Book Review: Yanks in the RAF
/Yanks in the RAF:
The squadron seemed to accept the Yank replacements without any sign of condescension, which is surprising. Number 609 was an Auxiliary squadron. Auxiliary pilots usually regarded members of the Volunteer Reserve – and all three Americans were with the Volunteer Reserve – as being of inferior social rank, if not absolutely subhuman.
(As Johnson relates, the standard joke in the airman ranks went: “A regular RAF officer was an officer trying to be a gentleman; an Auxiliary was a gentleman trying to be an officer, and a Volunteer Reserve was neither, trying to be both”)The subtlety, the sad valor of Johnson's story only hits the reader after these three men (and dozens like them) have been thoroughly and amusingly fleshed out: before the book's second chapter is over, we learn that “Red,” “Shorty,” and “Andy” were all killed while on active duty with the RAF. Johnson includes the information in the caption of a photo showing the three of them young and uniformed and smiling, and like a bolt shooting home, the reader is reminded that this was no lark; the reason the British air force so desperately needed men that it would accept American volunteers (many of whom were small-town barnstormers who lied about their qualifications) was because it was losing pilots to the Luftwaffe at an unsustainable rate. These Americans were signing up for some of the most dangerous fighting in the world.They were ahead of the curve of general sentiment in the US, although not in their new land. As Johnson points out, “All of Britain was unanimous when it came to US neutrality – everybody was angry and resentful over America's refusal to come to Britain's aid.” In time, the RAF had enough American volunteers to give them their own squadrons – the famed Eagle squadrons, and while the folks back home in America were still fence-sitting about getting entangled in another European war, the men in those squadrons were in the skies over Britain and the Channel, learning with desperate speed the ways of a much better-equipped enemy:
All three Eagle Squadrons were still learning that the Luftwaffe had quite a few nasty little tricks up its sleeve. One was a standard evasion maneuver, simple but effective. The pilot of a Bf 109 would roll the fighter over on its back and pull the stick until it was up against his stomach, putting the airplane in a full power dive. The Messerschmitt was powered by a Daimler-Benz fuel-injection engine, which allowed the German pilot to die away at full throttle any time he needed to break off combat. The Spitfire or Hurricane pilot did not have this luxury. His fighter's Rolls-Royce Merlin engine came equipped with a carburetor, which meant that it would stall momentarily if he pushed over into a power dive. In order to prevent his engine from stalling, the RAF pilot would have to perform a half-roll before diving, which let the Messerschmitt pull ahead of him and frequently allowed the enemy to get away.
Even now, a lifetime later, the surviving old pilots Johnson interviewed were reticent and sometimes even outright confused when asked what their motives had been for traveling thousands of miles to volunteer to fight in a war that was not yet America's. Some wanted adventure, others wanted the bonus money promised to fighter pilots, but Johnson's valuable research (there will surely never be a more approachable book on this subject) makes it clear that something else – as indefinable now as it was then – was often at work.Whatever that something was, it drew these men into a brief interval of such heroism as fables are made of. When America entered the war, those Yanks left the RAF to fly in their own planes, but here in Johnson's pages, they're up in Spitfires and Hurricanes one more time.