About 150 years before the first Yank ever thought of leaving home to join the RAF, French writer and observer Jean de Crèvecoeur spent a good deal of time and effort traveling throughout the United States trying to figure out exactly what an American was. After much travel and even more thought, he divided Americans mainly into two categories: the industrious farmer and the uncivilized frontiersman.

According to Crèvecoeur, the farmer was hard working, sociable, responsible, family orientated, and had a sense of community. But the frontiersman, a fellow Crèvecoeur did not have much use for, was a loner: footloose and antisocial with no respect for law and order.

What Fighter Command wound up with was a squadron of Crèvecoeur's wild frontiersmen. Which should not have come as any great surprise—when restless young men decide to run away from home, they do not run away to become farmers. “They run away,” according to one writer, “to become romantic isolates, lone riders who slit their eyes against steely distances and loosen their carbines.” In other words, they become fighter pilots.1

There were some in 71 Squadron who would have met with Crevecoeur's approval, as well as Fighter Command's. Gus Daymond joined the RAF at age nineteen because of a “sophomoric, but genuine, sense of social consciousness.”² He had been working as a makeup man in Hollywood, which had a large Jewish community. “People on film sets used to listen to Hitler's speeches between takes. We were immensely concerned and there was an atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Well, I went tearing off to do my stuff.”

But many more had motives that were a good deal less idealistic than Gus Daymond's. An Essex woman asked the Eagles why they had come to England, “expecting to hear about the defence of the Mother Country, and all that.”³ Instead, “this one told me he was browned off at his wife, that one was browned off at his girl, a third was in debt.” Of course, a lot of this was just a front—most of the young pilots were not used to expressing their feelings and would not have told anyone that they were fighting for the mother country even if it happened to be true. But a lot of the “footloose” explanation had more than a grain of truth in it.

Fighter Command and the Air Ministry saw the situation as worse than it really was. They saw the Eagles as a collection of rugged individualists who could never make a fighting unit, even if they tried. The Eagles were a crew of primitive cowboys who grew up with too much freedom, and they would never be willing or able to learn discipline.

Actually, most of the Yanks had already found out exactly how far they could push their “free and independent” act. They knew that some of their squadron mates had been dismissed from the Eagle Squadron and sent home. Some had left for personal reasons; a few, because they thought they should be getting higher pay; but others had been discharged from the RAF because they had been judged “unsuitable” as fighter pilots—mostly because of lack of discipline. There was no punishment involved; their service records were simply marked “returned home.” After all the trouble they had gone through to reach England, no one wanted to be sent back to the States. Also, they heard about what happened to Mike Kolendorski when he failed to obey orders. They had no desire to be killed, either.

In short, the wild Yanks decided to learn discipline because they knew they had to. On the ground, they could still be cowboys and hell-raisers. But in the air, they realized that their lives depended upon paying attention to their flight leader. There is nothing like the fear of death to make a fellow more conservative. Even Jean de Crèvecoeur would have agreed with that.

An RAF squadron consisted of twelve airplanes, but to keep at full strength about eighteen were actually needed. Airplanes were always having things go wrong with them, especially high-performance fighters—overheated engines, bad radios, jammed guns, battle damage. Spares always had to be brought up as replacements.

Normally, three squadrons operated out of an aerodrome, forming a “wing.” The North Weald Wing was made up of 71 (Eagle) Squadron, 111 Squadron, and 222 Squadron. Along with the two other squadrons, the Eagles were frequently assigned to escort bombers on raids against targets in northern France. They also took part in fighter sweeps, flying low over enemy territory in an attempt to entice the Luftwaffe to come up and fight.

On June 26, all twelve fighters of 71 Squadron “carried out Bomber Escorts three times during the day,” according to the squadron logbook. The last Hurricane returned to North Weald at 11:35 p.m., with no losses due to enemy action. This was typical for the first ten days at North Weald; nothing much happened.

The routine had not changed very much from Kirton-in-Lindsey. Instead of flying convoy patrols over the North Sea, the Eagles were escorting bombers across the Channel. It seemed that they had only exchanged one dull routine for another. But on July 2, the dull routine ended—courtesy of the Luftwaffe.

