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[Tzacol]

I have been building a campaign centred around No.1 Squadron RAF and their operations in France during 1939/40. In order to get things as right as I can, I have skinned their MkI Hurricanes with the black and white undersurfaces, red spinner and full tail fin flash worn by them at the time. In April 1940 they made an unofficial change to the livery of their aircraft which was adopted right across the RAF a few months later. I thought that I would easily find a skin to adapt and add a red spinner and full tail flash. I was quite suprised to find that all the stock Hurricanes have a magnolia or light buff underside. Why is this do you think?

There follows a quote from Paul Richey's autobiography 'Fighter Pilot' as this may be of interest to other skinners.

'A few days later an air marshal from the Air Ministry paid us a visit. He had come, he told us, to find out why we had shot down every aircraft we had attacked while Fighter Command squadrons in England were, in the main, only succeeding  in 'driving the German aircraft off in an easterly direction', as he put it.

Since we were no longer under the jurisdiction of Fighter Command we had no hesitation in telling the air marshal the reason'......there follows a description of how in 1938 they 'secretly' harmonized their guns to 250yds and not 400yds as prescribed by Fighter Command orders, but the important thing is they were now under the command of the Advanced Air Striking Force and not Fighter Command and were given largely a free hand in these matters.

He continues.

'Not long afterwards we made another contribution that was to benefit all our fighter squadrons. While still with Fighter Command, in order to facilitate recognition by our observers on the ground the undersides of our wings were painted black on one side, white on the other. We considered this to be idiotic, since the German aircraft were duck-egg blue underneath and very difficult to spot from below, whereas we stood out like flying chequer-boards. So the Bull gave orders for the undersides of our aircraft to be painted duck-egg blue, and this too was later adopted for all RAF fighters.'

I distinctly remember as a kid in the 1950's painting my Airfix models duck-egg blue underneath. (RAF memo's from the summer of '40 seem to have interchanged the term 'Sky' which it became officially known as, but it was the same colour.) So why do painters use magnolia?

I am going to skin all my 1940's RAF fighters with duck-egg blue undersides, which unfortunately put back the date when I can publish my Phoney War/BoF campaign. Never mind, I would be even more unhappy knowing the aircraft liveries were wrong.

[Tzacol]

Apologies to Emel and others who do use a version of duck-egg blue, I didn't intend a blanket criticism, just for those stock aircraft that don't. I know how many hours of work and research goes into your creations having done some myself. On re-reading my post it looks like I'm having a go at all SAS/M4T skinners, but that was not my intention, I just wanted to start a thread on the colour used and what a fair representation of it is.

[Tzacol]

OK so after several hours of surfing it is my opinion that no one really has a handle on duck egg blue. One site quotes RAF fitters being just as bewildered in June'40 and, since there were no official tins of the stuff in central stores, they just made it up as they went along. Some even seeking out duck eggs to get an idea of what it looked like. Almost certainly No.1 Squadron, who first used it, probably did, or just said 'Paint the underside of our kites the same colour as those blighters who bomb us!'

Anyway, here is my impression of what  it probably looked like. Funny thing is that it takes on the colour cast of its surroundings, if flying low it looks greenish, if high then blueish.

[EHood]

The quote from Richey reminds me of an article in the September 2004 edition of Model Aircraft magazine. The article, "Enigmatic Emils," was written by Paul Lucas, and it's about the traces of original paint he found on a number of Bf 109 wrecks held by private estates in the UK. He'd discovered that Bf 109 Es were often re-painted in new camouflage schemes at front-line units in France. The scheme applied by at least one front-line unit, 6./II (Schlacht) LG 2, included undersides painted in a duck-egg blue very similar to the British "Sky." At the time (BoB), there was no color like this in the RLM catalog, and Lucas raises two possibilities for its appearance on Luftwaffe fighters:

1 - The unit may have been running low on 65 or 76 Blue, and they mixed in white and 27 Yellow in order to stretch their stock.

2 - The paint may actually have been RAF "Sky" from stocks captured during the BoF.

Lucas's article contains much other very interesting information about front-line camouflage schemes of the period. To my knowledge, no Il-2 skinners have re-created any of these non-standard schemes, which is somewhat surprising, given the number of BoB Emil skins available.

 

[vpmedia]