ATOM Luftwaffe WWII Late Colors

The palette of the last months of the war

When the German supply system fell apart in 1944, the old certainties stopped holding at the airfields. Machines came off dispersed production lines in whatever shades a given works happened to have to hand, camouflage was finished on field strips and often the old pattern was simply oversprayed. The set aims at exactly this confused final phase.

The four paints comprise a dark olive brown in the spirit of the Allied drab shade, the tone designated RLM 81, a light green also known as chromate green and a pale gray. Historians still argue about the exact tone of RLM 81, whether it was closer to a brown-violet or to a dark green, and modelers choose accordingly. The pale gray comes into its own on the undersides and on late oversprays of the fuselage.

It pays to build up in layers. First a continuous base, then irregular blotches sprayed freehand without a stencil and finally a lightening in the middle of the larger areas. A chaotic impression is what you want on late machines; a symmetrical pattern would look unconvincing. It suits last-generation fighters and jet types alike.

A period photograph remains a good guide even in black and white. From it you can read where the pattern begins and ends, how coarse the blotches are and whether they carry across the whole side of the fuselage or stay only on the spine. It is exactly these small things that tell a machine assembled in one workshop from the same type built at a works two hundred kilometers away.

Four tones leave plenty of room without your having to mix your own shades. Anyone who wants to go all the way can finish one machine with the remains of an older coat showing through the new one, because overspraying an existing pattern was common practice in the last year.