paste would have been a chromatic black with a purple/blue hue) The Navy abandoned these paints on VJ Day (deciding their schemes didn't really help that much) and never put them into the Federal Standard data base. So what color were they? They were defined using the still popular (and very neat when you figure it out) Munsell Color System. All major USN WWII colors were in the Purple/Blue Hue (think of that as general color type) and varied in "value" (lightness) and "chroma" (saturation). Within a hue, the higher the value, the lighter the color, the higher the chroma, the less saturated. As luck would have it, I own a Munsell student book and can see exactly what's up. The Munsell numbers are Navy Blue Value 3.5/Chroma 3; Deck Blue Value 3, Chroma 4; Haze gray value 6, chroma 3. In practice this means all of these colors are related - deck blue is the darkest, but it is slight less saturated than Navy Blue. Haze Gray is highly saturated but the lightest. Now, I could have used my Life Color paints that are quite accurate, but are hard to airbrush. (I used them and my CoulorCoates as samples - very useful.) Here's where my Golden High Flow paints come up trumps. They airspray like a dream and are by far the best water based acrylic to use for black basing. Golden makes paints for artists and while it doesn't have specific military colors it does have artist mixing colors with powerful and expensive pigments which are an absolute gas if you like to play with paint. I took me two damn days to get my colors right and I enjoyed every minute of it. Each color comes from a "chromatic black" base made with Quinacridone Red; Platho Blue (green shade) and Hansa Yellow. In practice it was needed to cut each with bits of white: sienna, black, neutral gray and Prussian Blue appear in tiny quantities. There's also scale effect which is important for a 1700/scale vessel. I lightened the value of each color a bit - I also exaggerated the differences between the three paints. (Deck and Navy Blue are first cousins but not twins - so I made them second cousins.) In retrospect I don't think I gave the colors enough purple - should have used just a bit more Quinacridone Red in the mix. I also used a purple oil paint filter and that adjusted things a little. If you want to see the results, check my renditions of 1/700 Tamiya USS Bogue in the gallery.
Eric