A force of twelve bombers was sent to bomb the Lille electric power station; 71 Squadron was one of the fighter units assigned to protect them. Going to Lille meant an encounter with the famous Jagdgeschwader 26, the “Abbeville Boys,” who had nine squadrons of Messerschmitt Bf 109s based at several airfields in the area. JG 26, commanded by Adolf Galland, was generally considered the elite of German fighter units. Galland alone had seventy enemy aircraft destroyed to his credit. The Abbeville Boys were not about to let an enemy formation go unchallenged.

Over Lille, the RAF formation quickly found itself under attack by many Bf 109s. It immediately became apparent that this particular sortie was going to be a far cry from flying convoy patrols. The first Eagle Squadron pilot to shoot down an enemy aircraft was Pilot Officer William Dunn, who destroyed a Bf 109 at 12:35 p.m. Five minutes later, Pilot Officer Gus Daymond got the squadron's second Messerschmitt. He shot away the Bf 109’s right aileron; the pilot jettisoned the canopy, bailed out, and “just seemed to float out of his machine.”4 The squadron leader, Henry “Paddy” Woodhouse (who had replaced Bill Taylor in June), also accounted for a Bf 109.

Although Bill Dunn got the squadron's first kill, the press and news media reported that it had been Gus Daymond. Bill Dunn was not happy about this error. He thought that politics and favoritism were behind it, and he especially credits the oversight to the squadron's intelligence officer, J. Roland “Robbie” Robinson. Robinson was a member of Parliament, had contact with a good many influential people in London, and would later become Lord Martonmere. Dunn thought that Robinson always chose his friends, his fair-haired clique, for promotions and awards at the expense of everyone else. It was not the last time that Dunn would feel slighted.

At the moment, though, there were other things to worry about. On July 6, the squadron was given another escort assignment. A flight of RAF bombers were going near Lille again, and 71 Squadron had another brush with the Abbeville Boys. Gus Daymond shot down a Bf 109 in the resulting fight. Bill Dunn was credited with a half-kill, sharing a Bf 109 with a Polish pilot from 306 Squadron.

Actual combat came as a nasty shock to some of the Eagles. They realized they would be doing their share of shooting at the Germans, but it somehow never occurred to them that they would be firing live ammunition—real bullets—at the enemy, or that German pilots were living, breathing human beings who could be killed.

One of Gus Daymond's first encounters with the enemy came when 71 Squadron was flying with a Polish squadron. Over his earphones, Daymond heard a “terrific quacking” from the Poles; they had been jumped by a flight of Bf 109s. At first, they called to each other in English. But after a few minutes, they “blew their gaskets and began to garble-garble among themselves in Polish, and we didn't know what the hell was happening.”5

Daymond looked all over the sky, trying to figure out what was going on. He spotted a Bf 109 going down, with a Pole chasing it and “shooting it into mighty small pieces.”⁶ The Pole stayed right behind the German all the way down and kept on shooting at the Messerschmitt and “the poor guy inside it.” For the first time, it dawned on Daymond that he was in the middle of a real war and that “these guys were really playing for keeps.”

Throughout the month of July, an unfriendly rivalry developed between Bill Dunn and Gus Daymond. The contest was to see who could destroy the most enemy airplanes, and the tone was not cordial. The lead changed hands several times—Dunn took a half-plane lead when he shared the Bf 109 with the Polish squadron on July 6. Daymond then shot down a Bf 109, which then gave him a half-plane lead. Then Dunn moved ahead again when he destroyed another Bf 109 near Lille. By August 10, Dunn was ahead: three and a half to Daymond's three.

In a publicity photo, Red Tobin and other pilots of 71 Squadron “scramble” for reporters and photographers. The original caption for this photo is: “The Eagle Squadron is ready for action: The American Eagle Squadron is now an operational squadron.” Actually, 71 Squadron took a lot longer to become operational than Fighter Command had expected. (Courtesy of the National Museum of the United States Air Force®.)

The magazine Flight, in its August 15 edition, mentioned: “In their first month as a front-line squadron of RAF Fighter Command, pilots of the American Eagle Squadron have shot down six German aeroplanes—five fighters and a Do 17 bomber.”7 The article went on to say that “one pilot has bagged two of the fighters.” The magazine got its figures wrong and forgot to mention the Bf 109 shot down by S/L Woodhouse, but at least this sort of coverage was an improvement over the glamour-boy publicity that the squadron usually received.

