Over the past 10 years or so, much discussion and debating has taken place over the colors of the Pacific Battlefleet during 1941, with the USS Arizona taking the main stage in the majority of these conversations. With all of this focus on the Pacific fleet, there came very little to no attention to what was discovered about the Atlantic Battlefleet, more specifically, USS Texas in 1941. For those of you that own Classic Warships Warship Pictorial #4 USS Texas BB-35, you know that Steve did an excellent job on this book capturing much of the history of this ship through photographs and drawings. Unfortunately though, there are no photographs of Texas in 1941. In fact, there are no photos between the dates of February 1940 through July 11, 1942. There is only one drawing of Texas as she appeared in 1941. The drawing shows her in Standard Navy Gray #5 and is captioned as "LATE 1941". Since the printing of this book, however, a few directives and a few photos of Texas have surfaced that have shown us something different than a Standard Navy Gray Texas during much of 1941.
Back when the "Blue Battleship" debate was at it's peak, Ron Smith wrote an article on this forum entitled " The colors of Pearl Harbor 5-D vs 5-S and Other Fun stuff". It has since been removed from this site. It discussed his research and thoughts on the colors of the Battleships at Pearl Harbor. All this Pearl Harbor color talk interested me a great deal, but within this article Ron also talks about "Other Fun stuff" as well. He spoke specifically about USS Texas during this same time period. First he states that "USS Texas experimentally darkens her decks late 1940 or early 1941". Then he wrote that he found a memo at the archives to Texas from June 1941 "ordering her to paint into Ms2 modified with her hull 5-D, everything above the decks 5-0 ocean grey and her tops to remain 5-L light grey as per Ms-1". This I found to be VERY interesting and instantly I wanted to model this look but there was no good models of Texas at the time and a few things about this discovery were too vague and confusing. First of all, how high did 5-0 go up if the entire hull was 5-D? Did the 5-0 go all the way up to the top of the stack just like 5-D did on the majority of MS-1 ships? Or did it stop at a different level? Secondly, why does it read "tops to remain 5-L"? Did Texas already have 5-L on her tops? If so, was she wearing MS-1 when this memo was presented to her?
Then a few photos started to show up. First came the "LIFE" photos that were released through Google. Within these photo archives are a few pictures of Norfolk Navy Yard during the spring/summer of 1941. These photos were taken to complement a September 1941 article in Life magazine entitled "Gearing Up for War at Norfolk Naval Shipyard".
http://books.google.com/books?id=l0wEAA ... &q&f=false[url][/url]
These photos show USS Texas in something other that Standard Navy Gray and give a major clue how high 5-0 goes up.
Then, a series of eight excellent color photos from the summer of 1941 aboard Texas hit the web. Five of them can be seen here.
http://www.ww2incolor.com/us-navy/usstexas2.html[url][/url]
These photos confirmed that 5-0 and 5-D were used on Texas and they gave me more looks at the height of the 5-0 paint and also answered the darkened deck question, but they also presented me with even more questions about what I was looking at. I'll save my observations for later as I progress on this build but now you know the basis of my build.
Here is a photo of how much I have taken off of the decks so far and the initial roughed in painting of the hull to get a feel for the look. I'll try to analyze the splinter shields and gun tubs tomorrow. For now, hope you enjoy looking at this stuff.
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