Camouflage Volume One: Royal Navy 1939-1941
Author: Alan Raven
By: Shane Jenkins
After a long period of waiting amongst the naval enthusiast community, renowned naval author Alan Raven, has published the first volume in his Royal Navy camouflage series. It is published in landscape format (a la Squadron Signal) and is illustrated by (amongst others) maritime artist Mr J Dominy. This book would be best read in conjunction with Alan's excellent series of work in Plastic Ship Modeler (specifically "The Development of Naval Camouflage 1914-1945 part III" issue 1997/1), which deals with British camouflage in World War II.
Volume 1 covers the Royal Navy ships between 1939-1941 with 8 pages of colour profiles in the 60 pages of this monograph. These cover the following: "HMS Cairo", "HMS Cleopatra", "HMS Sheffield", "HMS Kent", "HMS Fiji", "HMS Renown", "HMS Indomitable" and others. . There is also a guide to the various RN colours on the back cover in the form of "printed" chips. While this is a good idea and the colours themselves close enough for many people's tolerances, due to the limitations of the print medium the more exacting modeller may wish to seek out the Snyder and Short Paint Chips.
The book starts off with a brief run down of Royal Naval camouflage and then goes into the various schemes with examples of how they were applied. The artwork accompanying the schemes is broken down into three categories: detailed drawings of destroyers etc; less detailed drawings of cruisers; and simple outline drawings of aircraft carriers and battleships. The schemes covered include the following 1940's unofficial disruptive designs, (Home Fleet) Overall Grey, Mountbatten Pink, Contrast Type, Peter Scott Type, Alexandria Type, Dark Hull/Upper Works Type and others.
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With approx. 150 drawings and 8 profiles this is a must for anyone interested in the Royal Navy during the period. Although I would have preferred to see it broken up by ship class I realise that doing it this way would have resulted in a very large and very expensive tome to say the least.
Even with works of this calibre, some errors can creep in. The following errata is from Alan Raven: "The visual errors on page 26 (Sheffield) and page 53 (Formidable) will form part of an errata that will be in Volume Two."
This Volume is HIGHLY recommended and I look forward to others in the series. Here's hoping the RAN gets a look in as well in future volumes.
Published by: WR Press
Review copy supplied by Warshipbooks.com
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