The two veteran pilots from 609 Squadron, Red Tobin and Andy Mamedoff, were not having the same success as Dunn and Daymond. Since joining the Eagle Squadron, neither had accounted for any enemy aircraft destroyed. Andy Mamedoff could never seem to find the enemy. As 71 Squadron's historian put it, “on the day Andy was flying over the Channel, the big fight was over France; when he went over France, the fight was somewhere over the Channel.”8

Red Tobin faced the same situation, coming back empty handed after every sortie. At night, in the officers’ mess, the always garrulous Red would regale the rest of the pilots with stories about his time with 609 Squadron and in l’Armee de l’Air. Some of the things were about the grim summer of the year before, when RAF sector airfields were under almost daily attack by the Luftwaffe. During the attack on Middle Wallop Aerodrome, Red had seen one man with his foot blown off and another with his arms blown off “up to the shoulder blades.”⁹ Most stories had a dose of humor, even though no one laughed at the time of the incident.

One story that was told over and over was of the time that Red, Andy Mamedoff, and Shorty Keough tried to escape from France by stealing a French airplane. Two Czech pilots came up with that particular idea. The French army was quickly disintegrating, and everybody kept saying that the Germans would be arriving any day. “Just what would happen if we were taken prisoners we didn't know,” Tobin said, “but we weren't interested in finding out.”¹⁰

So the two Czechs decided that the best way to get out of France would be to borrow an airplane from l’Armee—without asking permission. The plan sounded simple enough: take a plane and fly to England. It seemed like a good idea. But the French sentries did not think much of it. They thought the five pilots were German paratroopers and started shooting. The two Czech pilots were killed. Tobin, Mamedoff, and Keough managed to get away.

The three Americans now had no choice but to join the army of French refugees that were heading toward Spain. At the port of Saint Jean-de-Luz, they were lucky enough to board the steamer Baron Nairn, which was bound for England. Their plan to escape the German army worked, but just barely—two hours after Baron Nairn sailed, the Germans arrived at Saint Jean-de-Luz. Red's reaction to every predicament was that it was all a huge joke—a million laughs, as he used to say.

Both Red and Andy Mamedoff were frequently questioned about the good points and bad points of the Hurricane and the Spitfire—a subject of more immediate interest, since 71 Squadron was due to have its Hurricanes replaced by the renowned Spitfire “any day.” Or at least that was what everybody said. The Eagles also asked the pilots of the two British squadrons at North Weald about the differences between the Spitfire and Hurricane. Both 111 and 222 Squadron had played highly active roles in the Battle of Britain, and the Eagles were more than interested in what they had to say. The only trouble was that they could not always understand what the British pilots were saying. It came as a surprise to learn that British English and American English are two different languages—related to each other, but still different.

“One thing American visitors to Britain are seldom warned about is the ‘language problem,’” commented a British authority, who went on to say that even the “most mundane negotiation, the simplest attempt at communication with the natives, can lead to unutterable confusion.”11 A columnist from the New York Herald Tribune agreed, observing that “English is a vast, beautiful but improbable language that resembles American…just enough to throw you off.”¹²

Byron Kennerly found this out just after he arrived in England. He remarked to his group captain that a nearby Hurricane looked like a “powerful ship.”¹³ The group captain took the opportunity to give the ignorant Yank a lesson in English usage. “Kennerly…for centuries the British have been seamen,” he pointed out. “To us, a ship is still a ship. Most of us wouldn't know what you meant if you called an aircraft a ship.”

“I was having a tough time learning the English language,” Kennerly admitted. Bob Raymond, the Kansas native who wound up in Bomber Command, found himself in the same predicament. “Cannot understand half of the English talk yet,” he wrote in his diary. “It is very much like a foreign language.”14

On top of everything else, the Yanks found out that the RAF had a language all of its own. It was very colorful and self-consciously vivid. To take another fellow's girl away from him was to “bird-dog” him. To have sex was a “prang.” (To crash an airplane was also a “prang.”) There were probably hundreds of other useful phrases to be learned, as well.

The Americans picked up the RAF slang with no trouble at all. Maybe it was because it was so lively and not all that dissimilar to American slang. It did not take long before the Yanks were talking about their “kite” (airplane), a pilot who “bought it” (was killed), or a “piece of cake” (anything easy, an enemy kill or a girl). They were soon also saying things like “good show” and “bad show” and using a number of other expressions that they had not picked up in Dallas, Texas or Jersey City.

