Russian Vehicle Markings

[Lang]

David

I don't think that is the case. Unmarked things just create confusion for your own people. In the Eastern front situation with the scale of operations, both sides would know exactly who they are dealing with the first prisoner captured quite apart from the intelligence brought back by active patrolling.

The stupidity of having things unmarked was taken to the extreme in the UK when some idiot decided to remove all the road signs. It created untold confusion for a vast mobile population of both British and Allied servicemen without local knowledge.

This clown (and the people who approved it) could only have thought that the German Army only got to Dunkirk by using tourist guides and his cunning plan would confuse the mapless invading amphibious or parachuting Germans so much they would end up in the Outer Hebrides instead of London where they were planning to go.

The same with unmarked vehicles, particularly at borders between major formations, where people could not tell whether vehicles were theirs or the next door division. Trans-formation convoys would have a bad time trying to keep untangled from the local traffic if everybody was unidentified.

Lang

[David Dunlop]

Ahhh. Stalinism at it’s finest.

“If nobody knows what’s going on in the Army, it can’t rise against me.”

David

[Lang]

Tony

I think you might be selling the Russian vehicles short. Although they had hundreds of thousands of American vehicles and you see a majority of these in combat photos because they are 4x4 or 6x6 the great bulk of the Russian fleet were home built vehicles.

They were known for their simplicity and ease of maintenance. They do look old fashioned.

We now know the Soviet block have had the best off-road military vehicles in the world for nearly 70 years. They have kept them simple concentrating on all-terrain ability without the complicated sophistication and comfort of western vehicles - most of which are adaptions of civil designs and merely side-line production by huge corporations earning their main living from commercial sales.

Lang