My Grandpa is aged 90 with dementia which has deteriorated rapidly. He lives in a home (UK) and they have a model of a Hawker Hurricane with a french flag on the tail. Ive Googled it and found that it is a british plane but i am not sure where the French flag comes in?
My Grandad served in the RAF after the war and he often points to it but he is confused about the french flag. I'd like to talk to him about it but i dont know much about the plane. Does anyone know why it has a french flag?
It would be amazing to understand some history about the plane so I can prompt his memory and we can discuss it.
It's not really the French flag painted on the tail. It's the RAF fin flash, done in British flag colors of red, white, and blue, like the circular roundel on the Hurricane's fuselage. Military planes wear fin flashes in national colors as another way of distinguishing friend from foe, just in case it isn't clear from the roundel.
For example, in the East Asia theater of World War II, RAF planes with their red roundels might be mistaken for Japanese planes bearing the red hinomaru, but from the fin flash you could tell which planes were British (for this reason RAF planes also started to use blue roundels when fighting the Japanese). It just happens to be a coincidence that Britain's flag colors are the same ones used by France, but French planes wore a fin flash in reverse order, bleu blanc rouge.
Sorry to hear about your grandfather's dementia, but it's great to chat about history with him. I hope this clears up the issue with the plane.