Canadian Camouflage

Canada's first military usage of camouflage clothing occurred during World War Two. Men of the 1st Canadian Parachute Battalion (attached to the British 6th Airborne Division) wore British-made Denison smocks in a unique, hand-painted "brushstroke" camouflage pattern that later spawned a large branch of derivative patterns that are still used today. Canadian paratroopers continued to wear Denison smocks for several years after the war, but they were phased out after wartime stocks were depleted and the Canadians never replaced them with an indigenously-produced version. Indeed, aside from solid white outer clothing, worn by members of the Special Service Force and other Canadian military personnel operating in arctic or snow-covered regions, the Canadian Armed Forces did not utilize any camouflage uniforms at all until the mid-1970s. In 1975, the Canadian Airborne Regiment was issued its first camouflage garment in nearly twenty-five years, a DPM pattern camouflage airborne smock. Although the Regiment experimented with other items, such as special windproof trousers, the DPM smock remained the only item of issue camouflaged clothing worn by the Regiment until its disbandment in 1995. Canadian Forces briefly adopted a bizarre Garrison Jacket in 1989, printed in a dark woodland camouflage pattern, but it was short-lived and never intended for practical combat usage. The standard combat uniform remained olive green for the next quarter century, with a tan version for desert deployments seeing very brief trials in the mid-1990s. Then, in 2001, after several months of research and experimentation, for the first time in her history, Canada's Armed Forces adopted its very own camouflage pattern, a computer-designed scheme incorporating a pixelated pattern known as CADPAT (TW). This pattern was shortly thereafter complemented by its desert counterpart, CADPAT (AR), and a snow/arctic version, CADPAT (WA).