What is this vehicle?

[Bruce_in_Oz]

Re. the photo of the M3 based recovery vehicle and “colourization”:

Colour film has been around since the beginning of the 20th Century. It just wasn’t common until after WW2.

AGFA in Germany were producing a pretty good 35mm colour transparency film in the late 1930s and this was also available in 16mm cine stock.

Mr. Kodak was right behind in the field.

Agfa introduced “Agfachrome” in 35mm (and larger) format for still cameras and Kodak did likewise with “Kodachrome”, which, I suspect, was used to take that photo. The interesting thing about both systems is that the “colour” dyes are added AT PROCESSING and thus the film has essentially three sensitized layers, each of which reacts to either cyan, magenta or yellow, just as “high-level” video cameras have a beam-splitter and “red, green and blue” CCDs (or, in the old days, “tubes”.

This is one of the reasons Kodachrome is/was a “slow” film. It is also the main reason that Kodachrome shot in WW2 still looks “fresh” in 2015. Later film types like Ektachrome and worse, Kodacolor “print” film are subject to degradation of the dyes in the negs AND the prints.

The Wehrmacht used a LOT of colour film, both in 35mm stills cameras or run through the “bomb-proof” Arriflex “S” “combat movie camera”. I was using one of these small Arris in the field as late as1996. They are, especially when fitted with Schneider lenses, a magnificent piece of kit, with a very stable pin-registered pull-down mechanism.

The US Navy was the other BIG user of colour film; think of all the nautical footage of their activities in WW2.

The problem was that colour film, then as now, is expensive to make and to process.

The Germans got around this by shooting colour “in the field”, but distributing for “local consumption”, in black and white (generally).

Limited quantities of programmes made for EXPORT / third-party propaganda, were usually printed and released in colour: Plenty of room for a film lab on an aircraft carrier.

The US army was on a tighter budget and very little “official” colour footage appeared from them. A LOT of what can be seen today is from surviving images taken by “Uncle Sam’s Tourists” with their own 16mm (or VERY early Standard 8) Bell and Howell or similar cameras, loaded with early Kodachrome.

Now, back to the hardware in question.........

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