In a hangar at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia, in July 2024, a maintainer knelt beside the nose of an A-10C Thunderbolt II and peeled strips of masking tape off a row of white triangles. The teeth came up clean. Behind them, the eye had already been painted, and the muzzle of the GAU-8 sat where a throat would be. It is the most recognisable piece of military decoration on earth, and the 23rd Wing is the only unit in the United States Air Force allowed to wear it.

Almost everyone who sees it thinks of the Flying Tigers. That is not wrong, exactly. But the Flying Tigers did not invent the shark mouth. They were not even the second unit to use it. They were third in a chain that runs backwards through the Royal Air Force to the Luftwaffe, and then further back still, to a German two-seater in 1916 that its crews called a whale.

This is the nerd version of a story most people know only by its ending.

The Answer Nobody Expects: the Luftwaffe Wore It First

The Second World War shark mouth begins on a German heavy fighter. The Messerschmitt Bf 110 had two things almost no other aircraft of the period had: a long, blunt, whale-like nose with nothing mounted on it, and two engines far enough outboard that the nose read as a single solid mass. Paint a mouth on that and it does not look like decoration. It looks like a face.

Zerstörergeschwader 76 did exactly that. Its II. Gruppe wore the marking widely enough that the unit picked up the nickname Haifischgruppe — shark group. Photographs put shark-mouthed ZG 76 machines over the Channel in 1940, and the unit carried the marking through the Balkans, Greece and Crete in 1941.

Pinning down the first application to a particular month is not possible from the surviving record, and anyone who tells you otherwise is repeating a guess. What the photographs do establish beyond argument is the sequence: German aircraft were flying with shark mouths before any Allied unit adopted one.

Before That: a Whale Called Walfisch

The Luftwaffe was not starting from nothing either. The motif had a First World War ancestry that most retellings skip entirely.

The LFG Roland C.II was a German two-seater with a deep, rounded, monocoque fuselage that filled the gap between the wings. Crews called it the Walfisch — whale — and at least one of them decided to lean into the joke. A Roland C.II flown by Leutnant Richard Seibert and Hauptmann Pfleger of Bavarian Feldfliegerabteilung 5 carried eyes and a toothed mouth on the Western Front in the autumn of 1916. It is the earliest well-documented shark mouth in aviation. Seibert was killed a few months later.

There were others. An AEG G.IV bomber photographed in 1918 wore one. So, by several accounts, did a British Sopwith Dolphin. Go back further and you reach the beginnings of nose art itself: 1913 is the year usually cited, either for a sea monster painted on an Italian flying boat or for a Donnet-Levêque flying boat called Flygfisken — the flying fish — operated by Carl Cederström at his flying school in Linköping, painted with scales and a mouth. The two claims are told interchangeably and neither is settled.

Then the idea went quiet for twenty years. What brought it back was not nostalgia. It was the shape of a new generation of aircraft.

No. 112 Squadron and the Design That Won

No. 112 Squadron RAF went to Greece in January 1941 and spent the campaign being comprehensively outclassed, first over Albania and then in the last defence of the Athens area. Among the aircraft they were up against were the Bf 110s of ZG 76. The squadron came out of Greece with very little except an idea.

In July 1941 it became one of the first squadrons in the world to go operational on the Curtiss Tomahawk, in Egypt. And the P-40 had the one feature the Bf 110 lacked: a deep radiator intake slung directly under the spinner, with a lower lip that already looked like a jaw. You did not have to invent a mouth for it. You had to notice one was already there.

What 112 Squadron produced in the summer of 1941 is the version everyone since has copied: eye above the exhaust stacks, upper teeth following the top line of the intake, lower teeth following the bottom, the whole thing wrapping the cowling rather than sitting flat on it. The Germans had a mouth. The British had a shark. The squadron motto, fittingly, was Swift in Destruction.

It is worth being precise about one thing that gets garbled constantly: the marking went onto Tomahawks, not Kittyhawks. The Kittyhawks did not arrive until December 1941, by which time the design was already six months old and on its way around the world.

The Magazine That Crossed the World

The route from Egypt to China ran through a missionary house in Burma.

In November 1941 the American Volunteer Group was working up at Toungoo. Charles Bond, a former Army pilot who had resigned his commission to join, was at a Baptist missionary’s house when he picked up a copy of the Illustrated Weekly of India dated 2 November 1941. Inside was a photograph of a 112 Squadron P-40 in North Africa.

Claire Chennault approved it for the whole group. Bond’s diary entry two weeks later, on 16 November, is the least heroic sentence in the entire Flying Tigers legend: Quite sore today. I suppose it was from pedaling into town for the paint to jazz up the planes. The most recognisable marking in military aviation was applied with paint fetched by bicycle.

