East, General Wavell himself. He sketched a tank mimicking a truck in a handwritten note: The note was passed to Barkas, in his words "not long after my arrival in Middle East... The whole idea was there. It was only a matter of design, development, and arrangements for manufacture." The first heavy wooden prototype was made in 1941 by Jasper Maskelyne, who gave it the name Sunshield. 12 men were needed to lift it, and it disintegrated on its first trial run on a Crusader tank. However, Barkas had enough confidence in the Sunshield to ask for a lighter version. The Mark 2 Sunshield was made of canvas stretched over a light steel tube frame. It was strong, light, and cheap to manufacture. And crucially, from as low as 500 feet, RAF pilots found that the Mark 2 convincingly resembled a truck. The 722 Sunshields were carefully pre-positioned in the Martello tank-holding area near El Imayid railway station. Each was numbered. The crew of each tank was brought to Martello, told their number, shown where they would be parked and taught how to put up and take down the Sunshield, which they would have to do at night. "Cannibals" for field guns Field guns and their limbers were disguised as British "3-tonner" trucks, under the direction of Tony Ayrton and Brian Robb. They arranged for the long towing pole of the limber to overlap the trail of the gun and then put up a dummy truck canopy over both. The real wheels of both the gun and the limber added to the realism of the dummy truck, as they remained visible under the canopy, exactly where the truck's wheels ought to be. The technique was named "Cannibal" because the gun and limber were "eaten up" by the canopy. The extremely distinctive Morris C8 four wheel drive tractors, known as "Quads" that pulled the 25 pounder guns and their limbers also had to be disguised, as their presence directly advertised the presence of artillery. They were more simply camouflaged, again as trucks with real wheels, by draping a net over four poles tied to the sides of the vehicle and braced with guy ropes. A total of 360 Cannibals were deployed in Bertram. The rear artillery concentration area and the forward artillery barrage area near El Alamein station were named Cannibal I and Cannibal II, respectively, after the camouflage technique. In