The basic guidelines for the painting of US Army registration numbers on vehicles were controlled by AR-850-5 (AR= Army regulation). At the start of the war, the governing regulation was the 25 Sep 36 circular which called for 4 inch white reg. nos. On 5 June 1942, the War Dept. issued Circular No. 174 which changed the previous circular to the use of blue drab paint applied with a stencil.
AR-850-5 was reissued on 5 Aug 42 and incorporated the Circular No. 174 change, reiterating the blue drab and specifying 2 inch (down from 4 inch) for all vehicles except motorcycles (1 in). The 15 Feb 45 AR-850-5 edition switched back to the use of flat white paint.
The actual registration numbers painted on the vehicles were assigned in the contract to the manufacturer. So for example, the first 1940 manufacturing contract to American Car and Foundry for the M3 light tank called for the use of registration numbers from 30978 to 31604. By 1941, the number of digits had increased so one contract batch (tank serials 670 to 1800) had the reg. nos. 307125 to 307753. The 1942 contact block included reg. nos. 3011159 to 3011459. Individual tank types often had multiple registration blocks due to different plants and different contract batches. So for example, there were ten different registration number blocks for the M5A1 light tank.
The actual style of painting of the reg. nos. had some variation from plant to plant, which is why you see the "railroad" style fonts from some plants.
To further complicate things, when tanks were shipped overseas, they had to be waterproofed for the shipment, and after the waterproofing was removed, the paint was often damaged. So this often meant that the tanks were repainted by ordnance units in theater before being issued to troops. Many Ordnance units in Europe repainted the registration numbers in white, either because they didn't have blue drab paint, or because the local theater commander approved the use of white or yellow as a substitute. A lot of combat units didn't like blue drab numbers since they were hard to read, and this number was regularly used for maintenance records. So as a result, there tends to be a lot of variation in registration numbers on photos of tanks in combat.
The bottom line is to use photos of the actual tank or AFV you want to model for guidance.
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