Wednesday, May 6, 2020

The Army shelter half

The Shelter half was always a useful piece of issue gear for me. I actually bought one at a surplus store and took it along with a poncho liner to one of the riggers and had them sew it together and put quilting baffels in it - all for a case of beer and a #1 number on chudo street. I had in essence created as far as I know THE very first "survival quilt" in history. Why? well, for a couple of reasons.

1. Army issue ponchos suck the big mahoney and either de lam or fail in another regard.
2. ponchos make you sweat.
3. and making your own designs are pimp as a mo-fo

The combination of the shelter half and poncho gave me a water resistant (not water proof) medium weight blanket/shelter combo. it served me in good stead in both North carolina and Germany.
anyhoo, A shelter-half (UK and United States; the German equivalent, dating from before the Second World War, being the [Dreiecks]Zeltbahn or triangle tarpaulin), is a simple kind of partial tent designed to provide temporary shelter and concealment when combined with one or more sections. Two sheets of canvas or a similar material (the halves) are fastened together with snaps, straps or buttons to form a larger surface. The shelter-half is then erected using poles, ropes, pegs, and whatever tools are on hand, forming an inverted V structure. Small tents like these are often called pup tents" in American English.

Shelter halves are a mainstay of most armies, and are known from the mid 19th century. Often, each soldier carries one shelter-half and half the poles, etc., and they pair off to erect a two-man tent. The size and shape of each half shelter piece may vary from army to army, but are typically rectangular, triangular or lozenge shaped. When time and space allow, some forms of half-shelters can be combined into a larger, more complex tent.

Shelter-halves are usually designed to serve double duty as ponchos against the rain, or for the concealment of snipers. While the fabric is often simple olive drab, several nations use camouflaged fabric. The first printed camouflage for soldiers were the Italian Telo mimetico introduced in 1929 for their half-shelters. The first camouflage uniforms were the Second World War German paratrooper smock, based on their M1931 Splittermuster shelter-halves. Russian Army has used Plasch-palatkas (literally "cape-tents", designed to be used as both a part of a larger tent cover, or an individual weatherproof cape) since 1894, and the modern version, virtually unchanged since, was introduced in 1936, with the cammo version being available since 1942. To add some confusion, the ordinary waterproofed cape with a similar name (plasch-nakidka, "cape-overcoat") was issued at the same time, but these weren't intended to combine with each other

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