Botswanan Army 1970s DPM Camouflage Field Shirt

The Botswanan Army DPM field shirt is stamped 1973 inside the collar and cut to the same pattern Britain had been issuing since 1968, in ripstop cotton.

It features an open revere collar, a buttoned front placket, two chest pockets under pointed button down flaps, epaulettes at the shoulder and buttoned cuffs, with the facings and inner collar left in plain sand cotton. The disruptive pattern is the four colour woodland DPM — black, brown and green on sand — and the ripstop grid reads clearly across the whole shirt. Southern Africa took the British template wholesale in these years and kept it running long after Britain had moved on, which is why a 1973 date on a shirt of this cut is not the contradiction it looks like.

Stamped SMALL inside the collar. It has not been measured flat.