Camouflage

 Up until World War I, most countries’ military uniforms appeared to have little to do with allowing soldiers to blend into the environment in which they were fighting.  In the Revolutionary War, the British wore bright red coats, even evoking their colloquial name of “redcoats”.  In the US Civil War, Union soldiers wore dark blue.  In World War I, the French started out with dark blue jackets and bright red pants before switching over to light blue, commonly referred to as “horizon blue”.  By that point the Germans had switched from dark blue to field grey and the British had finally discovered khaki.  The US settled on a green color commonly referred to as “olive drab”, though US Marines in WWI wore a darker shade of green.

  During WWII, Germany and the US developed camouflage uniforms.   The Wehrmacht “splinter” pattern is less well known – though prevalent in the original “Inglorious Bastards” film from 1978.  So far as I can tell it was a smock but not a full uniform (except a little-used winter version).  The much-discussed Waffen SS developed a dot pattern in spring and autumn versions, though I rarely see the spring version.  The autumn version started out as a smock and wound up, by 1944, as a full uniform.  By now that dot cammo pattern is an easy way to distinguish SS troops, along with either SS (Sigrune) or Totenkopf black collar patches and their distinctive collar insignia, from private all the way up to the Reichfuhrer SS himself, Heinrich Himmler (who was too young to see combat in WWI). 

 For its part US forces developed a similar pattern, but had to reserve it for Pacific theater operations due to US troops in Europe being mistaken for SS.  I’m not aware the Japanese ever developed a camouflage uniform.  However, you don’t see the US WWII camouflage pattern appear after WWII, Korean and Vietnam War US troops are almost always seen in simple olive drab.

 Woodland camouflage.  By the mid-80s the US switched from olive drab to woodland camouflage as a standard, at least for the Army.   This is green, brown and tan.  By Operation Desert Storm (1991) we’d developed our first desert camouflage variety, later replaced with a slightly different pattern, obviously in desert colors, for the operations in Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). 

 Multicam Black.  Recently I developed an affinity for jungle hats, in particular of camouflage variety.  And there’s apparently a new variety out there these days, “multicam black”.  I ordered one, and the label had this eerie description: “Multicam black was developed to meet the unique needs of law enforcement operating in high risk environments. It projects a distinctly authoritative presence appropriate for domestic operations.”  So here’s a camouflage variant expressly designed for domestic military operations against our own civilian population.  I’m not Angela Davis, Bernie Sanders or Tom Morello, but language like that really makes you wonder if the police understand that they are NOT the military when facing US citizens at home.  Even the FBI, training at Quantico – of all places – designate non-target civilians as “the taxpayer”, meaning Special Agents are repeatedly reminded that innocent civilians are paying their salaries.   Having said all that, multicam black is pretty cool, like a goth version of woodland camouflage.