In the scorching deserts of North Africa, British forces pulled off one of the most audacious deceptions of World War II—they made 27-ton tanks disappear by disguising them as harmless 3-ton lorries.
The “Sunshield” was a crude contraption: wooden frames covered in painted canvas that transformed Crusaders, Grants, and Shermans into what appeared to be supply trucks. On paper, it shouldn’t have fooled anyone. German reconnaissance had superior optics, methodical aerial photography, and officers who’d spent years in the desert. Yet from November 1941 through May 1943, this simple disguise repeatedly deceived the Afrika Korps.
At El Alamein in October 1942, Operation Bertram used Sunshields to hide 300 tanks in plain sight. For six nights, British armour moved from south to north whilst German reconnaissance photographed the same positions daily—seeing only supply lorries. When the attack came, German commanders were stunned. Their panzers were positioned to defend against threats that didn’t exist, whilst real British armour struck from “logistics areas.”
This wasn’t theatrical trickery. It was systematic exploitation of how the enemy gathered intelligence. The Germans relied on predictable reconnaissance flights at specific times and altitudes. The British designed a weapon system around that predictability. Each Sunshield cost £12 to build but delivered tactical surprise worth divisions.
German pilots weren’t incompetent. They were seeing exactly what was there—through heat shimmer, from 3,000 feet, through atmospheric distortion that made perfect identification impossible. The Sunshield worked because it matched the mental template observers had built from seeing thousands of real lorries. Pattern recognition, humanity’s greatest cognitive strength, became its greatest vulnerability.
Credit to : WW2 Recode