Camouflaged Bomber Command Roundels

I’ve also seen similar toned down roundels on Fighter Command night fighter Defiants and Havocs (1941), but have yet to see one on a Beaufighter.

Thanks Vildebeest and everyone for clearing this up. Thanks for the links to those decals too Kansan, great examples. If I’d seen them on a model before this thread I’d have been awefully suspicious, but now…

I don’t believe there was an order, it was done at a unit level. More usually, the toning down was done with medium sea grey rather than black, either neat or thinned down. There are quite a few photos of Wellingtons and Whitleys (the size of their fuselages meant they had large roundels and therefore more of a problem) and I think Blenheims with toned down roundels. Black was also used and there are certainly photos of Wellingtons with the white of the roundels and the fin flash blacked out.

Paul

It’s not a photographic thing at all, they really did experiment with changing the colours/proportion of the roundels. This may have been done at unit / station level – maybe someone can find an Air Ministry order but I couldn’t.

On the subject, look at the decals and model reviewed here for variety of roundel styles.

http://www.kitreview.com/reviews/waratnightdecalsreviewbg_1.htm

http://www.kitreview.com/reviews/wellingtonreviewbg_1.htm

Rob / Kansan

I’ve got a photo of two Wellingtons parked together, one with the modified roundel, and one with the standard type. Can’t put that one down to a particular film stock. 😀

A lot of people also forget about the effect of filters on panchromatic film. The use of filters was widespread with black and white photography to increase or decrease contrast and would render certain tones lighter or darker, depending on the filter used.

Best wishes
Steve P

The paralyzed acting probably has a lot to do with the fact that the RAF chaps were fighting hard to avoid being in the squadron line book after the film was made.

That probably hits the nail on the head quite squarely. I guess too having a film crew come into work in those days made one very nervous, it’s bad enough today in the world where everyone’s so media conscoius and cameras are so less obtrusive an object.

I take back anything I may have lightheartedly said about the people i this film. They were doing their best and we still have the film available today, which is what matters.

In 60 years time people are going to look at ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Titanic’ and find how odd and mannered that acting was.

Oh dear, I hope people of the future won’t use Keanu Reeves to judge this eras’ acting style on. He’s dreadful. (I know what you mean though).

No worries. As an ex-printer, it was important not to muddle them up. Ortho is OK under red light, pan has to be total blackout in the darkroom. Or was it the other way around? 😀

Meanwhile, back at the roundels…

I think we can say it’s an early application of the low-viz national marking.

I think you can see a number of contemporary shots of Wellingtons and Hampdens with altered type A1 roundels since the yellow and white elements of the RAF roundel were just too distinctive on Bomber Command Camo.
I think in particular there are a number of pictures of KX-coded Wellingtons with the same range of alterations. IMHO it’s similar to the USAAF practice of greying-out the white star (and later star and bar) on B-24s because it stood out so much.

Rob / Kansan

Panchromatic vs orthochromatic films.

I couldn’t remember the correct names for the film types – thanks! 😉

Pan (‘across all’) gives a different hue value to certain colours to ortho. Thus yellow (for instance) can look v dark.

In this case, Daz, no. It’s motion picture, not still film.

Ah well, it was worth a go!

Looks like I’m going completely off topic – nothing new here!

The “speak posh” bit. Actually, in the majority of cases, that’s how they sounded. Regional accents in the UK were more marked than today, but the RP (recieved pronounciation) and public shcool accents were relatively uniform and sound VERY lah de dah to us today. Contemporary recordings of real people (rather than actors and announcers) are fascinating for how different people sounded – well within living memory.

What is amazing is if you listen to the rushes of RAAF and RCAF crews on various Pathe newsreels, they sound very ‘British’ to us today, but with a Australian or Canadian twang in there as well. Most odd. Yorkshirewoman Amy Johnson (nice school) sounds so ‘posh’ her accent was almost strangled. American Jacquline Cochran sounds closer to a British accent (though definitely American) than to a modern American one, when she spoke on a Pathe newsreel in 1942. Bizarre.

The paralyzed acting probably has a lot to do with the fact that the RAF chaps were fighting hard to avoid being in the squadron line book after the film was made. Also we are used to a completely different version of acting and film behaviour today. Yes, they may seem wooden, not just because they weren’t actors, but that’s because to us they were also trying to do so. In 60 years time people are going to look at ‘The Matrix’ and ‘Titanic’ and find how odd and mannered that acting was.

Colour – not really the place to go into it here, Eddie’s right, IF the colour in question is white, and not in shadow. Roundels are very good colour benchmarks, but they can be a trap for the unwary. Yellow is perceved as a light colour. It is possible for a white to have a yellow fade in it, and then it would read on Ortho film as much much darker than we’d ‘see’ in in colour. This area is quite simple, and also irrelevent as film stock is (AFAIK) usually Panchromatic.

