Austrian Camouflage: The “Pea” Battle Suit and the Alpine “Stone” Pattern

Austria has one of the least-known camouflage histories in Europe. In the 1950s the newly neutral republic equipped its army with an unusual pinkish “pea” pattern for combat uniforms, and printed a quite different grey-and-ochre design on the reverse of its shelter halves. The two are so often lumped together as “Austrian camouflage” that most people assume they must be the same design. They are not — one dressed the soldier’s suit, the other the reverse of his tent, and later the reverse of his helmet cover. This is the story of how a small alpine nation turned a German wartime idea into its own distinctive camouflage family.

Introduction: two patterns, one country

When people talk about “Austrian camouflage” they often mean one design. In fact, Austria fielded two quite different patterns in the same era, for different purposes. The Kampfanzug 57/59 combat suit used a “pea” pattern on the uniform. The Steintarn splinter pattern appeared on the reverse of the shelter half, the tent sheet that a soldier carried — and on the covers that soldiers cut from the same printed cloth for their helmets. Getting these two straight is the first step to understanding Austrian camouflage.

A frequent error is to describe the Austrian combat pattern as a derivative of the French lizard camouflage. It is not. The Austrian “pea” pattern is a descendent of the German Erbsenmuster, the pea-dot camouflage of the Second World War. The lizard is a French family. The two are unrelated.

1957: Austria returns to camouflage

Austria regained full independence in 1955 and declared permanent neutrality. A newly sovereign state needed a new army, and a new army needed uniforms. In 1957 the Austrian army introduced its first camouflage pattern since the war. It was the “pea” pattern, the Erbsentarn.

The design was influenced by the German Erbsenmuster of the Waffen-SS, but it was not based on the original German plans. It was an Austrian adaptation. The palette is striking: dark bordeaux, mauve and pea-green shapes and flecks on a pinkish-grey ground, with a dominant rose, mauve and lilac effect. Among the soldiers it went by the nickname Fleckerlteppich — roughly, “patchwork quilt” — and sometimes Fleckerlpyjama, “patchwork pyjama”. (The designation K4 refers not to the pattern but to the combat uniform itself — the Kampfanzug 1957/59 — although collectors sometimes misapply it to the design.)

The pea-pattern uniform was the Kampfanzug 1957 and the Kampfanzug 1959, a two-piece suit of a big over-jacket (Tarnjacke) and over-trousers (Tarnhose). The standard combat cut and several parka styles were produced; collectors also record tank-crew and parachute variants. The print itself went through two versions. The first, from 1957, used a keyed, inverted cluster layout; a second version, introduced at some point between 1961 and 1966, kept the design but inserted a band of additional shapes that broke the inversion. That second print then ran essentially unchanged until around 1976.

The Steintarn: the stone pattern of the tent sheet and the helmet cover

While the soldier’s uniform was the pea pattern, the shelter half told a different story. The Austrian Zeltbahn, or tent sheet, was printed with two different designs, one on each face: the pea pattern on one side and a very different design on the other. That reverse side is the Steintarn, the “stone” pattern — and because the cloth was reversible, so was the kit cut from it.

The Steintarn was never a uniform pattern. It is a splinter-family design: grey and ochre shapes over a tan ground, with grey “rain streaks” overprinted across the print. Where the wartime German patterns use hard, angular splinters, the Steintarn’s fields read as soft, rounded blotches with broken, stepped edges. In 1962 the Austrian army introduced a four-colour variant of the West German BGS Sumpftarn for tents in the Alpine regions — taking over the German shaping and swapping the beige-brown for mid-grey and the red-browns for olive green — and that the pattern the Austrians called Steintarn stayed in use until 1978. The design derives from the Sumpfmuster, the “marsh” pattern of the German Wehrmacht: grey and ochre splinter shapes on a tan background with grey rain streaks. It reads well against rock and scree, and German specialist reporting on the pattern is blunt about why it was worth keeping: in rocky terrain, it works beautifully.

The Austrian shelter half was made from the late 1950s to about 1980, printed pea on one face and Steintarn on the other. Soldiers did not leave the Steintarn on the tent. The cloth was reversible, so the reverse print could be turned outward on anything made from it — and the item most often made from it was a helmet cover. Surviving examples sold today as Austrian surplus are reversible covers with an elasticated hem and a foliage net, printed with the pea pattern on one face and the Steintarn splinter on the other, cut for the Austrian M1-type steel helmet. Whether that cover was an official issue item or was made from the tent sheet by the troops is not settled; either way, the Steintarn travelled from the tent to the helmet.

The pattern has since travelled further. In 2017 a helmet cover in Steintarn was hand-cut from decommissioned Austrian Zeltbahnen for the Ops-Core Sentry XP helmet worn by an Austrian contingent at the tri-national mountain exercise Common Challenge in Montenegro, with the unit’s saddlery doing the sewing — old tent sheets, recovered from training stores, turned back into camouflage. And as with most long-lived screen-printed designs, the Steintarn was printed in more than one run: Two prints of the pattern have been recorded, the later one adding a band of new shapes to the repeat. The two are close enough that they are usually told apart by studying the print itself, not by any marking on the cloth.

The end of the pea era

The pea pattern was a fixture for over two decades. Yet it was phased out in the late 1970s, in favour of plain olive-green uniforms (the pattern is usually dated to 1957–1978), and reservists continued to wear the Fleckerlteppich until they were retired. The Austrian army then spent the next decades largely in solid olive, and it was not until the 2010s and 2020s that it returned to camouflage for regular troops.

Modern Austria has since gone further than most of its neighbours, but that is a separate story. In 2008 the Ministry of Defence introduced pixelated trial patterns — a temperate, a desert, and a third version — for the Jagdkommando special forces; none was officially adopted; in 2017 the army announced a new national six-colour organic camouflage for the whole Bundesheer, and from 2019 a digital four-colour desert pattern went to personnel in arid zones. Those are modern Austrian designs in their own right — worth an article of their own, and not part of the Zeltbahn and pea-suit history that this piece covers.

Why Austrian camouflage matters

Austrian camouflage matters because it is a compact lesson in how camouflage can be built for a specific environment, and how easily two very different designs can be conflated. The pea-pattern battle suit was a European uniform design; the Steintarn’s grey-and-ochre splinter reads well against rock and scree and has come to be associated with Austria’s alpine terrain, and the German-language record does tie its introduction to tents in the Alpine regions. They were made by the same army, at the same time, for different jobs.

It is also a story of continuity. The Austrian army went from a German-inspired pea pattern in the 1950s, to decades of plain olive, to a new national six-colour camouflage in the 2010s. Along the way, one of its most distinctive and least-known designs — the Steintarn — went from the reverse face of a tent sheet, to the outside of a soldier’s helmet, to a striking pattern that still turns heads today.

Explore Austrian camouflage on MegaCamo

MegaCamo’s Austrian Steintarn collection brings this alpine splinter to modern apparel, made to order. The related Kampfanzug 57-59 and wider Austria country page gather the full national range.