Klappentext

Camouflage and Colours of the Battle of the Atlantic, Volume One (1939-1941) is a landscape-format illustrated chronology documenting the visual identity of the vessels that fought, sailed, and were lost in the opening years of the Atlantic naval war. Compiled and illustrated by naval historian Malcolm G. Wright, the volume covers warships, merchant vessels, and neutral shipping -- including Baltic and Arctic-theatre traffic often omitted from Atlantic-focused references -- in strict date order, entry by entry, from the earliest days of September 1939 through the close of 1941. Each entry records a specific ship on a specific date: a Kriegsmarine U-boat surfacing to sink a lone freighter, a Royal Navy sloop or corvette on escort duty, a French torpedo boat, a neutral Dutch or Scandinavian merchantman caught in the war zone. Early-war entries capture a genuine transitional moment in naval camouflage practice: vessels recorded still in peacetime livery, house colours not yet discontinued, ship's names still partially visible before wartime concealment practice caught up with the reality of unrestricted U-boat warfare. As the chronology advances through 1940 and 1941, the volume tracks the spread of dedicated wartime disruptive schemes across the Royal Navy, the Kriegsmarine, and the merchant fleets between them -- major fleet units alongside obscure requisitioned trawlers and armed yachts, recorded here with equal care. This is not a narrative history but a working visual reference: a date-ordered catalogue of hull colours, camouflage patterns, and funnel markings, letting a modeler, wargamer, or researcher locate a vessel's correct appearance on a specific day of the war -- a precision not readily available in general Battle of the Atlantic histories, which typically organize by campaign or convoy rather than by the day-by-day evolution of a ship's paint scheme. Merchant-shipping research drew on archival material assembled with the assistance of a fellow naval historian, extending coverage beyond combatant-navy records alone. This is the first of a planned multi-volume chronology extending Wright's established body of work on naval camouflage and ship identification -- a niche but enduring subject for modelers, wargamers, and researchers of the naval war in the Atlantic, for whom the exact appearance of a vessel on a given date is often the detail no other reference supplies. Volume One closes at the end of 1941, with subsequent volumes to extend the chronology through the remainder of the Atlantic campaign. The landscape page format is a deliberate editorial choice: a ship profile illustration reads most naturally in a wide format, and this volume is built around that constraint rather than compressing illustrations into a portrait page. Each entry pairs a compact identification line -- owner or navy, vessel name, hull number where recorded, and the precise date -- with the corresponding profile illustration, so a reader moves from "what happened" directly to "what did this ship look like" without cross-referencing a separate plate section. The scope deliberately crosses navies and flags rather than confining itself to one combatant's fleet: British destroyers, sloops, and corvettes on convoy-escort duty; Kriegsmarine U-boats and their victims; French torpedo boats operating alongside the Royal Navy in the war's early months; and the merchant and neutral shipping of Belgium, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, and beyond, whose losses in these years are often recorded only in specialist admiralty casualty lists rather than in illustrated form. Bringing these strands together in one chronological sequence lets a reader see the full texture of a given week of the war -- escort actions, U-boat sinkings, and merchant losses side by side. This volume is intended as a durable reference to consult, not a cover-to-cover read.