Why The SAS Painted Their Land Rovers Pink And How They Became The Most Feared Vehicle In The Desert

Описание: Why The SAS Painted Their Land Rovers Pink And How They Became The Most Feared Vehicle In The Desert

The SAS Pink Panther — a Land Rover Series IIA with no doors, no windscreen, and no roof, painted pink, that became the most effective long-range desert warfare vehicle ever built by any army in the Cold War era.

In 1968, the Ministry of Defence bought 72 Land Rover Series IIA 109-inch wheelbase vehicles and sent them to Marshalls of Cambridge to be transformed. The doors came off. The windscreen came off. The roof came off. Four fuel tanks replaced the standard unit, giving a combined capacity of 100 gallons and a range of over 1,000 miles. Twin GPMGs went on the commander's forward mount. A Browning .50 calibre went on the rear. Sand ladders were bolted to the sides. A spare tyre went on the front. Then the whole thing was painted pink. Not camouflage pink. Not subtle pink. Mauve-pink. The kind of pink that made new recruits laugh until they saw what happened in the field, where the pink-red geology of Oman, Jordan, and Yemen absorbed the colour completely and the vehicle vanished at 200 metres. SAS veteran Colin Armstrong described standing next to one in the Omani desert and thinking the camouflage couldn't possibly work — until he watched it disappear from distance into rock features the same colour as the paint. The SAS used these vehicles from 1968 to 1984 across Oman's Dhofar campaign, Jordan, Kenya, Belize, and the inner German border. Their descendants — Land Rover Defender 110 Desert Patrol Vehicles, still called pinkies by veterans who couldn't break the habit — drove into Iraq in January 1991 with A and D Squadrons in what Peter Ratcliffe called the biggest gathering of SAS in a battle zone since the Second World War. They were told to slow down because they were destroying too much, too fast. Of the original 72 Pink Panthers, approximately 20 survive. When one comes to sale, the price reflects five decades of legend.

This is the complete story of the vehicle that the SAS made famous and nobody else could copy. From the Long Range Desert Group Jeeps of 1941 to the pink Land Rovers of Oman to the desert columns that hunted Scud launchers across Iraq.

No doors. No roof. No armour. Completely invisible in the desert.