LUFTWAFFE PRE-WWII AIRCRAFT COLORS

German finishes before 1939

The Luftwaffe designated its finishes by the numbers of the Reich Air Ministry, and in the second half of the 1930s a set of four settled in, which then gradually disappeared during the first years of the war. A dark brown, a green and a lighter gray made up a splinter pattern with sharp edges on the upper surfaces, while the undersurface carried a light blue. That is how the machines of bomber units over Spain looked, and trainer and liaison types at home as well.

What is inside

The box holds four bottles covering the whole regulation of the day: two earthy colors for the upper surfaces, a lighter gray complement and the blue undersurface in the 1938 variant. That last tone outlived the others by several years and you will meet it on machines from the start of the war too, so the set of four will also serve outside its main period.

Spraying the splinter pattern

A sharp transition comes about under a mask of tape or of thin film lifted a little way above the surface, while a softer edge is sprayed freehand with a narrow jet at a pressure of around one bar. In both cases it pays to thin more and to lay three coats rather than one saturated one, because a thick deposit fills the panel lines and the edge of the pattern then looks thick.

Laying the pattern out on a model

The prewar pattern is geometric, its fields have straight edges and they repeat as mirror images on both halves of the airframe. The surest route goes through a fine pencil drawing on the base color, from which the mask is only then cut. Anyone who fancies working freehand should start with the smallest fields; correcting by spraying over is easy with the darker tones, less so with the light gray.