The Rainbow Codes were a series of
code names used to disguise the nature of various British military research projects. They were mainly used by the
Ministry of Supply from the end of the
Second World War until 1958, when the ministry was broken up and its functions distributed among the forces. The codes were replaced by an
alphanumeric code system.
History
During World War II, British intelligence was able to glean details of new German technologies simply by considering their code names. For instance, when they heard of a new system known as Wotan,
Reginald Victor Jones asked around and found that
Wotan was a one-eyed god. Based on this, he guessed it was a
radio navigation system using a single radio beam. This proved correct, and the
Royal Air Force was able to quickly render it useless through jamming.[1]
Wishing to avoid making this sort of mistake, the
Ministry of Supply (MoS) initiated a system that would be entirely random and deliberately unrelated to the program in any way,[2] while still being easy to remember. Each rainbow code name was constructed from a randomly selected colour, plus an (often appropriate) noun taken from a list, for example:
"Green" + "Mace" =
Green Mace, an anti-aircraft (AA) gun.
While most colour and noun combinations were meaningless, some combinations produced real names, although quite unrelated to the project they designated. For example, "Black Maria" is also a nickname for a
police van and the "Red Duster" is a nickname for the
Red Ensign, the flag flown by British
merchant ships. Some code names were not assigned through the official system, but created to sound like it. The
Blue Yeoman radar is an example, an unofficial name created by combining the names of two other projects,
Blue Riband and
Orange Yeoman.
The names were mostly dropped with the end of the Ministry in 1959. Its functions were split between the
War Office, the
Air Ministry, and the newly created
Ministry of Aviation, which was responsible for civil aviation. After the reorganization, projects were mostly named with randomly selected codes comprising two letters and three digits, e.g.
BL755,
WE.177.[3] Rainbow codes, or at least names that look like them without being official, have occasionally been used for some modern systems; current examples include the Orange Reaper
electronic support measures system and the
Blue Vixen radar[4]—the latter most likely so named because it was a replacement for the
Blue Fox radar.
Blue Diver – ARI (Airborne Radio Installation) 18075 airborne low-band
VHFjammer – against metric frequency radar such as Tall King – fitted to
Victor and
Vulcan
Blue Oak –
AWREAtlas 2 super-computer used for simulation of nuclear explosions
Blue Orchid – Marconi doppler navigation equipment for helicopters
Blue Parrot – ARI 5930
I band automatic contour-following radar for Buccaneer – also known as AIRPASS II (acronym for Airborne Interception Radar & Pilot's Attack Sight System)
Blue Yeoman – early warning radar, also known as
AMES Type 85, a component Linesman; name created from the "Blue" of Blue Riband and the Yeoman of Orange Yeoman. Potentially non-official name.
Orange Blossom – probably a deliberate mis-identification of the Orange Crop pods fitted to 1312 Flight Hercules aircraft, possibly pod-mounted electronic support measures used on the Hercules[citation needed]
Orange Cocktail – experimental homing radar weapon from the 1950s
Orange Crop –
Racal MIR 2
ESM system for Royal Navy
Lynx and Royal Navy
Sea King helicopters (HAS.5 onwards but not Mk 4 "Junglies", who had the
Racal Prophet lightweight RWR fitted to some, or to the Royal Navy SAR) and some Royal Air Force Hercules aircraft
Pink Hawk – early name for
Fairey Fireflash missile. As this was a "watered down" version of the
Red Hawk, and thus pink, it is an example of Rainbow Codes having some implied meaning, rather than their usual purely deliberately meaningless choice.
Red Hermes – FV3702 armoured fuel trailer for flamethrower tanks
Red Indian – analogue anti-aircraft fire control computer for Bofors L/70 gun.
Red King – two-barrel
revolver cannon, developed alongside Red Queen. The name is likely not random, but instead a reference to its
Oerlikon factory designation, RK, for Revolver Kanone.
