Early War IJN Musashi in Camo

[Marty]

Over the years I guess I've built the Yamato/Musashi about a dozen times. Something about the ship, built to be the ultimate weapon at sea, designed and built in extreme secrecy to be a war winning Sunday punch and they end up being useless dunsels sitting in harbor and waiting. For years, sitting and waiting for their moment of glory and it turns into a hopeless fiasco for both ships. Kind of tragic.

There must be seventy or eighty models of the Yamato class ships posted on the various websites and the thing that struck me is that they are all monotone grey. Whether it's "blue gray", "light gray", "dark gray", "Kure gray", they're all monotone. Gorgeous models, beautifully built and detailed but it gets boring.

There are maybe 40 photos of the actual ships, they're all black and white and the ships always appear to be uniform in color. The oral histories and TROMS don't really address color except for some reports of the wood decks being darkened with smokestack soot for the final sorties.

However these ships sat idle for months at a time, their utility was essentially as floating office buildings for the various high command staff. The IJN was short of fuel so they probably didn't drill very much or have very many training sorties. So what did the crew do while sitting in harbor for months at a time waiting for the call that never came, 2800 guys just sitting and polishing the brass doesn't make much sense.

Now it's kinda traditional in every Navy that you want to keep a crew busy and active at all times to "keep morale up". So it's pretty likely that they handed out chipping hammers, wire brushes and buckets of paint.............If you look at Tirpitz sitting in Norway her paint scheme changed on an almost monthly basis in a similar situation..................there's really no way to prove that the Japanese didn't look at camo schemes for the Yamato and Musashi. It's unlikely, granted, they were short of every type of supplies, including paint. But what if they did?? What would it have looked like???

Marty

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[cthulhu77]

Very cool...too bad those tamiya kits are so pricey...would love to see that bigger!!!  Boy, would you draw some flak at the contest table, but that is a cool looking ship !
          greg

[NARSES2]

I like those Marty, and your reasoning is sound as well. I've spent a lot of time on cruises and the crew are constantly re-painting on the basis of idle hands etc. I know it's different but there again the "resident's" of Yamato etc would have been high ranking and you also need to look at what happened to the High Sea's Fleet after it was holed up at Keil for 2 years after Jutland with nothing to do.

Chris