In June 1941, at the war outbreak, some Soviet units were equipped with planes that showed blotched and dotted camouflages over the base grey-silver livery. This can be seen frequently on photos of I-153s and of SBs, more rarely on other types.

It can be that some planes were hurrily camouflaged in the first days of war, but it's likely that many of them preserved the camouflages that they have adopted during the Nomothan accident in 1939.

Dotted 16, 1941

The photos of wrecked and captured Soviet planes taken on the Minsk Air Base show at least two I-153s whose light livery was obscured by a dotting made with small green and black brush strokes.

The rudder of the closer plane is missing and doesn't allow us to know its bort number, but a red 16 is clearly visible on the rudder of the second camouflaged plane.

A difference between them is that the closer plane has the camouflage extended to the wing struts, while plane 16 features standard light grey struts.

The planes seem equipped with M-62 engines, the most common one for I-153s.

Dotted 63, 1941

'Red 63' is similar to Red 16. The number is outlined in black.

Note that the green-black dotting is much lighter than on previous planes, and looks uncompleted on the right upper wing.

Dotted 40, 1941

Another interesting I-153 Red 40 featuring green dots on the base grey-silver livery.

On the tail, one can see the number red 40.

On the nose, the green dots are wide and connected, giving even the idea of lights dots on an uniform green background.

On the upper wing leading edge, green dots are wide but more spaced than on the nose.

On the rudder and fin, the dots leave place to rough brush strokes. It's likely that the same thing happened on other fabric-skinned parts too. A difference in the style of improvised camouflages between metal and fabric skinned surfaces was observed on other planes too. This could be due to the difficulty of overpaint the AII aluminium background on the fabric parts.

As an alternative, it could be a work made by two different technicians on different parts of the plane.

The photo of n.40 from the left side seems to show a red cap on its tail, but there is no trace of it on the right side, so it could be only some green repair.

Red 3

A belly-landed plane with brush strokes camouflage.

Strangely the tail looks more dark and uniform than the front of the plane.

A number 3, probably painted in red, is vaguely visible on the rudder on the second photo.