Red Light –
X band jammer for V Bombers, entered service as ARI 18146
Red Neck – airborne side-looking radar (SLAR), tested on the
Victor, a 40 foot long aerial under each wing. Flexing in flight corrupted the resolution. Cancelled 1962.[16]
Yellow Tiger – Target illuminating radar used with the Thunderbird missile
Yellow Veil – ALQ-167 pod for Royal Navy Lynx
Non-Rainbow codes
Several British military-related terms have a similar "colour" format to Rainbow Codes, but are not true examples since they do not refer to classified research projects and/or were adopted long after Rainbow Codes went out of use. Others are entirely unofficial (sometimes humorous) nicknames. These include:
Black Banana – unofficial nickname for the
Blackburn Buccaneer. The name "ARNA" (allegedly an acronym for "A Royal Navy Aircraft") was submitted to a Blackburn in-house naming competition. It was only when "Blackburn ARNA" was said out loud that the joke became clear. The initial service aircraft were painted
Anti-flash white and were thus nicknamed "Peeled Nanas".[22]
Black Beacon – The Orfordness Rotating Wireless Beacon, known simply as the Orfordness Beacon or sometimes the Black Beacon, was an early radio navigation system
Blue Circle – sardonic name for concrete ballast for Buccaneer while awaiting Blue Parrot radar. Also used for
Sea Harrier ballast in place of
Blue Fox radar, and
Tornado F.2 ballast. From the
Blue Circle cement company.
Blue Eric – improvised
I bandECM jammer against the
Fledermaus anti-aircraft gun control radar used by Argentine forces during the Falklands War. Installed in the
Harrier GR.3's starboard 30mm gun pod.[23][24]
Blue Yeoman – unofficial name for an experimental radar made from components of the Blue Riband and Orange Yeoman
Green Parrot – unconfirmed low yield nuclear weapon mentioned in a 1981 New Statesman article by
Duncan Campbell[26] who later claimed that it was "probably" a copy of the US
B57 nuclear bomb.[27] The
WE.177 has incorrectly been referred to as the Green Parrot by some authors. However Green Parrot was a NATO codename for the Soviet
PFM-1 anti-infantry mine. Green Parrot was also the term for an admiral's barge, traditionally with a green-painted hull.
An allusion to the Rainbow codes was made in the title of the 1961
Alistair MacLean Cold War novel The Dark Crusader, even more so in the American edition's title The Black Shrike. Both names were based on Blue Streak (which was mentioned in the novel); the title was of a fictional solid-fueled ICBM which was the object of a covert theft operation at an isolated Fijian test site.[29]
The Rainbow Codes were a series of
code names used to disguise the nature of various British military research projects. They were mainly used by the
Ministry of Supply from the end of the
Second World War until 1958, when the ministry was broken up and its functions distributed among the forces. The codes were replaced by an
alphanumeric code system.
History
During World War II, British intelligence was able to glean details of new German technologies simply by considering their code names. For instance, when they heard of a new system known as Wotan,
Reginald Victor Jones asked around and found that
Wotan was a one-eyed god. Based on this, he guessed it was a
radio navigation system using a single radio beam. This proved correct, and the
Royal Air Force was able to quickly render it useless through jamming.[1]
Wishing to avoid making this sort of mistake, the
Ministry of Supply (MoS) initiated a system that would be entirely random and deliberately unrelated to the program in any way,[2] while still being easy to remember. Each rainbow code name was constructed from a randomly selected colour, plus an (often appropriate) noun taken from a list, for example:
"Green" + "Mace" =
Green Mace, an anti-aircraft (AA) gun.
While most colour and noun combinations were meaningless, some combinations produced real names, although quite unrelated to the project they designated. For example, "Black Maria" is also a nickname for a
police van and the "Red Duster" is a nickname for the
Red Ensign, the flag flown by British
merchant ships. Some code names were not assigned through the official system, but created to sound like it. The
Blue Yeoman radar is an example, an unofficial name created by combining the names of two other projects,
Blue Riband and
Orange Yeoman.
The names were mostly dropped with the end of the Ministry in 1959. Its functions were split between the
War Office, the
Air Ministry, and the newly created
Ministry of Aviation, which was responsible for civil aviation. After the reorganization, projects were mostly named with randomly selected codes comprising two letters and three digits, e.g.
BL755,
WE.177.[3] Rainbow codes, or at least names that look like them without being official, have occasionally been used for some modern systems; current examples include the Orange Reaper
electronic support measures system and the
Blue Vixen radar[4]—the latter most likely so named because it was a replacement for the
Blue Fox radar.
