More 1941 Camouflage.

So as I had mentioned a while ago I found some camouflage documentation back in May at the San Francisco NARA. I'm slowly going through it as I get through stuff or if I get a bee in the bonnet to. Someone over on SteelNavy said something less than educated and I found that what I wanted to post in response as a reference wasn't online yet... so I back-burnered the Franklin report and started in on three documents regarding the shift from pre-war gray to the early war camouflage paints.

The #5 formula had been in production for quite some time at the beginning of 1941 and it's clear when reading through the documents that Mare Island had problems switching over; the first document posted (Feb 1941 - New Paint Formulas) has the formula for both 5-D Dark Gray and 5-U, a white base formula. Both contained a fair amount of zinc oxide, and even in May Mare Island was scrambling to get some. So it's probably safe to say that the west coast fleet didn't start receiving full 5-D shipments until June or so.

As always, your mileage may vary. I think it's cool that we've got the full recipe for 5-D, 5-L, 5-O, and 5-S on the net now at least!