What Year Did Grey/Green/Grey Scheme Replace Earth/Green/Sky?

[Jennings]

I hate to disagree but many Spitfire Vs were in dark green/earth/sky finish. And when the order came to replace this finish with the ocean grey/dark green/ sea grey medium fiish, this was done at unit level, hence the variations in greys (which were mixed locally by the units)

That's interesting Nigel, I've never seen any pictures showing that.  Where can I find some?

I'm not sure you could tell that from photos.  There are lots of first hand accounts however.  Keeping in mind that it was years ago now, I did a lot of the research behind the Victory Productions "Spitfire: Aces of the Empire" sheet, and several of those a/c had dark green and "mixed grey" camouflage.

J

[Flitzer]

Thanks to all.
Very interesting.

For my purposes 1941 will do the job.

My late uncle was a mechanic on Spits and later Typhoons and he said due to the time and pressures of the war, some aircraft did wear mixed schemes due to damage repair etc for a while until the new grey/green scheme caught up. However I have not found much in the way of photo references.

Cheers and many thanks
Peter

[Mossie]

Colour photos from that early in the war are going to be few & far between & then the quality may be shakey.  I agree it's not 100% conclusive, but it's almost certainly originally dark earth/dark green.  There's a couple of things that show the 'age' of that Spit, there's the patchwork & faded nature of the paint, but one of most telling signs is the exhausts.  The whole exhaust is discoloured, on most pics it's just the front section, often starting to spread to the centre stub.  I'm no expert on it, but I'd say that takes a relatively long time as you rarely see it.

I've posted the phe photo to make it easier to refer to:

[kitnut617]

Now we can see this better, I'm more convinced that this has a number of parts from different aircraft, it could almost be different photo parts, notice the roundels have quite a blue tint, whereas the tail flash is almost black instead of blue.  If I was to make a comment I would say this was a cannon armed Mk.II which has been brought up to Mk.V standard, the camo colours of the cowling back to the firewall would seem to point this way.  Plus you have different aircraft parts for the ailerons and wingtips.  Of interest is the aircraft doesn't have a serial number and the photo doesn't appear to be 'touch-up' by the censor guys back then.