When the first aircraft was finished, R. T. Smith — the pilot who would later take the famous colour photograph of Hell’s Angels in echelon — delivered the review that has followed the design for eighty-five years.

One honest caveat, because the nerddive demands it. Not every account agrees on the magazine. Several serious sources say the AVG saw the design in the Illustrated London News rather than the Illustrated Weekly of India. Bond’s own diary is the strongest evidence and it names the Indian weekly, which is why that version is given here — but the competing claim is old, widespread, and not obviously the product of sloppiness.

Why the Tigers Got the Credit Anyway

There is no mystery about why the AVG owns the shark mouth in popular memory, and it is not that they did it better. It is that they did it in front of an American audience that badly needed something to cheer about in the first winter of the Pacific war.

112 Squadron was one RAF unit among dozens in a desert campaign that was going badly. The AVG was a small group of Americans in China who, in roughly seven months of combat from mid-December 1941, were credited with 296 Japanese aircraft destroyed — bounties were eventually paid to 67 pilots — while losing ten men killed in action, seven of them in accidents rather than combat. Nineteen of its pilots became aces. Whatever the accounting arguments about those totals, and there are some, the newsreels had a story and the story had a face painted on the nose.

112 Squadron Kept It for Nineteen More Years

The squadron that actually designed the thing did not let it go. The shark mouth followed 112 through the Kittyhawk from December 1941, the Mustang III and IV from June 1944, and then straight into the jet age: Vampire FB5 from 1951, Canadair Sabre F4 from 1954, Hawker Hunter F4 from 1956.

It ended in 1960, when the squadron converted to Bristol Bloodhound surface-to-air missiles. There is no good place to paint a shark mouth on a Bloodhound. The squadron carried on as a missile unit until it disbanded in Cyprus on 1 July 1975 — nineteen years of teeth, then fifteen without.

The RAF has brought it back for anniversaries since. A Harrier GR9A wore one over Iraq in 2003, and a Panavia Tornade carried one in 2016 to mark twenty-five years since the 1991 Gulf War.

The Only Unit Allowed to Wear It Today

When the AVG was dissolved on 4 July 1942, the United States Army Air Forces stood up the 23rd Fighter Group in its place — constituted as the 23rd Pursuit Group (Interceptor) on 17 December 1941, redesignated on 15 May 1942, activated in China on the day the Tigers ceased to exist.

The USAF does not claim the AVG as formal lineage; the volunteers were civilians and the paperwork says so. What it does instead is more interesting. The 23rd Fighter Group’s aircraft are the only aircraft in the United States Air Force authorised to carry the shark teeth and the FT tail code. It is a marking held by permission, not by habit. Forty-eight A-10Cs at Moody Air Force Base wear it today, with F-35As due to begin replacing them from 2029.

In early April 2026 the wing revealed a heritage aircraft: an A-10C repainted by eleven airmen of the 23rd Maintenance Squadron in AVG markings, honouring Brigadier General David “Tex” Hill. The unit historian made the point better than any of the anniversary copy did.

It Never Stopped Spreading

Everything about the shark mouth should have made it a period piece. It is hand-painted, it is unofficial, it serves no tactical purpose whatsoever, and it survives in an era where every other marking on a combat aircraft has been shrunk, greyed out or deleted for signature reasons. It spread anyway, because it costs nothing and it does something no roundel does: it makes the machine look like it wants to be there.

A Swiss Messerschmitt Bf 109E wore shark teeth while Switzerland was officially neutral and, in 1940, occasionally shooting at the air force that had sold it the aircraft. Vintage Wings of Canada’s survey of the motif reproduces the photograph, though the unit is not firmly established in the sources available here.

No. 457 Squadron RAAF flew Spitfires as the Grey Nurse Squadron, named for the shark rather than the other way round. The F-4 Phantom II wore it. So did F-100s, F-94s and a long line of US Navy squadrons.

And it is current. A Ukrainian MiG-29 carrying live AGM-88 HARM anti-radiation missiles appeared online on 23 January 2024 wearing a high-visibility shark mouth — a marking with its own separate association with the radar-hunting mission going back to the Wild Weasels. It was not the first Ukrainian example either: a MiG-29 known as 25 White, of the 92nd Fighter Aviation Regiment at Vasylkiv, had worn one years before the invasion. The teeth have also turned up on HIMARS launch vehicles, which have no nose to speak of and got them anyway.

A hundred and ten years after a German crew drew a face on a whale-shaped biplane, the joke is still working.

Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, How the Curtiss P-40 Got That Wicked Shark Grin; Vintage Wings of Canada, BITE ME! The Story of the Shark Mouth; AirCorps Art; Imperial War Museum; Wikipedia entries for No. 112 Squadron RAF, Zerstörergeschwader 76, the 23rd Fighter Group and Nose Art; Vintage Aviation News; Air Force Times; The Aviationist