WWII LUFTWAFFE LATE WAR COLORS

Six tones for German machines of 1945

In the last year of the war the appearance of German aircraft changed faster than the authorities could issue regulations. The upper pattern was made up of the brown-violet RLM 81 and the light green RLM 82, while the undersides carried the light blue RLM 76. RLM 81 in particular is among the most debated tones in the whole field, because surviving samples and archive color charts show strikingly different results.

The box deals with that dispute generously. It brings three separate forms of RLM 81, from a browner to a greener shift, and two versions of RLM 76 including the late variant with a hint of gray-green such as machines from dispersed production carried. The sixth bottle belongs to the RLM 82 shade.

The range of use is wide: the Fw 190 D-9, the Bf 109 K-4, the Me 262 A-1a, the Ta 152 H or the Ju 88 G night fighter. A different combination can be documented on each of them, so three forms of RLM 81 are not a luxury but a necessity if you want to build more than one machine from the end of the war.

The binder is acrylic and the paints are made above all for an airbrush. Thin them with water or with the product of the same maker and work in thin coats at low pressure, so that the edge of the pattern stays soft the way the operational and field workshops of the day produced it.

The mottling on the sides of the fuselage and on the vertical tail matters just as much on machines of that period as the pattern from above. It is applied with a fine nozzle from a short distance at very low pressure, ideally with one of the tones in the box, only heavily thinned. Patience at this step is worth two more bottles, because it is exactly the irregular blotches that make a late German machine recognizable at a glance.