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Chocks away!
Sep. 19th, 2008 10:27 amSomething which soldiers have done since time immemorial is to decorate and personalise their machines of war. It my be against regulations to deface military property, but most commanders realise that for whatever reason; be it ownership or amusement or agression, such decoration is ueful for morale and they don't put a stop to it.
The male mind being what it is (and most soldiers are boys), such decorations tend to take one of two formats - either pretty girls (both the Enola Gay and the Memphis Belle were named after the girls painted on their fuselage), or agression and threat (such as Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers and their iconic Shark Mouth design). It's not just the Americans who acted this way either: the Red Baron was so named because he deliberately painted his entire plane red to draw attention to himself.
The recent Gulf War saw a resurgence in such decoration, expecially within the Air Forces. With so many pilots from different nations, it was inevitable that they would try to individualise themselves and stand out but whilst the images used by the US Air Force tended to be agressively patriotic, the British, in their usual half-arsed, piss-taking way, were, shall we say, less serious about such things:
And my personal favourite:
The male mind being what it is (and most soldiers are boys), such decorations tend to take one of two formats - either pretty girls (both the Enola Gay and the Memphis Belle were named after the girls painted on their fuselage), or agression and threat (such as Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers and their iconic Shark Mouth design). It's not just the Americans who acted this way either: the Red Baron was so named because he deliberately painted his entire plane red to draw attention to himself.
The recent Gulf War saw a resurgence in such decoration, expecially within the Air Forces. With so many pilots from different nations, it was inevitable that they would try to individualise themselves and stand out but whilst the images used by the US Air Force tended to be agressively patriotic, the British, in their usual half-arsed, piss-taking way, were, shall we say, less serious about such things:
And my personal favourite:
