"Vallejo Colors For Brits in Burma" Topic

What color best matches the British jungle uniforms in 44-45? Any help greatly appreciated!

I sometimes ask others for their colors. What I now prefer is to look up some pictures of the worn uniforms and pick my own.

Try this:

link

LOL, I have the Osprey book, but I am red-green colorblind. I know, of all the hobbies out there, I paint miniatures!

I used a bright green, but it looks too green to me. I'm thinking drybrushing khaki over the green but wanted to see if it would just look better starting over with one color.
Thanks!

I used Gunship Green for mine and highlighted by adding progressive amounts of Dark Sand.

There are a few of them here:

I prefer a more faded colour – Vallejo 886 Green-Grey looks just the ticket to me.

Both the examples given are perfectly acceptable for JG uniforms. There was wide variation in exact JG colour, caused by varying quality-control at the factories where uniforms were manufactured/dyed. Home-dyed JG items were also common. According to my friend's father the uniforms looked very light grey-green (like Dom's suggestion) when dry and very dark blue-grey-green (like scrivs' suggestion) when wet.

Note that many units and formations were also still using tropical Khaki-Drill (KD) uniforms in early 1944 and there was often something of a 'patchwork' look to units as JG was issued.

For example, 81 (West African) Division took to the field in December 1943 wearing KD and had JG delivered by air-drop from March 1944 onwards. Their Recce Regiment meanwhile, which was serving as the XV Corps recce regt away from the division, stayed in KD throughout the first half of 1944, only receiving JG in August of that year. This pattern was repeated in other units.

For Gurkha-hats and the Australian-style bush-hats, use whatever brown-khaki colour you might use for temperate Battle-Dress. 'Puggarees' were mainly KD, but could also be JG or some other colour. Other hats were also common, such as Tam-o-Shanters in Scottish regiments and GS Caps (big, floppy beret-type things) in other non-armoured regiments, including Indian infantry regiments. These were invariably temperate brown-khaki. Woollen 'Cap, Comforters' were also popular and were usually olive-drab or brown-khaki in colour. Armoured and mechanised recce regt AFV crews wore black berets.

Sikh turbans usually remained KD, though JG items did appear toward the end of the war. These were sometimes covered by camouflage scrim.

Webbing was the usual faded yellow-ochre colour, though some units and individuals dyed it JG and some Indian factories started manufacturing it in JG. A lot of men (including my friend's father) painted webbing in green or black vehicle paint to protect it from damp and rot.

For vehicle colours, have a look at my Burma painting guide on the Battlefront: WW2 pages at fireandfury.com (sorry I can't give you the exact link from the work computer).

Thanks for posting that Mark – I'm just starting on my forces for Malaya & Burma and your guide is a fantastic resource.

Perhaps you can help me with smething please – the colour of British helmets in Malaya/Singapore?

Thanks

Nick

Good question. It's not something I've looked at, so I can't give a definitive answer, but my guess would be a shade of green rather than desert sand, despite the KD uniforms. I have found repeated mention of sand-camouflaged kit being repainted green while en route from the Middle East/North Africa to Malaya, Singapore and Burma, which does tend to suggest that metalwork was meant to be painted green in the Far East.

Coming back to Jungle Green/Khaki Drill in Burma circa 1944/45, this photo from the BBC comedy 'It Ain't Half Hot Mum' does give a pretty accurate impression of how units might have looked in terms of uniform colour:

For what it's worth, all the mannequins on display at Fort Siloso and the Battlebox have green helmets.

Thanks Mark. Yes – I had seen the same. Would it most likely be the same as vehicle colour – light khaki/green?

I guess so if they were recently-painted (such as in a ship heading from North Africa to Singapore), as No.3 Khaki-Green was then the current vehicle colour. However, I imagine that there would have been a lot of helmets (and vehicles!) still painted in earlier (darker) shades.

Gentlemen thanks for the comments, I am going to dull down my green so it looks a little more grey.