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My wife Liz was a little girl at the end of the second world war in Germany. She always explain to me that she actually saw an airplane with a sharks mouth painted on the front while it was making a strafing run right outside of her house. For years I thought this might be one of those long term memory things. After all, the only airplane I knew of painted this way was the P-40 Warhawk and those where primarily used in the pacific theater not Europe. However then she gave me this big beautiful airplane I felt that I just had to research this matter a little more.
After some research I found that towards the end of the war, the United States had an abundance of the P-40N model Warhawks. So rather than destroy then many they were sold to our allies such as the USSR, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Britain. The United Kingdom received 586 of the Warhawks and were designated the Kittyhawk. Although the RAF evaluated the P40Ns in the United Kingdom, they were employed solely abroad. One unit of the
RAF however, did paint their Kittyhawks with the nose art work we associate the P-40 today.
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