Found this thread on a Google search for map markings. Orange may not have featured, but purple did. The "defence overprint" versions of British/Canadian topo maps in the Second World War showed enemy positions, units, and sometimes held territory in purple ink. A friend of mine told me that one Canadian senior officer started a briefing by announcing to all assembled "Gentlemen, today we advance into the Deep Purple."
Based on an exhaustive sample of one document, Imperial red v rest-of-the-world blue appears to have persisted in India/Burma.
I remember it well. A medical hospital took over Mansergh Barracks on ex Crusader 80 . It was like watching a Club 18-30 holiday. The Orderly SNCO complained about tripping over copulating couples. My unit was part of 2nd Armoured Div, the administration division. We were guards for a special site and then "exercise casualties" for the Blue forces medical system to process. Some TA SAS tried to get close to what we were protecting. We told them forcefully to go forth and multiply, as we were not on exercise and would shoot them with real bullets if they tried to get in. That is as close as I got to a Blue on Blue - apart from when mis-directing the fire of mortars. The medical evacuation phase opened my eyes to how ghastly WW3 might be. The plans appeared for a Crimean war standard of medical care with stretcher cases in barns with very primitive.
Hi In the good old days of the cold war, every exercise was simple. Blue forces were the good guys. Red forces were the bad guys. In 2000 I was part of a small team which prepared paperwork for small and large scale RAF air defence exercises and tactical evaluations. At about the same time the use of the phrase 'red forces' was effectively banned to avoid upsetting the new 'friends' from the former soviet block. So any colour except Red would be used. We had a war against 'mauve forces' once. As our powers at be got increasingly desperate to avoid offending anyone we stopped using country names too. Huge parts of the UK and Europe would be chopped up and given entirety fictitious names. I lost count how many times we waged war with Vaginia. This made exercise preparation an absolute nightmare as everyone wasted way too much time converting places, countries and landmarks. It was the technical equivalent of giving motorists completely reprogrammed sat navs and use them to navigate whilst ignoring all of the fixed road signs or any prior local knowledge. Gus
It seems that red and blue were not just a British map marking convention. This is a captured German map from April 1945 showing British and German positions marked in red and blue respectively. Later the owner of the map seems to have run out of blue crayon as most of the German positions (not shown in the photo) are marked in pencil. Apologies for the map being upside down, I couldn’t work out how to rotate it!
That could also be a consequence of orders to not show friendly positions on maps, presumably in case they were captured. I think that was a fairly standard procedure in the Great War, perhaps reflected in some of the trench map reprints?
The British Army annual exercises in 1912 and 1913 had blue and red forces.I think that the US Army at the time followed the same convention The British usage dates back from Red = British Blue = French
The British and French standardised blue = friendly and red = enemy in WW1. Prior to that the British system was the other way round. I should imagine the US conformed when they joined in. I do not know when red became orange but it was in use by 1960 vide from 'Seaborne Deception - The history of US Navy Beach Jumpers' by John B Dwyer: From when I joined up in the late '60s the enemy were always Orange Forces. Tim
The American system had already been been red = enemy (British/ Canadian), blue = friendly (American)
From "German Army Uniforms and Insignia 1933-1945" by Brian L Davis pages 86-87. The Germans had red & yellow forces for Battle Practice.
What at peace, the British designated the enemy in an exercise General Idea which would define the enemy territory and what the war was about. So the enemy might be Anglia versus Wessex. I used to use beer brands to try to retain the interest of junior ranks. The Dortmunder Union against the forces of Warstein for the sacred Yellow Handbag of Herford. During the Cold War, Orange forces, sometimes called the Fantassians and equipped like the Warsaw Pact did all sorts of devious operations. The invasion of Bournemouth comes to mind.
The US had a colour coding system dating back to the early 1900s. Between the wars they had a series of colour coded War Plans in the event of war with various powers. In these the US was always blue. War Plan Orange which covered war with Japan is probably the best known. But there was also War Plan Red covering war with Britain and Canada. More info here United States color-coded war plans - Wikipedia
At the risk of reawakening a long dead thread. The British changed their map marking colours when it adopted the US system on the formation of NATO in 1949. (However according to wikipedia the British did confoirm to the French conventions in France in WW1 with enemy trenches and units ion red and allied in blue.) As I understand it British MOD policy is not to train against a named enemy. It has always used fictional enemies for training exercises, except in wartime. (One way of raising a cheap laugh in a military briefing used to be to refer the the French as the traditional enemy, but not a great way to maintain good cross channel relations.) The MOD established the standard enemy during the Cold War as the Fantasians, Notes on the Fantasian armed forces I suspect the term Orange rather than Red forces was picked in order to avoid a direct link to the Soviet Red Army. Oange also worked on exercises as Orange high visibility mine tape transformed a NATO Army's APC into a fearsome Orange forces BMP or T80
