If this is any thing like the story that was told to me by one of Consolidated Aircraft engineers during world war two, I am going to bet that they were painted anything that four out of five people could identify as gray and that would be good enough. As to getting blue on the top this sounds like something that was done for the photographer and in port and not something done most of the time because the depth charges would have to been dry for the paint to adhere to the depth charge and in the middle of the ocean I don't see that happening especially as wet as the destroyers were. I really think that as modelers we obsess way to much over color, especially if the subject is from WW2. Nobody had the time or the inclination during the war to worry to much about color, they just had to many other thing to get done.
When I was going to collage I worked for the San Diego Areo Space Museum, and one day this truck from Convair General Dynamics arrived with a very interesting donation. It was paint samples from WW2, when a new patch of paint or primer came in they as part of the documentation process had to paint 1 foot squares with the paint and put the paint name, batch or lot number and manufacture on these squares of aluminum and store them, what for no one knew but they had to do it so they did. What really interested me when I looked through them was the variation in shade of some of these. For instance some of the "Dark Sea Blue" were almost black and others were almost a medium blue. When I asked on of the volunteers that had worked at Consolidated during the war why the difference he simply said that during the war that for a Navy plane if it looked blue then it was blue and get the d@@m plane out the door because they are shooting them down faster than we can build them. At the time Consolidated was building the PBY-5, PBY5a and the PB4Y(the Navy's version of the B-24) as well as the B-24.
I then asked him about the unfinished or raw aluminum B-24's and why they went to those, I asked was it so they could carry a heavier bomb load, no, so they could carry more gas, no, so they could fly faster, no, so I said "Alright what was the reason?" And the reply was "Well we told the Army Air Core that if we had to paint these aircraft we could only build say 48 for example a month but if we don't paint them we can build say 96 a month saving both time and money and since we are charging you cost plus 10% for each aircraft, you will get more aircraft and they will cost less. He then pointed out that the service life for a B-24 over Europe was only 6 to 8 weeks corrosion was not going to be a problem.
Andre
over yonder in Portland Oregon
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Topic: Depth Charge Colour??? (Read 3049 times)