Airplane spotter
playing cards were a
deck of cards issued during
World War II to
soldiers, so while they
pissed away their free time
gambling away their paychecks, they might learn a thing or two about what
friendly and
enemy aircraft looked like, and hopefully could therefore tell whether that huge chunk of speeding
iron flying through the air was on your side or not before you could see the
markings on the side of the
fuselage. There surely must also be some men who
studied the cards
prodigously, intent on learning to identify every plane as soon as it was seen, and they may in fact have been quite
numerous.
But as far as good
logic goes, putting the
silhouettes on a
deck of cards was a stroke of genius. Not only is it something that
soldiers have been known to frequently use in their free time anyway, but it's an awful lot easier to carry a
deck of cards than a giant
chart or
poster, and easier to flip through than a little book, and has no
binding to ruin.