The day finally came, after weeks of talk, for 71 Squadron to trade in their Hurricane Mark IIs for Spitfires. The squadron flew their Hurricanes to Kenley to pick up their Spitfire Mark II-As. (These were actually another squadron's castoffs. That squadron was getting the new Mark V-B.) None of the Eagles had flown a Spitfire before, but that did not cause any worries. It was just a matter of skimming through the pilot's manual, taking a quick look at the cockpit and its controls and dials, and then starting the engine. Watching that first takeoff must have been quite a sight—Spitfires lunging into the air like drunkards, staggering all over the place until the pilots started to feel comfortable. The ground crews must have had quite a snappy little conversation afterwards about the crazy Yanks who could not even fly straight.

A popular topic of conversation—as soon as the Eagles learned to understand what the British pilots were saying—was which fighter was better, the Hurricane or the Spitfire. Everybody had their own opinion. Wing Commander Robert Stanford-Tuck said that the Spitfire was like “a fine thoroughbred racehorse, while the dear old Hurricane was rather like a heavy workhorse.”15 Both fighters had the same armament—eight .303 machine guns—but had few other features in common.

For attacking formations of bombers, the Hurricane had the advantage. It had better visibility and was much steadier for shooting. The Spitfire was “a slightly higher performance airplane—faster, better rate of climb, and very much more responsive to the controls.”¹⁶ In other words, each had its good points and its bad points. Or, as another pilot said, “the Spitfire and the Hurricane complimented each other.” The Spitfire's job was to engage enemy fighters, to draw the Messerschmitts away from the Dorniers and Heinkels. When the Bf 109s were out of position, the Hurricanes would then jump the bombers. That was the plan, at least, but things did not always work out that way in real life.

Most German pilots had more respect for the Spitfire than for the Hurricane. The standard wisecrack among Luftwaffe fighter pilots was that the Hurricane was “a nice little plane to shoot down.”¹⁷ As far as any direct comparison between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt was concerned, Wing Commander Stanford-Tuck thought the two planes were “virtual equal performers”; the Spitfire could out-turn the Messerschmitt, but they were “basically comparable.”

But among RAF pilots, the Spitfire versus Hurricane controversy went on and on, with no quarter given by either side. The argument was not always confined to the officers’ mess.

Shortly before the Battle of Britain began, a practice “air raid” was arranged between a Spitfire squadron and a Hurricane squadron. The Hurricanes were to make a mock bombing run over Kenley Aerodrome; 64 Squadron was to send six Spitfires to intercept the incoming “bombers.” It looked like a nice, easy practice drill on paper, but whoever planned the exercise did not reckon with the rivalry between the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots.

The drill began according to plan—the Spitfires patrolled above Kenley, and the Hurricanes showed up flying in “V” formation. But when the Spitfires dove to attack, the plan quickly fell apart. As soon as the Hurricane pilots saw their adversaries closing in from behind, they turned to meet their attackers—a highly un-bomberlike tactic. For the next several minutes, the two squadrons chased each other for miles in all directions. The strain of the aerial combat quickly wore down the pilots’ enthusiasm, and both squadrons landed after several minutes of wild aerobatics.

Nothing much was accomplished by this little drill. Nobody's skills at breaking up bomber formations were improved, and neither side could brag about a clear-cut victory over the other. But at least it gave the pilots something else to argue about.

Americans never realized how much the British resented the stubborn neutrality of the United States. Even if they had known, it would not have made any difference. The country was determined to stay out of the fighting, and did not really care how much the British objected.

Pilot Officer Arthur Donahue of 64 Squadron was constantly being asked when the United States was going to enter the war—“When is your country going to give us some help, America?”18 Donahue would answer, “I don't know. They've sent me, haven't they?” The RAF pilots wondered if this was supposed to help them or if this was part of a sabotage plan to give aid and comfort to the enemy.

By the early part of 1941, most Americans seemed fairly certain that it would only be a matter of time before they were drawn into the war. The majority—71 percent percent—now approved of sending aid to Britain.¹⁹ But the reasons for wanting to come to the assistance of the British were anything but unselfish and altruistic. One Londoner defined the American position of sending aid as, “Supply the British with arms and cash in order that they might fight our battle.” This opinion came a lot closer to the truth than many Americans would have cared to admit.

