"HMS Exeter at the Java Sea - Camouflage?" Topic

I'm painting the participants in the Battle of the Java Sea (Feb-March 1942) and I have good sources for the camouflage on the US, Dutch and IJN ships plus HMAS Perth but nothing on Exeter or the British or Australian destroyers. Any help is appreciated.

IIRC the old Almark book on RN camouflage has details of Exeter's colour scheme.

I've got that book somewhere. I'll hunt around and see if I can find it.

Any idea what scheme the destroyers would be in?

David, do you have more details of the old Almark book? I remember borrowing it from the local library about 30 years ago and I'd like to try and hunt down a copy.

Dave

The Almark book is by Peter Hodges. The book was first published in 1973 and the hard cover ISBN is 0 85524 139 and the soft cover 0 8 5524 140.

Unfortunately, the Exeter illustration is from before she sailed to the Far East and it states that the example was replaced with a much lighter scheme with no indication what that scheme was.

McKinstry, in viewing the photo of the Exeter sinking, it doesn't show anything at that distance and detail. So it's either a lightly tinted pattern or a single hull color.

The E class destroyer present was also repainted for the deployment. If the scheme adopted was a general one, then going by that, the Exter would have had a mid grey hull and light grey upperworks. Its hard to tell from the photo of here sinking, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if that is the scheme she is wearing. Its not the dark grey, or dark blue later adopted, merely a middle gray that looks like standard Admiralty grey, with upperworks several shades lighter. Probably by adding white to the mid grey.

Somewhere, there is a painting of Exeter sinking. I believe it was done by one of the crew post war, or ordered from an artist post war. I have not seen it for some years, but I'm pretty sure that shows her in two shades of grey as well.

Paintings of ships, as commissioned from the artist by an ex member of the crew, are usually excellent sources of colour because of course the artist had someone to help him in that regard. I helped identify some ships for a gallery a couple of years ago. In that instance, because they were commissioned by a retired naval officer who had served on them, I was able to pick up changes of detail in the upperworks etc that enabled me to not only identify the ships but confirm which battles they were painted in representation of.

If anyone knows of the painting of Exeter that I'm talking about, I'd love to have a reference to it again please. It was a pretty good one as I recall.

Mal.Wright.

The book "Sea Battles In Close Up, World War II, Volume Two", by Eric Grove, Naval Institute Press, has a picture of Exeter taken just after the Battle of the Java Sea. Picture is on p.97, (IWM HU50188). In this picture, A and B turrets seem to be a lighter color than the hull, but it is hard to tell for the rest of the upperworks. (The turret sides are sloped inward slightly compared with the hull, so it may just be that they are more exposed to the sun than the hull sides). At verious points in her career, Exeter definately was painted in schemes where the hull was darker than the upperworks. One example of this was the battle of the River Plate (photo on p.18 of "Warship Profile 13, HMS Exeter").

If interested, the Grove book can be obtained used from Amazon.com, and is extremently useful for setting up battles or mini-campaigns on the battles covered. See my post at TMP link about half way down for the list of covered battles in this book.

Since the link doesn't seem to work, here is a cut-and-paste of my post:

The anthologies were/are entitled:

Sea Battles in close-up, World War 2,
Martin Stephen, edited by Eric Grove (Naval Institute Press)
(This one contains The Battle of the River Plate, The Attack on Taranto, The Battle of Matapan, The Sinking of Hood and Bismarck, The Sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse, The Escape of Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, The Battle of the Coral Sea, The Battle of Midway, The Battle of the Barents Sea, The Sinking of the Scharnhorst).

Sea Battles in Close-Up, World War 2, Volume 2,
Eric Grove (Naval Institute Press)
(This one contains Narvik, Crete, Malta Striking Forces, Java Sea, Sirte, Attack at Source – Tirpitz, Operation 'Neptune', The Phillipine Sea, Leyte Gulf).

They are both available used from Amazon.com, as of today (March 25, 2006).

Thanks all. I'm guessing but the medium gray hull/lighter upper works would be the Admiralty Intermediate scheme that was popular in the Med at the time and it seems reasonable that she may have been repainted to a similar scheme for East Indian duty and it would not be unreasonable to assume the British destroyers would also follow the same scheme as their Med based sisters.

Thanks McKinstry!

Thanks Mark, I'll check out those Sea Battle titles. do they add any information or color plates on camouflage or contain good OOB data?

This link

spruso.com/1RN%20Ships.htm

Is about the Perth, but shows a photo of Exeter "off Sumatra". She has no cammo pattern at all.

In fact, I've never seen a picture of Exeter in a cammo pattern, but then there's always a source one hasn't seen.

Mserafin,

That image of Exeter "off Sumatra" was probably taken on the same day as the one in my book above, based on the positioning of objects and the lighting. However, it's larger, and from a better angle. Thanks!

McKinstry,

The "Sea Battles in Close Up" titles have no color (except the cover paintings), and the ship images are often from a different year than the battle depicted. However, I like the books for the description of overall context, and for useful fragments of information in the text. For example, the Java Sea chapter has a different perspective on the ABDA than Morison. The general sense is that the Americans and British screwed up the Dutch air-sea command relationships. Kind of like people from a big corporation imposing their (monolithic, less efficient) procedures on a small business.