Luftwaffe Nightfighter Colours

By: neilly - 27th May 2001 at 10:30 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

RE: Luftwaffe Nightfighter Colours

Hi Ant,
I don't know about the electonic reason for different colours on a night fighter aircraft.
However, the colour black (believe it or not), is not a very good night camouflage, because it shows up to well! The RAF, on the Mosquito night fighter, got rid of overall black for two reasons. 1. As above. The overall ocean grey with dark green camouflage, worked far better. 2. Because of the texture of the paint, the Mosquito lost about 30mph off it's top speed.
I have a book, Confound & Destroy by Martin Streetly, which I'll have a look at & see if I can find anything,(don't have much time at the moment, working on my Mosquito) but I don't recall anything on Luftwaffe colour schemes other than the usual pictures (it's been a few years since I read it & I may have forgotten something).
Regards,
Neilly

By: neilly - 27th May 2001 at 20:37 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

RE: Luftwaffe Nightfighter Colours

Hi Ant,
Back again. I've had a look in 'Confound & Destroy', I can't see anything relating to the electronic side, I think it unlikely that special paints etc were even considered in the 1940's (someones bound to tell me I'm wrong).
I did find a drawing of a Heinkel He219A of the 2/NJG 1. I'm coping part of the caption under the drawing: 'Light Grey 76 (dot hatching) overall with a mid grey 75 (diagonal hatching) mottled over the uppersurface. The lower starboard wing was partially oversprayed with black 22. This was to aid identification by friendly forces, during the Wilde Sau Operation',(Wilde Sau Ops.- this type of operation was were Luftwaffe Aircraft flew above the allied bomber force & dropped flares to illuminate the bombers. The bombers were then attacked by single engine fighters like FW 190's).
It would also seem that the Luftwaffe did not like black as a colour for their night fighters, preferring greys & dark blue.
Regards,
Neilly

By: neilly - 23rd June 2001 at 03:06 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

RE: Luftwaffe Nightfighter Colours

Just a bit more on black & white identification colours. I'm reading a book about Typhoons & Tempests, & came across an interesting statement cncerning these black & white strips.
I don't know if you've noticed, D-Day invasion type stripes under some Typhoons. These stripes are thinner & instead of 2 black & 3 white, there's an extra stripe of each colour. These were put on at the factory because a number of Typhoons had been shot down by friendly aircraft, they were mistaken for FW 190's. The yellow strip on the leading edges were put on for the same reason.
Thought this might interest you. I'd noticed these thinner stripes, but just thought they were a variation of the theme!
Regards,
Neilly

By: jamesthorlby - 26th June 2001 at 10:48 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

RE: Luftwaffe Nightfighter Colours

In my book about aircraft markings, it gives an example of a Do17. It is painted white on the top surfaces for daytime ops, and black on the under surfaces for night ops.

JET

By: LEG - 15th January 2017 at 10:27 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

The human eye's cones are the majority visual detector (120 million) and are designed to function in a scotopic environment where they offer much better response to ambient low light conditions. They don't see spatial differentiations (near/far/rotation) but are excellent as 'block imagers' in differentiating bright dark contrasts as _polarized_ light. This has two immediate functions:

1. It allows the cones to interpolate rod data as relative degrees of tonality to infer color under conditions where, nominally, (i.e. most cats) there should only be a grey scale image.

2. By treating the air more like water as a refractory lens, the human eye can subconsciously detect bright/dark patches in the fluid medium, rather like reading currents in a dye colored swimming pool near the aerator outlets. By maintaining a constant sweep of scanned field comparison, dark objects show up as holes-in-background which are more rather than less apparent.

For a _long_ time, our ancestors were hunted to near extinction (long gestation time, away from trees and millennia before fire) by night hunting predators. While we never matched their nocturnal adaptations, they did bias our selection towards low light optical function.

Now consider the lighting. For some twenty days out of thirty, if you are above the cloud layer (and there are usually two in central Europe, one at 5-10 and another at 15-20), you will get some form of lunar illumination between first and third quarters-

http://www.moonconnection.com/images/moon_phases_diagram.jpg

Which is bright enough to navigate by, at height, where the clouds act as soft reflectors. If you are facing radar directed searchlights, these clouds can also act as 'Milk Glass' (the frosted glass in your bathroom) refractors. And of course if there are target marking flares, large scale fires or even burning aircraft, these too can radically increase ambient illumination. To the point where your vision can flip back to near diurnal functioning.

Under these conditions, the 'sea of air' is itself ambient-bright, as are the clouds themselves, just as they are in daylight. And it is the dark objects which are out of place because they show relative movement against the background (why you scan) like cockroaches skittering across a tiled floor. Hence you don't use black as a camouflage color because it absorbs rather than (specular reflectance) scatters the background isoluminant lighting.

Of course there are other variables to consider. For most of it's early flight, a high wingloading Lanc would be at 12-14,000ft, over the North Sea, burning off it's fuel load to get up around 19,000ft for the target run. Black works here. Systems like Spanner Anlage did function better when the adjacent fuselage next to the detector wasn't casting 'glow' in the .9-1.5u range of early active IR, sensors (unlike the Sperber on tanks, the IR searchlight was typically on the underside so this wasn't an active illumination issue but rather the equivalent of an anti-glare panel one where the sensor tube protruded through the windscreen).

