Mick
SOH-CM-2025
Great pic! Mystery solved! Thanks for posting that!
I'm tempted to go and paint one like that, but I'm not very good at soft-edged camo schemes, and that early blue-gray gives me fits. But I have a -5 in that scheme that someone else painted, and it should work on the older versions with no more changes than renaming the external texture files.
The training command was interesting, and frustrating from a modeler's point of view because there are interesting B&W photos where the colors can't be determined. We can usually determine the section colors by context and aircraft number, but we often don't know what the tail colors were, and we have no known system that can give us a clue.
I have a number of books and articles with photos of service types in use as advanced trainers, some in color, and the tale they tell is interesting, if sometimes somewhat cryptic. The general rule - which had many exceptions - seems to be that the training establishment usually left their hand-me-down planes in the colors they were received in, but changed the markings to suit their own purposes. Planes delivered new to training units sometimes seem to have been painted in the then-current fleet scheme, but sometimes appear to have been delivered in the old silver & yellow colors when planes delivered to the fleet were camouflaged. (SNJs and OS2Us seem to be examples of this.)
One system that appears to have been used on Boeing F4B fighters and TBD Devastators was to have the pre-war livery of silver paint with yellow upper wing surfaces, and pre-war style section markings and colored tails. The old three-part identification group was replaced by a simple aircraft number. Numbers 1 through 18 wore the standard tactical section markings in the usual order: red, white, blue, black,green,yellow, with the section leader having the section color on the fuselage band, wing chevron and full cowl colors and the two wing men having the color on the chevrons and half of the cowling, with no leader band. The sequence was repeated for aircraft numbers 19 through 36, then again from 37 through 54, so so on. The tail color apparently always matched the section color. I have a color photo of a huge formation of F4Bs that illustrates that pattern.
I have a photo or two of Grumman F3F trainers that also seem to follow that pattern, though not a big formation like the F4B shot.
I have a black & white photo of a TBD that also appears to follow that same system, though the photo being B&W makes certainty about the colors impossible. But it sure looks like the colors could match the number of that system was indeed being followed; the section color is dark and the aircraft number would call for it to be red or black (don't remember which.) What's interesting about the TBD is that the entire TBD fleet was camouflaged while the type was still in first line service with the fleet. You may recall that in the movie Dive Bomber, all the TBDs were gray while all the other planes - almost every type the Navy had in 1941 - were still in silver with yellow upper wing top surfaces. So the training command must have repainted the TBDs back to the old colors. That seems strange, but the photo, even in B&W, is clearly of a silver and yellow plane, not all gray.
I have a color shot of a ramp full of SNJs at Jacksonville. They all had their cowlings, tails and fuselage bands in the six section colors. All had fuselage bands and fully colored cowls, none had fuselage bands, and all their tails were the same color as their cowls and fuselage bands. Aircraft numbers appear to follow the old sequence of 1, 2 & 3 red, 4, 5 & 6 white, etc., but most of the numbers aren't clear enough to determine if they all follow the pattern. It looks like they do, though. So here, the use of colors follows the old pattern but the section markings, such as they are, are only an approximation of the old system.
One of my references has a B&W photo of an early PBY trainer. It wears the old livery with standard section markings and a colored tail, with the identification group replaced by s simple aircraft number. In this case, the rudder color and the section markings are not the same color. I can't figure out what colors they are (or I might have painted the plane) but they are clearly not the same.
Finally, I have several color photos of OS2U Kingfisher trainers with the old silver and yellow livery, but mid-war style national insignia. If memory serves, they have no section markings. Scattered among them are a few that have camouflaged fuselages with silver and yellow wings, possibly mashed up from the remains of crashed aircraft - though there don't seem to be any with camouflaged wings on silver fuselages.
