Can you make a tank disappear? The Evolution of Tank Camouflage

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Sergeant: "I didn't see you at camouflage class this morning Private?" Private: "Thank you Sergeant"

My grandparents live near the NATO training grounds of Bergen in Germany. I was out in the forests there as a child and eventually discovered the edge of a tree line to what looked like a very large, open and quite sandy area, which was dotted with various large clumps and islands of bushes and birches. I was fascinated at seeing loads of spent cartridges, no doubt results from the training we had heard over the past weeks, strewn across the ground. A massive bush, just 50 m from me, turned its turret to me and laughed gayly as the soldiers inside caught sight of little me jumping out of my skin in shock and surprise. I’d totally overlooked a deadly chieftain tank, which in turn had been heavily camouflaged with bush material. An opening hatch revealed a smiling squady and eventually a whole troop who kindly fed me chocolate, a cup of tankers tea and let me sit on the turret. Childhood awesomeness moment

I would love to know why the Brits used pink for desert camo instead of plain sand beige, and why the Germans decided on grey instead of green for the early vehicles.

Camo net is an horror to setup and stow. Hard on the hands, hard to setup, hard to remove. On exercises we moved twice a day so handling the net was a constant pain.

My father was in the North African desert (and Italy) from 39’ to 43’ he said in the field, unofficially they resorted to painting and throwing sand over the wet paint , tanks and trucks etc. he said it was as good as anything at camouflage, the art of camouflage is a fascinating subject 👌🏻😎

My UAV Unit went to Afghanistan in 2011. We were scheduled to support 10th Mountain in the north so our vehicles and equipment were all painted in woodland patterns. At the last minute we were assigned to the Marines in the southern desert area (Camp Dwyer). Nothing like being completely out of place.

Fun fact: Nowadays they use specially designed paints, as your common wall paint (that they often used in WW2) will actually shine in UV, making it super-obvious for enemy sensors. Paints with reduced UV signature are very expensive, but pretty much a must-have if you want to stay hidden on a modern battlefield.

In 1946 and 1947 war surplus camouflage nets were used to disguise ski huts and caravans from the authorities at Mt Buller in Victoria Australia. Despite the post war ski boom in Australia, the state government was reluctant to authorise new ski lodges on the mountain, so people built huts or hid caravans just below the treeline and covered them with camouflage nets to stop them being detected by aerial surveillance. A few were found, but most were not. The huts only lasted a few years because a new subdivision was authorised in 1949 and an extra 21 ski lodges were built that year.

I appreciate that you showed an S-tank while explaining all the various S's of camouflage :)

With a big enough cannon, you can make almost anything disappear.

Pity that you didn't mention soviet pre war school of painting armour it was actually something, even putting white for the winter wasn't as straightforward as it seems. There were instructions to put white paint in net patterns of different line thickness to make different shades of off white / green colour. And in cold war era eastern block tank crews were taught to paint camouflage patterns on their tanks in case of war. Plain green was peace time option to keep west as unaware or at least unfamiliar with wartime camo as possible. Nevertheless great and pleasurable to watch as always

Early Klingon cloaking devices had the disadvantage of not being able to fire while cloaked. They fixed that flaw and tested it more or less successfully at the Khitomer Conference in 2293. Oh wait, wrong channel... 😅

Camouflage is an important factor on the modern battlefield that is often overlooked, nice to see it covered!

I read a few years ago that BAE simply slapped some LCD screens on the side of a tank with opposite side cameras as a test. This actually made the tank optically vanish from about 20 meters away. Given we now have low energy flexible OLED tech, it wouldn't surprise me if this actually has progressed further in testing.

Can't argue with Chris' description of using a camnet, he did mention snagging on everything but buttons (on uniform) seemed to be a particular favourite!

That Maltese stonewall camouflage pattern looks great. Maybe it's time to buy a Matilda II model.

There was another, rather unconventional, type of Soviet winter tank camo, that could work only in the extreme cold. A wet newspaper. They just quickly soaked a newspaper in water, layed it on the armor and in a matter of seconds it was frozen solid. A few years ago camo like this was spotted on the Belarusian tanks.

Oh! I didn't know the smoke grenades were made of red phosphorus. I always assumed it was white phosphorus (and other magical chemicals) because it obscures the tank from visible and IR light, showing basically a gigantic white blob on thermals. Thanks! Love learning small details like that.

When we were building the MC-130H Combat Talon II aircraft in the late 1980's I had the privilege of attending a four-day meeting on how we were going to paint the aircraft. The mission was to fly into deigned areas, usually at night to drop off or pick up people and cargo. We discussed one color, two color, three color and four-color schemes. The one-color schemes included what shade of color and flat or how glossy it should be. The multi color schemes included shades, gloss, and what to paint what in each color. I never saw so many people fight so hard for their pet paint scheme. Everyone was adamant they had the best idea. We ended up having a couple more meetings and settled for a variation of European Lizard.