The Spitfire Society : Southern Region

The Spitfire Society : Southern Region

THE SPITFIRE MARKINGS AND CAMOUFLAGE

The first Spitfire, the prototype K5054, was first flown unpainted. Later a finish of "float-plane blue" was applied.

The first Spitfires to reach the R.A.F. were painted in a "sand and spinach" camouflage of brown and dark green. The undersides were painted with one half black, the other half light blue, with the dividing line running from nose to tail, sometimes only the underside of one wing was painted black, leaving the fuselage light blue. The idea behind this strange underside colour scheme was to aid identification of R.A.F. aircraft by anti-aircraft artillery. By the time of the Battle of Britain most Spitfires had completely light blue undersides.

The brown and green camouflage saw the R.A.F. through the Battle and into 1941. With them now taking the fight to the enemy, and having to cross the Channel or North Sea to do it, the brown part of the camouflage stood out against the sea. So it was changed to dark grey, a scheme of grey and green being equally good over land or sea.

The R.A.F. symbol known as a roundel, was carried on the top and bottom of the wings and the side of the fuselage. The roundels on the top of the wing had the white missing leaving only red and blue. This helped the aircraft be less easily seen, particularly if it was on the ground. The roundels on the side still had white in them, but a much reduced thickness than was normal in peacetime. It was usual for the whole roundel to be surrounded by a yellow ring. Having made the white part less conspicuous the authorities added the yellow to make it more easily seen after a series of losses to "friendly fire". The roundel under the wing was normal size at the beginning of the war, by the end the white portion had shrunk to a small band separating the red and blue.

R.A.F. aircraft usually carried two sets of characters. The first was in quite small black or dark letters near the tail on both sides of the fuselage. This was that aircraft`s own serial number and would stay with it throughout it's service life, the only problems arise when one good airframe was made out of two damaged ones! The other was a three (very rarely four) letter code in large light characters arranged around the fuselage roundel. The first two letters were the code of the Squadron the aircraft was with, for example "XT" was 603 squadron in 1941. The remaining letter was the individual code of that aircraft within the squadron. So if you were with 603 squadron and were told to take off in "baker" aircraft you would walk out to the aircraft with XT-B on it's side. Since most squadrons would only have eighteen aircraft at maximum there was no need for any other letters, on the odd occasion that a squadron did acquire more than 26 aircraft it might start again with "AA". The squadron markings of an aircraft would change any time it was acquired by a new unit. The R.A.F. would change the squadron code if it ever thought the Germans had managed to tie the code to a particular squadron, so the code of a squadron might have changed two or three times during the course of the war. The codes were deliberately painted on as large as possible so that pilots could identify planes from their own squadron so as to form up into formation again after a dogfight. The only exception to this code scheme were Wing-Commanders, that is the officers who commanded a Wing of two, three or more squadrons, usually flying from a common airfield, or "clutch" of airfields. Thus the famous Douglas Bader was allowed to have the letters "D-B" painted on the side of his Spitfire VA, because he commanded the Wing flying from Tangmere Aerodrome. Bob Stanford-Tuck, commander of the Biggin Hill Wing had a Spitfire with "RS-T" on it. It also had twenty-nine small swastikas painted just in front of the cockpit, the Wing Commander`s Victory tally.

For D-Day and the invasion of Europe all Allied aircraft had black and white "Invasion stripes" painted on the wings. This again helped identify them as friendly to their own anti-aircraft guns, at this stage considered more of a danger than the all-but-defeated Luftwaffe.

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