• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Camouflage

Kondoru said:
Didnt they stick on old Newspapers for white winter camo?
Click to expand...
The Germans simply weren't expecting to be still fighting in Russia in winter - they expected to have the whole thing done and dusted by then. Lamentable lack of pattern recognition there - you'd think somebody at the staff college might have looked up Napoleon in 1812 or Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, or even way back in German history - naming it "Barbarossa" must have evoked the Prussian Knights and that business with charging across a not-properly-frozen lake. Somebody should have said "Wait a minute here, guys, have we thought this through? Should we consider a Plan B here, just in case?"

No thought given to a Russian winter or the need to get winter kit together.

So yes, newspapers. And bizarre desperate expedients, such as the German soldier who used a looted wedding dress as winter cam. (Now there's a model idea).

The Russians did think ahead; this is a larger and more elaborate model I did, working on getting the feel of a tank hide built into an excavation in the side of a hill - Russian field engineering did a lot of this sort of thing using locally available resources. (lot of trees and lots of guys with spades and saws and axes). Space here for two T-34's plus a crew barracks (incomplete at this stage) in between the two garages: dug deep and lined with treetrunks. The T34 has a Russian winter cam scheme which looks odd, but was meant to save on white paint.
going_underground_by_agprov-d5q6bjr.jpg
 
Last edited:
Another Russian oddity: a work-in-progress shot of a British-built Churchill IV tank, in Russian service in the winter of 1943. Again a white-over-green disruptive pattern; the draw for me was hand-illustrating the "ALEXANDR NEVSKY" name on the side of the turret. This illustrates the essential contradiction rather like the KV-2 illustrated earlier with the great big white cross painted on the top of the turret: camuflage obscures where it can't hide, it breaks up the outline, it makes the moving shape look vague and harder to hit, a green tank is harder to spot at a thousand yards against a background of trees, or a grey-white tank is harder to aim at against a background of snow.

But for some specific puposes it also has to be instantly recognisable and (locally) highly visible. - so your own people on the ground can tell it's definitely one of ours, for instance. Insignia help. On the other hand, giving your tank the long name of a mediaeval Russian knight-in-armour, and painting it on each side of the turret in large eighteen-inch-high blood-red letters, after you have meticulously overpainted the whole tank in winter white so it has a degree of camouflage....

T34(r) 013.JPG
 
Last edited:
You're short of tanks. Replacements from Germany aren't getting to you as quickly as you'd like. the whisper is that the Americans have bombed the ball-bearing factory and because of that they don't have any ball-races to instal so the turrets can move smoothly, and that's holding up production with lots of tanks in one place, lots of turrets in another, but no way of joining them up. Bottleneck. But the Russians abandoned a few of theirs where our recovery teams can get them. They've run out of petrol, basically, but have a full munitions load. We can swap the Russian MG's for ours and use them in the interim. The problem is. how does our side know they're German now and hopefully refrain from shooting at them?
Answer: fill up the tanks, drive them back to German lines (but make sure people know you're coming - you're driving Russian tanks!) repaint them in German cam and ask who can hold a brush in an acceptably straight line to mark them with lots of massive German crosses, they don't have to be dead straight, just obvious. And hang a couple of side-skirts on them, just cosmetic things, so they look more like German tanks. Use any old metal that's hanging around, if they stop an RPG aimed at the tracks, that's a bonus...

1642036823177.png
 
Last edited:
This is my prefered camo for deer /boar whatever watching. I use trousers that have a touch more green in them as there's always a few brambles still green in winter. Advantage Hardwoods camo. When I was in Florida there was a superstore called Outdoor World, I did buy a lot there.Archery, fishing and shooting gear was half the price we pay.
 

Attachments

  • your fucked.jpg
    your fucked.jpg
    97 KB · Views: 61
Sorry, did'nt realise my title for the jpeg would show, you would'nt want to know what some of my titles in my folders are !.
 
Bullseye said:
Sorry, did'nt realise my title for the jpeg would show, you would'nt want to know what some of my titles in my folders are !.
Click to expand...

If you simply attach a file to a post it's displayed at the bottom of the post with its filename. If you attach an image file and insert its image within the body of your post the titled attachment is not displayed separately / additionally.
 
Seeing the pics of various animals using their natural camouflage and the human designed military camouflage reminded me that the famous ornithologist and conservationist Sir Peter Scott designed the very successful Western Approaches camouflage scheme for the Royal Navy in WW2.
He was a serving officer and would, I imagine, have used his civilian skills to come up with the design -having a keen interest in wildlife he must surely have noticed the effects of camouflage in animals and his design used very light colours to disguise the vessels and blend in with the surroundings rather than the disruptive schemes often used.
It was successful enough to be adopted by virtually all the ships operating in the North Atlantic and Arctic areas by 1941.
 
British military camouflage fabric used to have a different infrared signature for each colour. This is supposed to make the wearer difficult to see with IR goggles (One of my previous jobs was checking random fabric samples for IR sig)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top