"1970s Belgian Armor Camouflage" Topic

Does anyone have any info on Belgian AFV/IFV camouflage used by the Belgian I Corps in West Germany during the 1970's ?

In Otto von Pivkas 'European Armies' book dating from the early 1970s, Belgian stuff all appears to be a single dark shade. So I'd go with NATO green.

I poked around this subject a bit, earlier in the year, and really couldn't come up with any official specifications or anything.

The pics that I found of older US vehicles in Belgian service, looked to be in either a faded US "olive" vehicle color or a slightly more chalky, washed out version of that color. I'm guessing that the photos mostly dated to the late 1960s and or early 1970s, though a few stated that they were from the 1970s. The color leaned more toward a slightly yellow olive, rather than a darker, more brown olive.

For this, I would start (its what I will use, when I finally work on some Belgians next year) with a base color of Vallejo 887 US Olive Drab (it use to be called Brown Violet, but my more recent bottles have the US OD name on them). The lighter, faded color could be achieved with a mix for the base coat, and possibly through shading/weathering. Depends on your preference and painting style.

Again, I can't say what is "correct", but the greatest frequency of what I saw in photographs of in service vehicles seemed to be a faded olive color.

Hope this might be of some help. best of luck with your project, and please share your work if you can. I'd love to see what you come up with.

Thanks all for the tips – the mixture of German, British, French and American equipment has inspired me to see what this can do against the red hordes. Logistical nightmare or a winning combination ? Time to put it to the test.

I did a fair bit of searching for Belgian vehicles when I was doing the Liberation figures and just found various shades of green! Obviously, photo reproduction, light, age, scale etc effect the shade so I did exactly what Irishserb did and used Brown Violet. This was because it looked close enough to a set of seventies postcards I dug up and was a slightly different shade from the Revell gelboliv I painted my German kit.

Sorry, I cannot give links because I'm moving on from the period and blitzed everything I saved.

I was in the Belgian Army for 30 years, we never had camouflaged vehicles. Our vehicles were painted in a single shade of green. I don't remember the Nato designation of that paint but it's basically a darkish green.

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