11. Artists Painted Pin-Up Girls On the Noses of Bombers
It might sound strange to think that men wanted pin-up girls painted on their planes that were dropping bombs to kill people, but that’s exactly what happened during World War II. Even though it sounds like a strange paradox, it apparently got men’s blood pumping, and it helped them to get excited about going into battle. Many of them wanted to stay alive long enough to go home and be with a woman again some day.
One “nose artist” named Don Allen told the BBC that many of the soldiers requested paintings of women who were totally nude, but he refused to do so, because it was personally against his morals. But that doesn’t mean other artists were unwilling. Plenty of bombers had women who were completely nude. Others were in the pin-up style where the women were scantily clad, their private parts were always covered up. Later critics would say that many of these artists were not exactly classically trained, to the proportions of the women were not realistic to real life.