Ironically, especially out over a rural countryside, the _lower_ you go, the more useful black also becomes because you are working against a predominantly darker backdrop of non-illuminated dirt below a cloud layer which blocks moon and starlight (in Europe). Hence 'flower' Mosquitoes had black bellies while hunting German nachtjaeger in their migratory phase. And of course, if you do get into trouble with radar direct search lights, the British semigloss-black was vastly better than the RLM-76 blauweiss, in helping to ditch criss-crossed lights with aggressive maneuver.

With these conditions in mind, Black Bellied Luftwaffe aircraft (Me-410 pathfinders) were used in the 1944 mini-Blitz and black was applied to some nightfighters (Ju-88, Ta-154 etc.) at the end, in Spring 1945, when they were adhoc adapted for use in intruder missions, to supplement Ju-87 and Hs-123. They also shifted from Ghost Holstein patchwork camouflage (RLM-75/76) to jagdwaffen equivalent upper side colors of RLM 80/81/82/83, 'as available', because the principle threat was roving bands of GCI radar directed Allied fighters, criss-crossing Germany's airfield network looking for things to strafe or shoot down, in daylight.

Point being: even with radar and RHAWS as Zaumsau, the primary intercept condition for the German nightfighters was always visual. It had to be so in order to accurately direct fire into highly loaded wings and away from dangerously explosive laden center fuselages at distances under two wingspans in the case of Schrage Musik. That meant that there had to be sufficient ambient illumination to transit the FuG-202/212 and especially 220 rmin as merged plot condition and the bombers were vulnerable to this during all but the waning-new-waxing crescent phases of zero illumination (aka 'Bomber Moon' = invisibility).

Correctly interpreting this visual intercept phase as the period of highest risk, the Germans used mixed violet grey and blue white pastel colors to pixelate the outline of their aircraft to match whatever the isoluminant conditions of the air itself was, given the air itself could 'glow' with refracted, polarized, light which the tail gunners night adapted eyes could pick up on.

By: Graham Boak - 15th January 2017 at 10:46 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

I'm not arguing against what's said above, but there is the additional if simpler explanation that a night fighter will initially see its prey as a silhouette against the sky. However dark the night, it is never completely black, so anything that reduces the apparent darkness of the prey will be beneficial. Or, indeed, anything that reduces the apparent darkness of the hunter from the target. This was simply not understood in the early years of the war, hence the common use of black.

The RAF's very rough black of Special Night RDM2 is the extreme example of this, at some price in performance. However, when viewed from the ground and particularly in searchlights a smooth black is more effective than a light colour, so black remained in use. It was then found that the very rough surface of Special Night actually reflected more light back to the ground, making the aircraft more visible than one in a smooth finish. The Americans supposedly believed that their very smooth Jet Black made the aircraft invisible to searchlights, hence the appearance of the P-61 Black Widow and the belly of later B-29s, but I think this claim should be taken with a pinch of salt.

By: Ossington - 15th January 2017 at 14:33 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

Yes but. The original colours for the Raf Hercs included glass black undersides "for anti-searchlight" reasons I was told (as a child). I would have thought that by 1966-7, RAE etc. would have some scientific back-up as to why it was chosen, or at least read up on why Jet Black was used by the USAAF. I've always wondered why P-38M's were gloss but Bomber Command black had to be matt, with all that entailed for airspeed, durability etc.
I have found a document at TNA that explains that black was used on Home Defence BE 2's and FE 2's because they need to kill reflections from under (and through!) wings from Holt flares and such. Not for camouflage at all. I bet that, years later, someone must have said "let's paint our Defiant's black. Like they did last war".
Intruder Beaus and Mossies were Sea Grey Medium with green topsides weren't they, so someone knew that all black was a poor choice early on. Owls aren't black either!

By: Graham Boak - 15th January 2017 at 15:12 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

It's a matter of chronology. Early WW2 RAF nightfighters were black, later ones weren't. The first Beaufighters and Mosquitoes were black (as indeed were the first night fighter Bf110s and Do217s.). But there was more than one black. The prewar colour (called Night) was perhaps more satin than matt, but thinking that the darker the better, a paint known as Special Night (RDM2) was introduced in 1940. This had very poor adhesion and a large grain size, making it very draggy. Use was abandoned after comparative trials and the original Night used (1942 onwards?) . There are references to Smooth Night for the later war years, a more satin finish, but it isn't clear to me whether this was simply the earlier paint or a variant with finer pigments. The glossy US Jet Black was a very late war introduction - the P-38M didn't make the war but the P-61 did from 1944. However all paints get matt with exposure, as photos of service P-61s show.

Having to relearn lessons learnt earlier is a recurrent theme in military history, particularly when they run against the common logic. Everyone knows black is better at night, don't they? Not just in the military

By: Ian Hunt - 16th January 2017 at 13:52 Permalink - Edited 1st January 1970 at 01:00

Thanks LEG for your detailed post above. Don't understand all the technical words about optics but the gist makes sense. Against anything but "black", a black a/c will show up as a silhouette more than a paler-coloured one. There's less contrast between the 'paler' a/c and the 'non-black' background or ambient lighting?

I imagine that with the glow from a burning city it might have been quite possible for ground based observers sometimes to have seen the 'black' a/c overhead? Many ORB entries talk about the glow of fires being visible for 100 miles or more after leaving the target, and you can see today the light pollution above towns and cities just from buildings and street lights etc.

Re the original post and the black/white undersides, I think I read somewhere (Aders' 'History of the German Nightfighter Force'?) that it was a trial scheme to aid ground-based recognition (eg for searchlights and flak units, in the target area).

Ian