Camouflage in the army began to acquire a really great importance only from the middle of the 19th century. Over the past century and a half, a huge number of different types of camouflage clothing have been created. The color palette is also very diverse. Suffice it to say that there is pink camouflage. Let's talk about when and by whom it was invented, and also find out why this "miracle" was used.
The idea of a pink camouflage appeared quite a long time ago, but this type of camouflage painting became really widespread only during the Second World War. However, even then the pink coloring did not have a mass character at all. The pioneers in this area were the British, namely the British admiral of the Royal Navy, Louis Mountbatten. Back in 1940, he submitted an interesting initiative for consideration.
Louis suggested that the pink color of ships and submarines could protect them during dawn and dusk, reducing the visibility of ships on the horizon in the rays of the setting (or rising) sun. The plan had its own reasons, especially since during the day any disguise did not help the courts too much. As a result, as an experiment, several destroyers and cruisers were painted pink (namely, "Mountbatten pink" or "Plymouth pink"). The ship "HMS Kenya" even received the affectionate nickname "Pink Lady" among sailors.
The practice of using pink camouflage has not become widespread, largely because there were no real advantages from this camouflage in the fleet. In addition, in 1945, the "Admiralty handbook on amunition" was published, which rather harshly criticized the practice of using pink camouflage. According to a number of officers, the pink color, due to the Purkine effect, did not mask the ship when looking at it through optics, but, on the contrary, unmasked it.
Despite all this, they did not just give up trying to use pink camouflage. At the end of the war, Louis was assigned to lead the British commandos. The admiral introduced the idea of pink disguise there too, proposing to paint some of the military equipment (primarily off-road vehicles) in the same “Mountbatten pink”. Moreover, until the 1950s, the British tried to use this color in aviation on SEPECAT Jaguar and Blackburn Buccaneer aircraft. However, very soon such "exotic" completely went out of the army fashion.
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