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#62439 03/27/02 10:55 PM
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wwh Offline
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Dear RhubarbCommando: I remember reading a long time ago that khaki originated in India when a unit clad in white was so vulnerable to enemy snipers that their colonel ordered them to rub dirt onto them. Several sources say "khaki" is an Urdu word

khaki - 1857, from Urdu khaki, lit. "dusty,"
from khak "dust," from Pers. First introduced
in uniforms of British cavalry in India (the
Guide Corps, 1846); widely adopted for
camoflage purposes in the Boer Wars.







#62440 04/01/02 12:12 AM
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Facings go back millenia, at least as far as Alexander the Great, who was the first to realize the importance of coordinated movements of troops. Timing is everything. He devised a system whereby different parts of his armies wore different colored head sashes. A wave of a flag from the command post would send say the green band into battle, followed by a flanking movement from the wearers of red on the right. This was the origination of Alexander's Rag Time Bands.



TEd
#62441 04/01/02 02:50 AM
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Jazzo, you have to think back to the days before the invention of smokeless powder. Battles were fought by masses of troops arranged in units which advanced like chess men over the field in blocks of varying sizes. Battles usually began with an artillery barrage, which invariably left the field covered in dense smoke. European armies early on (late 17th century, I believe) adopted bright colored uniforms so the troops would be visible in the smoke which generally covered the entire battlefield. Different nations used different colors. The Brits adopted scarlet (a technical term for a particular shade of red), the French wore blue, the Austrians wore white, the Spanish, green. And the sense of professional pride made it hard to give up these colors when smokeless powder and more modern tactics made the colorful uniforms downright hazardous, as has been noted by others, notwithstanding there were lots of old veterans who hated to give up the red and thought khaki was the ugliest color ever invented (which is probably right, with the possible exception of OD [olive drab], which is the U.S. army combat uniform color, or was in my day).


#62442 04/01/02 04:38 AM
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Yeah, what Rhube, BYB and Bingley said. I do remember reading that the Federal blue and southern grey were actually not bad cammo during that liddle fratricidal stoush y'all had in the 1860s, particularly once they had both faded. The blue went to grey, the grey went to butternut.



The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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