Our company commander had a fixation with camouflaging the vehicles, so that they were not visible from either the ground or the air. Accordingly, we had to make hessian windscreen covers, which could be rolled down to prevent reflections from betraying our hiding place. We also had to cut long wooden poles, which were carried on the top of the truck. These were to lift the camouflage net away from the vehicle, in order to break up the outline, so it didn’t look like a stationary lorry with a net over it! The net itself was interwoven with lengths of scrim, in various natural colours, green, brown, grey, black etc. Once we had the lorry in the best natural cover we could find, we would climb up and unroll the net from its place atop the truck. We then got under the net and began arranging it, using the aforementioned poles.
This is when the fun really began, especially under a roasting sun, on the German heathland, with its dust and silver sand. Being a net it would catch on the smallest protrusion, either on the truck or on one’s clothing and equipment. You would start to push it up and it would snag on a wheel bolt. Get in to release it and it would catch on your gaiter buckle, then, as you bent down to release that it would get your cap badge and carry your beret away, up out of reach. Climbing up to retrieve your headgear, you would find yourself caught by the buckles on your webbing equipment, reach round to free it from there and it had the buttons on your epaulettes. All this time the sweat was running into your eyes, and exposed skin was coated in a thick brown layer of perspiration and dust. And didn’t the horseflies just love that?
The next step was to use brushwood to cover the wheels and other distinctive shapes, such as headlights and number plates, and to make sure we had rolled down the hessian over the windscreen. Having dealt with the truck to the best of our ability, we would set about obliterating wheel tracks, which were an obvious pointer for a spotter plane, that a truck had driven in there. A sobering thought is that, today, infra-red imaging would make all these precautions pretty much a waste of time. However, that was not the case in the mid-1950s and “Nod” wanted our trucks to be rendered almost invisible.
I did put one over him on one occasion, though. We had orders to drive to nearby woodland and to camouflage up, and he would be along to inspect our efforts. I happened to be the last to arrive, and the other three had chosen the best positions, in what was fairly open pine forest. I was wondering what to do when I noticed a fair-sized patch of thick, scrubby woodland, consisting of birch, elder, hazel and the like, all of which was thickly overgrown with blackberry.
On investigation, this proved to be of a narrow, roughly oval shape, with the centre just wide enough to accommodate my Humber, and also of ample length. As I drove in at one end, the saplings, through which I had driven sprang back up and the truck was hidden from all sides. I then set about finishing off the ideal hiding place which nature had so thoughtfully provided. As the net was not needed to hide the truck from ground-level, I made the best possible use of it above. Having then brushed out any track marks, I walked over to join my mates.
Before long “Nod” drove up to carry out his inspection of our endeavours. He made all the usual criticisms, which we had all come to expect before suddenly realising there was a vehicle unaccounted for. “Where’s the other vehicle?” he demanded, suspiciously. “Over there, Sir,” I replied, gesturing in the general direction. “Where, I can’t see it?” said he. “We’d better go and look at this!” he said to his minions. “Come and show us, Driver” I took them and showed what I had done. He walked all round the thicket, before calling all the other drivers over. “This is what I mean by camouflage” he told them. “This is a first class effort, and I want you all to look at it and learn how it should be done!” I was not very popular with the blokes, but I was highly delighted at having silenced the Major.