The official legislation that sent aid to Britain was House of Representatives bill number 1776: Lend-Lease (known as Reverse Lend-Lease in Britain). H.R. 1776 was subtitled, “A Bill: Further to Promote the Defense of the United States, and for Other Purposes,” which was signed into law on March 11, 1941. In less official language, the intent of Lend-Lease was to lease, lend, or sell war goods—anything from paper clips to fighter planes—“to any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States.”20

Regardless of American motives, Lend-Lease was met with enthusiasm in Britain. After Lend-Lease was announced, the British opinion of Americans improved dramatically. Even those who did not like Americans, and did not care who knew it, admitted that their feelings toward the United States had changed for the better because of Lend-Lease.

However, there was still a great deal of resentment over America's refusal to declare war on Germany. An opinion poll asked “average” Britons when they thought the United States would enter the war. Most of the replies were either pessimistic or sarcastic. People had various opinions on when the Americans would enter the war, ranging from: toward the end, just like in 1917; a month before the end; when they felt like it; and only when it became necessary.

They were right—the United States was not going to come in until necessary. “To the Americans war is a business, not an art,” wrote D. W. Brogan in The American Character. “They are not interested in moral victories but in victory.”²¹ If isolationist America could promote victory by providing the hardware of war—by becoming “the great arsenal of democracy,” to use Franklin D. Roosevelt's phrase—then that was what the country was going to do.

Americans also recalled the First World War, just as the British did. They saw themselves as having been taken advantage of and swindled and felt that they had nothing to show for their part in the war but a huge, uncollected debt, which the British had run up and then failed to repay. Many Americans were opposed to lending or leasing anything to the British until they paid back what they owed from the 1914–1918 war.

Another point, which was being overlooked by both the British and the Americans, was the fact that the United States was not ready to enter the war. Although over sixteen million men had registered for the first peacetime draft in American history, those draftees were a long way from becoming a trained army. And the US Army Air Force had no fighter planes that could hope to compete with the Luftwaffe's Messerschmitt Bf 109s—which the pilots of the Eagle Squadron would eventually find out for themselves.

Lend-Lease, which was passed by Congress in March 1941, helped to simplify Britain's war effort. But the event that really took the pressure off took place three months later, on June 22, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Adolf Hitler had the idea of overrunning Russia in a short, dramatic campaign, just as his armies had done in France the year before. Once he had overwhelmed Russia, he could then come back and finish off Britain at his leisure.

If Hitler had not attacked Russia, the Eagles would not have been so impressed by Red Tobin's stories of more than one hundred German aircraft that attacked southern England during the Battle of Britain—they would have been facing the same number of Luftwaffe fighters and bombers themselves in the summer of 1941. But by the spring of 1941, during preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, a major part of Germany's air strength had been transferred to Russia.

After Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin signed their famous nonaggression pact in August 1939, the Russians thought themselves safely out of the war. They had even sold oil to Germany, which had fueled the bombers that attacked London. Now, Russia would feel the main fury of the German military machine and its blitzkrieg tactics, and Britain would be given some much-needed breathing room.

In the eyes of many Britons, the Soviet Union was now Britain's main ally. The Yanks could remain as neutral as they damn well pleased. The Russian army, under Josef Stalin, would probably have the war won before the Americans got around to waking up. Even after the United States formally entered the war in December 1941, this point of view continued to enjoy an enormous amount of popularity. In April 1942, Secretary of State for Air Sir Archibald Sinclair said in a speech before the House of Commons, “Our two mightiest weapons are the Russian army and the RAF.”22 America's efforts, including Lend-Lease, were considered too small and insignificant to mention.

The word soon spread that Russia was also heavily dependent upon American Lend-Lease, including for the Red Army's supply of Sherman tanks. Still, the myth of the heroic Soviets, who were portrayed as noble and valiant in the face of the German onslaught, was preferred to the notion of the noncommittal Americans. The public was in love with the Soviet Union and everything about it. Frequent radio programs were broadcast about Russian history, and a special broadcast was given in honor of Josef Stalin's birthday. “America's far greater, and far less selfish, contribution to the common war effort was taken for granted,” according to a British historian.²³

To the British, especially of the upper and upper-middle class, the Americans came under criticism no matter what they did. They were still viewed as outsiders, though they were not true foreigners, like the French and the Spanish. The Americans were more like cousins to the British, in other words, which made them more likely to be criticized.