ORANGE LINE – US Army paint set (MASSTER & DUALTEX)

The camouflage that the American army tried out in Europe

The 1970s and 1980s were a period of experiments for the ground forces of the United States in Europe. A uniform olive was being left behind and a coloring was sought that would break up the outline of a vehicle at a distance and in motion. Those experiments gave rise to two systems whose shades the set contains.

The older of them worked with large irregular areas of forest green to the color standard under number 34127, brick red 30117 and sand gray 30372. The younger system relied on a finer structure and built on sand brown 30277, dark green 34079 and brown-gray 30118. The black 37038 is common to both and forms the dark disruptive patches in both schemes. The eighth shade, a greenish pale 24533, does not belong to the camouflage: it is the standard color of the interiors of American armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles of that time, so it suits the inside of the hull if the model offers open interiors.

The practical side

Both schemes were painted in the field, not in a paint shop, and they looked accordingly. The edges of the fields were applied by hand and irregular, so a hard mask would give the result away as a modern copy. It is better to spray freehand with the airbrush close above the surface or to use an offset paper mask. It is advisable to choose the order from the lightest shade to the darkest, with the black going last and over the smallest area. Photographs from the exercises of the time moreover show that the patterns differed from vehicle to vehicle within the same unit, so a modeler does not have to keep to any exact reference.