AIUI, in NATO and Western circles it’s typical for militaries to refer to friendly forces as “blue” and hostile forces as “red.” And I wonder if, in militaries like Russia’s or China’s or other “hostile” countries (hostile from a Western perspective,) if they also think of friendlies as blues and hostiles as reds? Or maybe they have a tradition of labeling friendlies as red and hostiles as blue?
It is my limited understanding that Russian culture has a very, very strong positive association with red, so they might well “paint” friendlies as red and enemies as some other color.
In Chinese culture, red is associated with luck and, if I recall, money, prosperity, and other good things. So, again, they might well have red=friendly.
But I don’t really know for sure.
IIRC, captured maps in Vietnam had the Vietnamese labeled themselves as Blue and the Americans as Red.
Here are examples, albeit from official history type sources not actual field maps.
This map of the Soviet 1943 fall offensives on the Eastern Front show them as red, Germans as blue:
from the collection:
http://www.rkka.ru/maps1943.htm
This map of the Chinese Peoples Volunteers’ offensive in late 1950 in North Korea shows them as red, UN forces as blue or black:
from article:
OTOH Japan is a Sinic culture and the map of the Imperial Army’s October 1942 attack on Henderson Field, Guadalcanal, in the map packet for Senshi Sosho (the Japanese official history of the Pacific War) vol 28, shows the IJA as blue and the US Marine defense line as red (no link).
And the maps in the Nationalist Chinese official history of 1937-45 war show the Japanese as red, Chinese as blue/black. So to the extent it was or is widespread for the PLA to show itself as red on maps, that might be Communism more than Chinese culture.
The Soviet flag was red …
Britain and the CommonWealth countries used to use red for friendly (since they were the Redcoats) and blue for hostile (since they didn’t like France). Sometime after WW2 they switched to blue-friendly, red-hostile presumably to fit in with NATO. Russia used blue-friendly, red-hostile until Soviet Union took over, where the Red Army used red-friendly, blue hostile. I’m not sure if they’ve changed back.
Here’s an illustration from Fortune magazine in 1942. The good guys were red, the bad guys were black and everybody else was yellow.
Last I heard, China’s training OPFOR is “Blue Force,” as (according to at least one article) “Red is the ‘friendly’ color in China.”
There’s a bit of a clue in the name “Red Army”, which wasn’t a nickname; it was the official name of the military component of the Soviet defence forces.
Off-topic, but that illustration is a perfect example that all maps distort. The northern projection (IIRC the proper name) makes Australia look bigger than the USSR. :eek: It isn’t. (Wasn’t? No USSR anymore.) It isn’t even bigger than the United States.
Thanks for the responses everyone. Interesting. I’d had thought that red is universally regarded as a warning/threat color while cooler colors, such as blue and green, are regarded as friendly.
That notion would have interesting implications for the red state/blue state descriptors in the US, wouldn’t it?
Well, apart from anything else: the Red Army was the Bolshevik Army preceding the USSR’s armed forces.
Like the White Army ( no doubt named from White being the Royalist colour: although only half the Whites in the Civil War were monarchists: most of those commanders who were disloyal fancying their own chances as ruler of a new democratic state or in other words Supreme Leader ) the Red Army was based on inherited parts of the Russian Army owned by the Czars.
I’ve seen often enough that Red Square should actually be ‘Beautiful Square’, so either the Ruskis think of it as: ‘Beautiful Army’; or they correlate Red with Beauty.
As to the general discussion I once saw on late night television a puzzling and deeply subtle American indie film where in LA two gangs were battling it out, with plenty of that introspective angst-filled speculation gang members are known for ( 'Why are we doing this ?’ 'Why are we acting this way ?’ ) before wiping each other out in full futile tragedy.
I would hesitate to accuse anyone of **Didacticism, **but the only clue as to the MESSAGE was that the gangs were the Blues and the Reds.
I recently read a complaint on Facebook by a conservative to precisely that effect - “why is the GOP the red party when red is more associated with Communism, and is also a more threatening color?”
The current Red State/Blue State thing is an artifact of the close-run 2000 US election and the decision by TV networks to use blue for the Democrats. I don’t know if this was the case in any prior US elections, but a conservative friend remembers the 1984 Reagan landslide being depicted on TV election returns as a sea of “blue” states for the Republicans.
My impression is that red is more typically associated with the left because communists/socialists adopted the color red (blood of the people? not going to research now). And e.g. in Britain the Tories are still blue and Labour is red.
Don’t forget in the wars that followed the Russian Revolution there were armies that flew my favorite color–the Black Flag of anarchy.
Considering the current allegations about a Trump/Putin alliance or something, calling the GOP the red party might be quite appropriate.
The colour red was associated with socialism long before the Bolsheviks came along.
From memory, Jacobins in revolutionary France adopted red as their colour to symbolise the blood of martyrs of the revolution, and the red=left correlation has subsisted ever since. A red flag was flown by the Paris Commune in 1871, and was adopted as the symbol of the British Labour Party on its foundation in 1900. (The symbol is now a red rose, but the party anthem is still The Red Flag). The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, founded in 1899, also used the red flag as their symbol; any association in Russian between “red” and “beautiful” was probably a happy bonus, as far as they were concerned. The Bolsheviks emerged as a faction of this party and this, I don’t doubt, is how they acquired red as their characteristic colour. Similarly the Red Army.
The Tories inherited that from their ancestors the Whigs ( Whigs split into two constitutionalist parties around 1810: every main politician was a Whig from the death of Lord Bolingbroke and the first Tory ‘party’ in the earlier 1700s ). Charles James Fox — leader, but like most of them running his own faction in the Whigs — chose the famous colour pair ‘Buff & Blue’, partly at least as a compliment to the American Rebels ( also because soldiers wore buffcoats in the 1640s ). I suppose they could have selected Primrose, as it was ( probably erroneously ) believed that Disraeli loved primroses as his favourite flower.
There was also the Green Flag, sometimes Green/Black, of the Greens. No environmentalists they, just peasants who hated [del]everybody[/del] both sides, like the wretched [ English ] Clubmen of the War of the Three Kingdoms.
For some reason I rather think Petliura’s mob had green flags, but can find no instant evidence.
.
The Indian Army uses yellow for their own forces IIRC. I think Pakistan uses yellow for India and red/blue/green/whatever the map printer felt like for their own forces.
Generally, red is associated with ‘hostiles’ because it is the color of blood.
But this can be overridden by historic reasons (Russia/socialism liking red) and cultural reasons (China associating red with good luck).
And if red is used for the enemy, our side would be a cooler, opposite color, like blue or green.