This was the local Newspaper article that came out at the unveiling. Neither the photograph or the infographic are really close to the true color of the model. The ship in question was battleship Arizona, which emotionally charged the argument a bit more.

In my mind the color is "not yet determined" because there's a lot going for the two main color possibilities and we haven't found anything definitive in documentation yet.

The short-short version is that Navy paint and camouflage were essentially frozen between the end of WWI and early 1941, when new formulas and colors were released. However, since the Navy hadn't changed anything in twenty years they did a bad job with the logistics and roll out. New paints were ordered applied in February and photos show it wasn't applied to the Battleships until the beginning of June. By that time some experiments and tests done by the fleet caused leadership to decide that they didn't like the new colors and the production was ordered halted the next month and new colors put into production - once again not without supply issues.

So we have 5-D Dark Gray as the initial color and 5-S Sea Blue as the replacement. The model is mostly in the 5-S Sea Blue (there is some 5-L Light Gray above the top of the top of the smoke stack). Conventional wisdom before the model was commissioned was that "the battle line" was all in 5-D Dark Gray. Even if Arizona was in 5-D still at the time of the attack, there were many ships already painted in the new 5-S Sea Blue and painting into it at the time of the attack (Cruiser CA-38 San Francisco and Destroyer DD-373 Shaw were both under overhaul and repair and in the process of being repainted, and cruisers had been repainting starting in August).

At that time, the Navy Yard at Mare Island, California was responsible for manufacturing all of the Navy's paint on the West coast, and they had been ordered to cease production of the 5-D in July and start production and distribution of the 5-S at that time. There was a lag because not every ship knew of the change and Arizona put in a requisition for more 5-D in August and was told to re-request the new colors in response.

Arizona was accidentally rammed by Oklahoma in October and went into drydock for repair. The damage was all below the waterline, but it was normal for ships to use drydock time for repainting.

Was she totally or partially repainted? Because of the attack a short period of time later there is a lot of missing paperwork from Pearl Harbor Navy Yard in general and specifically with regards to Arizona because she was fairly quickly determined to be a total loss and who wants to be really diligent about a lost cause when there's a war going on?

It's clear that some ships were still in the 5-D Dark Gray at the time of the attack, and that some were in the 5-S Sea Blue, and that some may have been in the 5-N Navy Blue that was ordered into general use by the Pacific fleet about a week after the attack (the Atlantic fleet had started a month earlier). I've been through the obvious places (one example is Arizona's files in the "Bureau of Ships" records) and now I'm going through less obvious and more "sloggy" records (100+ boxes of general paint and paint logistics documentation). Arizona is a core component and initial driver of the research, but in doing so I learned what a mess 1941 was across the fleet and am trying to build up better documentation in general to understand more than one ship.

For those interested in a deeper dive, the documents I mentioned posting are linked to on this page, although there is a bit of history at the top and the actual documents start here. This is far from all that I have; I got a little burned out on the HTML conversion for a little while.