I hadn’t read your last post (#9) before I posted my reply James. Thanks for that extra info, it is really quite interesting. I have seen other wartime films from the Crown Film Unit that are much the same, stilted acting but by amazing real people and they’re great pieces of history.

Just as an aside – I also have a copy of a fantastic film made by the British Army Kinematography Branch, called ‘The New Lot’. It took a different approach. Though writeen and made by real soldiers they employed actors for the main roles. The result in this case is actually quite stunning. This was a film made only to show to army units, not the public, but the acting is a ton better than most of the stuff Pinewood and Denham, etc were putting out then and for twenty years after the war. It stars a great cast, including Peter Ustinov (who wrote it and was then also a soldier), and great actors like John Laurie, Bernard Lee, Raymond Huntley and Robert Donat! Others in the cast were regular soldiers too.

It was made in 1943, and a certain army officer who saw it, one David Niven, liked it so much he took the script and most of the cast, and developed it further into the classic film “The Way Ahead” for public consumption.

So, yes I see the great merit in old training and information films like Target For Tonight, but those done with actors also worked well when done right. Most of the actors were either serving or ex-servicemen anyway. John Laurie fought and nearly died in the trenches in WWI for one.

Eddie, I have seen clips from Night Bombers in various docos, but never the full film. I must track down a copy someday.

Here’s a Hampden of 50 Squadron. Source is the Air Britain “Hampden File”.

Best wishes
Steve P

A similarly fascinating film (which I unfortunately don’t have here – my copy is on PAL video, and so I can’t use it now I’m in the states!) is Cozens’ “Night Bombers” – genuine WW2 COLOUR footage of Lancasters operating from Hemswell in 1943-44. Unfortunately all the sound is dubbed on it, and there’s a little bit of modern footage and colourised B&W spliced in, but it’s fantastic nonetheless. They even cut away a Lancaster fuselage to film it, so there’s some terrific footage showing how all the crew positions relate to each other, and of the Nav’s equipment – eg H2S and Gee working IN COLOUR!

Yes, I realise that in reality they were all important people and did their jobs well. I was commenting about the film style rather than the people.

It looks like rehearsals and prepartion were not an option when they made the film – more a case of “read what’s on this card and speak posh”.

As I say, it’s an interesting historical document. It is a good insight into what went on before and during a raid. And I did also wonder when I watched it just how many of those aircrews were later killed or made POW’s, etc.

I never knew that it was Pickard – I assume playing the pilot you main mean?. Yes, he was a brave and interesting pilot, and quite the hero. I shall have another watch of it, with a different perspective now I guess.

During World War 2, the Ministry of Information in Britain took over the GPO Film Unit, and renamed it the Crown Film Unit. They made larger-scale documentaries and feature-length films, the latter being of the dramatised type with Servicemen and women playing themselves. “Target for Tonight” (Harry Watt, 1942) was one of the first commercially-successful documentaries. It illustrated processes, in this case how an RAF night-time bombing raid over Germany was actually carried out, AND showed real people.
Target for Tonight won a special Academy Award for best documentary
the film featured an RAF Wellington bomber attacking an oil storage depot in Kiel, Germany
the film was shot at RAF Mildenhall in 1941 with Wellington Mk.Ic, (possibly from 149 Squadron) and Avro Ansons, and a Wellington fuselage in the studio
filming also took place at High Wycombe in the real Bomber Command headquarters with the real head of B.C., Sir R. Peirse
S/L Pickard, who appears in the film, later died in the famed Mosquito attack on Amiens prison
in the Cinematheque Belgique Survey of 1952, director Elia Kazan listed Target for Tonight in his top ten favourite films
the film is approximately fifty minutes long

From:here

Within the limits of security, this and the SOE film ‘Now it Can be Told’ (also Crown) are among the most useful films in terms of first-hand data of what much (not all) of the real war involved. Not dumbed down, or smoothed off for mass moron appeal.

I’m not having a go at you Dave, but at the attitude that real people aren’t as real as actors. How ‘real’ do we want?

Dave, your comments are about real people who really did these things – I understand, and agree that the acting is not professional but perhaps you might like to look up Group CaptainP C Pickard. Perhaps not much of an actor, but in any measure a hero. I’d rather watch him in this than some shortars$ egomaniac actor pretending to be a great pilot.

Yes, it’s really him. One of Bomber Command’s greatest, captured on film.

But, white will always look white on film. Unless it’s a negative, but that should be pretty obvious!

Panchromatic vs orthochromatic films. Pan (‘across all’) gives a different hue value to certain colours to ortho. Thus yellow (for instance) can look v dark.

In this case, Daz, no. It’s motion picture, not still film.

Eh??

Is it not something to do with the film used?? :confused: