"naval paint colours............." Topic

There were a lot of variations, testing, patterns and colours used.

shipcamouflage.com/4_11.htm

I wonder about the British liking the pink colour:
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No wonder India was lost.

Montbatten pink – prefered by … Lord Montbatten. :)

The darker shade was more of a purple. The scheme seemed to be effective at dawn and dusk, but made the ships stand out more in both daylight and full dark.

Pink has such a soothing effect in times of stress.

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Mountbatten pink came in two shades. Light and dark. Lord Louis Mountbatten decided from personal observation, that certain colours were hard to see at a distance.
And of course he was quite right. But what he did not take into account was that although pink worked well in bright sunlight it was not good in low light. Red tones reflect light back very well, hence if you look at a red rose in bright sunlight it will be very red indeed. Look at the same rose at dawn or dusk and it will appear black. Green bushes that are dark in daylight will appear lighter than the red rose at night.
The reason is that red reflects bright light back in sunlight, but tends to absorb light in dark conditions instead of reflecting it back.

Mountbatten pink was very popular because in daylight in bright Mediterranean conditions it did work quite well and as British seamen seemed to have great admiration for Lord Louis they had faith in it.
Unfortunately at dawn or dusk pink appears darker and is therefore actually easier to see against a lighter background than many other colours.
It was very popular from 1941 through to mid to late 1942 and then fell out of favour as other schemes were seen to be obviously better.

In that period when it was popular there were massive shortages of paint pigment for the navy to use in camouflage schemes. Mountbatten pink eased that because it was just a matter of mixing the 'red lead' undercoat in plentiful supply, with some standard grey, also in plentiful supply. Add a dash of black and you had a dark version. Easy for most ships to adopt when other paint may have been unavailable.

It was tested on British aircraft and found to be an excellent colour for high flying planes in bright sunlight. It was even tested for fighters to use, but although one of the best colour schemes tried, it was mostly dropped purely because the pilots themselves complained that they felt too easy to see.

Sorry, but Mountbatten Pink did not use red lead in the mix. It was a mix of AP 507B Admiralty Medium Grey with a small amount of Venetian Red to tint it. Also, it was never tested on aircraft, since it was strictly a ship paint. The aircraft paint in question was PRU Pink, which was a very, very pale pink, almost white, and quite different from Mountbatten Pink.

I understood that "Mountbatten Pink" was intended for use in dawn/dusk situations when the low sun gives everything a reddish hue. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, of one of the ships of the 5th DF being painted in that colour as an experiment. When the flotilla of five ships passed a coastal observation post at twilight it was recorded as four ships with the fourth well astern of station.

At least two cruisers, Aurora and Nigeria, used a disruptive pattern that included "pink" shades when operating in the Spitsbergen area (Op. Gauntlet) as that was thought to be effective in high latitudes with a low sun

There were quite a number of RN ships so painted, though I don't have the complete list at hand. There was an extensive thread on the subject on ModelWarships.com. You might find it there. There were even some USN ships in Mountbatten Pink.