USAAF Unit Identification Aircraft Markings - Overview

Overview

At the beginning of the war the USAAF was a small service in comparison to the air forces of the combatants fighting since 1939. Its initial deployments to the European and African theaters in 1942 involved relatively small numbers of fighter and bomber aircraft and no system of Group identification was used. Some aircraft were identified by numbers painted on their fuselage.

The USAAF quickly adopted the system used by the Royal Air Force to identify squadrons, using fuselage codes of two letters (later letter-numeral when squadrons became too numerous) to denote a squadron and a third single letter to identify the aircraft within the squadron. However by 1944 the USAAF in Europe had grown to nearly 60 groups of heavy bombers (240 squadrons) and thirty groups of fighters (90 squadrons), and this system became impractical in combat after the summer of 1943, when the first tail system appeared.

To facilitate control among thousands of bombers, the USAAF devised a system of aircraft tail markings to identify groups and wings. Both the Eighth and Fifteenth Air Forces used a system of large, readily-identifiable geometric symbols combined with alphanumerics to designate groups when all USAAF bombers were painted olive drab in color, but as unpainted ("natural metal finish") aircraft became policy after April 1944, the system in use became difficult to read because of glare and lack of contrast. The system then evolved gradually to one using large bands of color in conjunction with symbols, the symbols identifying the wing and the color the group.

The Twentieth Air Force, eventually operating 20 groups and 1,000 bombers, also adopted a tail identification system in 1945. The five numbered air forces fighting in the Pacific War also used tail markings, but unsystematically within the various air forces, as squadron identifiers.