Don't ask a WW II subvet what color anything was. They were not in the job of taking notes and remembering that stuff. Your boat will tell you what colors it was painted, just ask... as in take a paint chip from an interior surface and inspect it. There is a handbook from the Secretary of the Interior on general guidelines for preservation and restoration of historic ships... please read it. Most of the boats got a general white coat at the time of construction that aged to a beige due to the oil content and the massive amounts of tar and nicotine from smoking. In 1944 the Navy instituted a program to increase the habitability of the boats and this included installation of both fluorescent lights and incandescent lights with the seafoam green and butter yellow colors on surfaces in crew spaces. The Officers staterooms were pretty much always the light green (I believe LING's very odd green is not standard issue). My guess is most of the boats never got painted in reserve days. It was not important. Sadly, at COD, a subvet got a ton of flat white housepaint from a neighbor who bought too much for his house... yes, before you knew it, active-duty era paint in the galley and crew's berthing space was covered (badly) with paint. Luckily, the painters were so bad that the tops of pipes and other shadow areas were left in their original (before 1959) colors.
Back to the warning about subvet memory: we at COD were very proud that we were able to restore our WWII vintage ice cream machine. During a reunion, we got it running for the crew. One of the vets of virtually all of COD's patrols took our director aside and said quietly "I don't want to rain on your parade, but COD NEVER had an ice cream machine!" My skipper told me what the veteran crewman said and later that night, at our banquet, I handed the vet a photograph of him standing in the galley, just a foot away from the ice cream maker that never was aboard. No one individual can remember anything from 65 years ago clearly. Take a bunch together in a room and give them a question, and chances are they will come to a correct answer, but individually, it's really a crap shoot. You have to know the answer yourself, using the evidence at hand and researching photos.
Paul
