Lord Mountbatten in WWII discovered that pink was less visible than other colors.
The color in his honor is called
Mountbatten Pink.
shipcamouflage
A further unofficial type that originated in 1940 in home waters was a singular idea thought up by Louis Mountbatten. In the autumn of 1940 while escorting a convoy he noticed that one ship in the group vanished from view much earlier that the remainder. The vessel in question turned out to be a Union Castle liner that was still wearing her pre-war hull color of medium lavender mauve grey. So convinced was Mountbatten of this color?s effectiveness at dawn and dusk, often the times of greatest danger, that with only a slight variation in tone, he adopted the color and had it worn by all of destroyers in his flotilla. At this time the ships of the fifth flotilla were all ?K? class destroyers. As originally worn, the color was a medium grey (507B) with a small amount of Venetian Red in the mix. The red tint produced a very distinctive color and is one of the few camouflage types an observer never forgot once he had seen it. No reports were ever received from sea as to its effectiveness but belief in its properties was strong enough to convince captains of other vessels, so that by early 1941 several destroyers and some cruisers were wearing this scheme, known by this time as ?Mountbatten Pink?.
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