In the autumn of 1940, a young man from Iowa or California or Brooklyn would stand at a Canadian train station with a suitcase and a lie ready on his lips. He was not, officially, going to war. His government had made that illegal. Joining the armed forces of a nation at war meant a fine, prison, and the loss of the American citizenship he had been born with. And yet across the border, in the grey skies over England, the Luftwaffe was trying to break a country, and there were aeroplanes that needed pilots.

So he went anyway. He was one of several hundred Americans who, between the fall of France and the attack on Pearl Harbor, quietly slipped north to join the Royal Canadian Air Force or the RAF. The RAF decided to gather the acceptable ones into units of their own. They called them the Eagle Squadrons.

How three squadrons came to be

The machinery behind the Eagles was almost as colourful as the men. A wealthy American named Charles Sweeny lobbied the British government to create an American squadron and helped fund the pipeline that carried recruits to Britain. In Canada, the World War I ace Billy Bishop worked with the artist Clayton Knight to run the Clayton Knight Committee, which processed thousands of American applications.

The first Eagle Squadron, No. 71, formed at RAF Church Fenton in September 1940 and became operational in February 1941. It was joined by No. 121 Squadron in May 1941 and No. 133 Squadron that July. Each pilot wore an RAF uniform with a distinctive patch: a white eagle flanked by the letters ES.

Hurricanes, then Spitfires, then the long summer of sweeps

The Eagles learned their trade the hard way. They began on Hawker Hurricanes, flying convoy patrols over cold coastal water, then graduated to the Supermarine Spitfire — first the Mk II, then the superb Mk V. By 1942 all three units were flying offensive sweeps and bomber escorts over occupied France, trading blows with Messerschmitt Bf 109s and the fearsome Focke-Wulf Fw 190.

There were early triumphs. On 21 July 1941, Pilot Officer William R. Dunn of 71 Squadron destroyed a Bf 109 and would go on to be credited as the first American ace of the war in Europe. There were also grievous losses. On 26 September 1942, disaster struck 133 Squadron near Morlaix: blown off course in heavy cloud and running out of fuel, eleven of its twelve new Spitfires were lost in a single mission.

A note on Billy Fiske, and the ghost of the Lafayette Escadrille

It is worth clearing up two things the Eagle Squadrons often get tangled with. The famous American pilot Billy Fiske — sometimes called one of the first Americans to die in the Battle of Britain — was not an Eagle Squadron pilot. He flew with No. 601 Squadron RAF and was mortally wounded in August 1940, before the first Eagle unit had truly taken shape.

And the Eagles were not the Lafayette Escadrille. That earlier band of American volunteers flew for France in the First World War, a generation before, and had helped seed the very idea that Americans might fight in another nation’s skies. The Eagles were their spiritual heirs, but their war was a different one entirely.

Becoming the Fourth

When news of Pearl Harbor reached England, most of the Eagles wanted to fight for their own flag at once. It took until 29 September 1942 for the transfer to happen. On that day the three squadrons left the RAF and became the 4th Fighter Group of the US Army Air Forces’ Eighth Air Force. Nos. 71, 121 and 133 became the 334th, 335th and 336th Fighter Squadrons, moving across as complete units.

They kept their Spitfires at first, converting to P-47 Thunderbolts and eventually to the long-legged P-51 Mustang. Men like Chesley ‘Pete’ Peterson and Don Blakeslee carried their experience into the great air battles over Germany. Through it all, by special order, the former Eagles were allowed to wear their RAF wings on their American tunics — a small, stubborn tribute to where they had learned to fight.

Why they went

Ask the Eagles why they crossed the ocean and you got a hundred honest, unromantic answers. Some came for the flying, plain and simple. Some came because a country they admired was in trouble.

By the end, 77 American and 5 British members of the Eagle Squadrons had been killed, and the units claimed dozens of German aircraft destroyed. Today their names are engraved on the Eagle Squadrons Memorial in London’s Grosvenor Square — young men who answered a war before their own nation did, and who flew Spitfires with an eagle on their shoulder.

Sources: Wikipedia (Eagle Squadrons); American Battle Monuments Commission.