vehicles there quite obvious, as trucks, well before battle. The tanks, too, would be openly displayed, far behind the battle front. When the enemy saw that nothing seemed to be happening, the trucks would be replaced by tanks, masquerading as trucks. That meant that the tanks, too, would have to be seen not to move so they would all be replaced with dummies. An unprecedented and "formidable" number of dummies were required: more than 400 tanks, 100 guns, and nearly 2000 soft-skinned vehicles. Different techniques were used for each task. The British Army had intentionally recruited designers, architects and artists for camouflage work. Tony Ayrton was a painter, son of the architect Maxwell Ayrton. Brian Robb had arrived more informally: he joined the army as a private, but Barkas noticed him and made use of his skills as an artist, teacher and illustrator by having him speedily promoted to Staff Lieutenant. Ayrton and Robb became Barkas's "GSO2"s, his senior staff officers, and they supervised the camouflage schemes used in Operation Bertram. Three companies of Pioneers were assigned to Barkas's command to carry out the physical work of making the thousands of dummies. They came respectively from East Africa, Mauritius and the Seychelles. One company worked the standard bed frame palm hurdles into the required shapes and fixed them together to make tank bodies, turrets and other dummy vehicle elements. The second company prepared hessian covers for the vehicle elements. The third company painted and prepared the dummies to the required degree of realism. Since the different Pioneer companies did not like one another, Barkas moved their camps as far apart as possible. To help maintain security, a NAAFI canteen was set up exclusively for the camouflage workers, to help keep everyone in camp. "Sunshields" for tanks Real tanks were disguised as trucks, using light "Sunshield" canopies. They were made in two halves, which hinged on the sides of the tank. A half could be lifted by two men and fitted or removed in a few minutes. Different models of Sunshield existed to fit the various types of Allied tank which included Crusaders, Valentines, Grants and Shermans, mimicking different kinds of truck. A total of 722 Sunshields were deployed in Bertram. According to Peter Forbes, "Sunshields were the most successful and the most exhilaratingly mimetic of the deceptions practised in the desert." The idea for the Sunshield came from Commander-in-Chief Middle