Blue Diver – ARI (Airborne Radio Installation) 18075 airborne low-band
VHFjammer – against metric frequency radar such as Tall King – fitted to
Victor and
Vulcan
Blue Oak –
AWREAtlas 2 super-computer used for simulation of nuclear explosions
Blue Orchid – Marconi doppler navigation equipment for helicopters
Blue Parrot – ARI 5930
I band automatic contour-following radar for Buccaneer – also known as AIRPASS II (acronym for Airborne Interception Radar & Pilot's Attack Sight System)
Blue Yeoman – early warning radar, also known as
AMES Type 85, a component Linesman; name created from the "Blue" of Blue Riband and the Yeoman of Orange Yeoman. Potentially non-official name.
Orange Blossom – probably a deliberate mis-identification of the Orange Crop pods fitted to 1312 Flight Hercules aircraft, possibly pod-mounted electronic support measures used on the Hercules[citation needed]
Orange Cocktail – experimental homing radar weapon from the 1950s
Orange Crop –
Racal MIR 2
ESM system for Royal Navy
Lynx and Royal Navy
Sea King helicopters (HAS.5 onwards but not Mk 4 "Junglies", who had the
Racal Prophet lightweight RWR fitted to some, or to the Royal Navy SAR) and some Royal Air Force Hercules aircraft
Pink Hawk – early name for
Fairey Fireflash missile. As this was a "watered down" version of the
Red Hawk, and thus pink, it is an example of Rainbow Codes having some implied meaning, rather than their usual purely deliberately meaningless choice.
Red Hermes – FV3702 armoured fuel trailer for flamethrower tanks
Red Indian – analogue anti-aircraft fire control computer for Bofors L/70 gun.
Red King – two-barrel
revolver cannon, developed alongside Red Queen. The name is likely not random, but instead a reference to its
Oerlikon factory designation, RK, for Revolver Kanone.
Red Light –
X band jammer for V Bombers, entered service as ARI 18146
Red Neck – airborne side-looking radar (SLAR), tested on the
Victor, a 40 foot long aerial under each wing. Flexing in flight corrupted the resolution. Cancelled 1962.[16]
Yellow Tiger – Target illuminating radar used with the Thunderbird missile
Yellow Veil – ALQ-167 pod for Royal Navy Lynx
Non-Rainbow codes
Several British military-related terms have a similar "colour" format to Rainbow Codes, but are not true examples since they do not refer to classified research projects and/or were adopted long after Rainbow Codes went out of use. Others are entirely unofficial (sometimes humorous) nicknames. These include:
Black Banana – unofficial nickname for the
Blackburn Buccaneer. The name "ARNA" (allegedly an acronym for "A Royal Navy Aircraft") was submitted to a Blackburn in-house naming competition. It was only when "Blackburn ARNA" was said out loud that the joke became clear. The initial service aircraft were painted
Anti-flash white and were thus nicknamed "Peeled Nanas".[22]
Black Beacon – The Orfordness Rotating Wireless Beacon, known simply as the Orfordness Beacon or sometimes the Black Beacon, was an early radio navigation system
Blue Circle – sardonic name for concrete ballast for Buccaneer while awaiting Blue Parrot radar. Also used for
Sea Harrier ballast in place of
Blue Fox radar, and
Tornado F.2 ballast. From the
Blue Circle cement company.
Blue Eric – improvised
I bandECM jammer against the
Fledermaus anti-aircraft gun control radar used by Argentine forces during the Falklands War. Installed in the
Harrier GR.3's starboard 30mm gun pod.[23][24]
Blue Yeoman – unofficial name for an experimental radar made from components of the Blue Riband and Orange Yeoman
Green Parrot – unconfirmed low yield nuclear weapon mentioned in a 1981 New Statesman article by
Duncan Campbell[26] who later claimed that it was "probably" a copy of the US
B57 nuclear bomb.[27] The
WE.177 has incorrectly been referred to as the Green Parrot by some authors. However Green Parrot was a NATO codename for the Soviet
PFM-1 anti-infantry mine. Green Parrot was also the term for an admiral's barge, traditionally with a green-painted hull.
An allusion to the Rainbow codes was made in the title of the 1961
Alistair MacLean Cold War novel The Dark Crusader, even more so in the American edition's title The Black Shrike. Both names were based on Blue Streak (which was mentioned in the novel); the title was of a fictional solid-fueled ICBM which was the object of a covert theft operation at an isolated Fijian test site.[29]