Mountbatten Pink

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Land Rover of the SAS in a camouflage color similar to Mountbatten Pink

Mountbatten Pink , also Plymouth Pink, is a marine camouflage that is reminiscent of the mauve . It was first used by Lord Louis Mountbatten in the British Royal Navy during World War II . After seeing a Union Castle Line ship with a similar camouflage color disappearing from view, Mountbatten applied the color to his own ships, believing the color would make his ships difficult to see at dawn and dusk. Although the color had at best an anecdotal success, it was judged by experts at best to be equivalent to neutral gray tones and, in the worst case, would make ships with this color stand out more clearly.

history

When Lord Mountbatten was escorting a convoy in 1940, he noticed that one of the group's ships had disappeared from view much earlier than the rest. The Union Castle Liner's ship was painted a lavender purple gray. Mountbatten was convinced of the effectiveness of the color as camouflage at dawn and dusk, a time often dangerous for ships, and had all destroyers of his flotilla painted with a similar color. He achieved the color by mixing a medium gray with a small amount of Venetian red . In early 1941, several other ships began using the same camouflage, although no formal tests of effectiveness were conducted.

A later refinement of the basic Mountbatten Pink camouflage was the use of a slightly lighter shade for the ships' upper structures. By the end of 1942, however, all ships larger than the destroyer size had dispensed with Mountbatten Pink, whereas smaller ships may have retained this color well into 1944. The main problem with the pink color of the Mountbatten Pink was its noticeability around noon, when the sky no longer appeared pink and the traditional battleship gray was much less noticeable.

The US Navy also experimented with experimenting with similar hues, and at least one ship, the USS Winslow, received such a color scheme.

The German Navy also experimented with a light pink shade. In the interrogation report of the Royal Navy on the crew rescued from the speedboat S 147 sunk in the English Channel in April 1944 , it is stated that they considered the pink shade of the boat to be effective.

effectiveness

One of the anecdotes and possibly apocryphal stories that were told to support Mountbatten Pink, the story of the cruiser HMS Kenya, because of their pink Mountbatten-color was The Pink Lady ( German : Pink Lady ) was called that as a command ship during surgery Archery led an attack on facilities on the island of Vågsøya off the Norwegian coast. The Germans fired coastal guns at the Kenya for several minutes, but the Kenya suffered only minor damage from missed hits. This was attributed to the fact that the pink Mountbatten pink camouflage was indistinguishable from the pink marking color of the German grenades, which meant that the German scouts could no longer distinguish between shrapnel and the ship. Stories like this and personal experiences with ships where the color disappeared from view convinced many crew members of other ships of the effectiveness of the camouflage effect of this color.

Experts in camouflage techniques found that the paint can make ships more noticeable due to the Purkinje effect . They also complained about unfavorable mixtures of the color tones, which contain more red than intended, since ships in almost every light level with even the slightest red tones attract more attention than those with corresponding blue tones. An Admiralty manual came to the conclusion that the color was neither more nor less effective in camouflage at sea than neutral gray tones of the same color, and that an only slightly increased proportion of red would hinder rather than promote the camouflage effect.

literature

  • David Williams: Naval camouflage, 1914-1945: A complete visual reference . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD 2001, ISBN 978-1-55750-496-8 , pp. 84 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cecil Ernest Lucas: The greatest raid of all . Little, Brown, Boston 1960 (English).
  2. ^ A b c Alan Raven: The Development of Naval Camouflage 1914 - 1945: Part III: British Camouflage in World War II . In: Plastic Ship Modeler . No. 13/1 , 1997 (English).
  3. ^ A b c Kassia St. Clair: The Secret Lives of Color . John Murray, London 2016, ISBN 978-1-4736-3081-9 , pp. 120-121 (English).
  4. ^ A b c David Williams: Naval camouflage, 1914-1945: A complete visual reference . Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD 2001, ISBN 978-1-55750-496-8 , pp. 84 (English).
  5. ^ David Krakow: Schnellboot in Action . Squadron, Signal, TX 2013, ISBN 978-0-89747-660-7 , pp. 71 (English).