Breaking or skirting the law to avoid having to go to war is not exactly uncommon in American history. Breaking the law to get into war, on the other hand, is all but unheard-of, yet that is exactly what the intrepid subjects of this superb history did.
At the outbreak of war in 1939, it was illegal for American citizens to join the military service of a warring power. Hundreds of Americans, nevertheless, risked a $10,000 fine, imprisonment for several years and possible loss of citizenship to join the Canadian and British armed services, most notably Britain’s Royal Air Force.
They were young men obsessed with flying. Recruited by a former mercenary who had become a recruiter of mercenaries, the amiable and apparently honorable Charles Sweeny, a native of Salt Lake City, they did not care for whom they flew, as long as it wasn’t Germany.
There have been numerous books about “Yanks in the RAF.” Alex Kershaw’s “The Few” focuses on five of the eight Americans who fought in the Battle of Britain, the aerial combat from July 10 to Oct. 31, 1940, the battle that likely staved off Adolf Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain. Kershaw, an Englishman now living in the United States, has other acclaimed World War II histories to his credit (“The Bedford Boys,” “The Longest Winter”).
Three of the five men occupy center stage more often than the others: Eugene Quimby Tobin, of Los Angeles; Andrew Mamedoff, of Thompson, Conn.; and Vernon Charles Keough, of Brooklyn, all of whom got to Britain from France at the same time (June 25, 1940). The resolve, cheerfulness and high morale of the Britons impressed them mightily after being thoroughly frustrated by the bureaucracy, defeatism and chaos of France in collapse.
They were not, however, welcomed with open arms. U.S. Embassy officials, angry at their “jeopardizing neutrality,” ordered them to go home, and at first the RAF declined their services. Eventually, after Sweeny and a sympathetic member of parliament pulled strings, they were accepted and ended up in the same RAF squadron.
(Keough, known as Shorty, got in despite his stature being well under the RAF’s requirements. At 4 feet 10, he needed a leg-up to climb into his Spitfire and two cushions to sit on so he could reach the rudder bar.)
They were not the first. That honor belonged to William Meade Fiske III, the Brooklyn-born son of a wealthy banker and an Olympics bobsled champion of the 1930s. Handsome, dashing and fearless, he joined 601 Squadron, known as the Millionaires’ Squadron because so many of its members were scions of British wealth, in September 1939.
The fifth is Arthur Gerald Donahue. He grew up on a farm in southeastern Minnesota in the Depression and was taught to fly at a Winona airfield by a local pilot, Max Conrad.
For several weeks the situation looked desperate for the RAF. On one of the most intense days of aerial combat, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sat in an operations room watching the plotting board. Afterward, riding in a car with a cabinet official, he first uttered the words that a later address would make immortal: “Never in the field of conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”
But Britain had the advantage of radar’s early warning, and Germany’s decision to change targets from attacking RAF airfields to bombing London proved a disastrous mistake. On Aug. 17, Hitler called off the invasion.
Two days after that, 71 Eagle Squadron was formed, the first American unit in RAF history. Two other Eagle Squadrons were created; in time all three were folded into the U.S. Army Air Force.
Seven of the eight American pilots were killed either in the battle or before war’s end. In all, 244 U.S. citizens flew with Eagle Squadrons. None was prosecuted for breaking American neutrality laws.
The structure and pacing of “The Few” are excellent, following the time-tested path of tracking the activities of several personages, both well-known and obscure, at a given time. The author describes in vivid detail the deadly dogfights in the glorious summer skies of 1940.
This is one of the most affecting short histories I have read in many a month, a rare combination of objectivity concerning what happened and tribute to its subject, the brave fighter pilots. At an average age of 22, and for pay of $80 a month, many of them said that in flying for Britain in its hour of peril. they felt they had found a true calling.
Roger K. Miller, a newspaperman for many years, is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
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The Few
The American ‘Knights of the Air’ Who Risked Everything to Fight in the Battle of Britain
By Alex Kershaw
Da Capo, 319 pages, $26
