00:00Why are these military jets painted pink? Is this another example of the military gone woke?
00:06Well, no. And in fact, these spazzy paint jobs actually helped the allies defeat the Axis in
00:11the North African Front during World War II. The whole idea of a pink paint job is simple,
00:16camouflage. But when you think of camouflage, you probably think of something like this.
00:21Well, okay, this one just kind of looks cool and is actually useless, but maybe more like this.
00:26Or like this. So why pink? Well, let's take a time machine back to World War II for a moment.
00:33These are the originators of the pink vehicles, members of the British Long Range Desert Group,
00:38deployed against the Axis in North Africa during World War II. Desert warfare experts,
00:43they discovered something astonishing. Pink paint jobs provided camouflage in the desert under certain
00:49common conditions. There are conflicting stories for how this was discovered, with one version stating
00:54that a British aircraft went missing, resulting in search and rescue teams heading out in an
00:58attempt to locate it. When it was found, it was barely noticeable, as the blowing sand had scraped
01:04off most of its paint, revealing its pink undercoat underneath, which camouflaged into the desert
01:08atmosphere. Another version states more simply that an airbase once simply ran out of other kinds of
01:14paint, resulting in it painting its ground vehicles with only the pink undercoat, which they immediately
01:19noticed was more difficult to detect. Either way, the reason it works is simple. In the desert atmosphere,
01:25warmer colors of sunlight tend to scatter more easily due to the environmental conditions,
01:30which is why you get that warm hue in the desert horizon ranging from orange to pink. As a result,
01:36the pink color tends to blend in more easily in these environments, and this is particularly true
01:40at dusk and dawn. The first vehicles to purposely deploy this color scheme were vehicles of the British
01:46LRDG group, as well as the SAS, infamously the Pink Panthers. Its usage then expanded to fighters like
01:52the Spitfire and the P-40. But she did make a comeback. In the 1980s, the Royal Air Force decided
01:58to
01:59embrace its sassy side once again, deploying the paint job, called Desert Pink, to different aircraft
02:05such as the Tornado GR-4 and the Hercules cargo craft. Still useful in the era of precision radars?
02:11Hmm, probably not. They do look kind of cool, I guess.
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