People making fighters 1939-41

[Derek Jackson]

Is there any place from which some non state organizaton could have got fighters of a quality which would mean that they could have been of material assistance to Britain in the fall of 1940?

I am thinking of a time line in which the Nazis kept pressure on Fighter comand rather than terror bombing

[Fellatio Nelson]

There was a US volunteer squadron serving in the RAF - Eagle Squadron?? - in 1940 and a (little known) Home Guard unit formed of US residents living in London.

[Grey Wolf]

Wow, reality is always stranger than fiction. I'd like more info on these guys

Grey Wolf

[Thande]

There was a US volunteer squadron serving in the RAF - Eagle Squadron?? - in 1940 and a (little known) Home Guard unit formed of US residents living in London.

Wasn't that what Captain Jack was supposed to be in in the recent Doctor Who Blitz two-parter?

[Derek Jackson]

I knew about the Eagle Squadron. I believe that these guys were members of the RAF or Royal Canadian Air Force.

Actually the scenario I am working on is more fantasitcal. It imagines a group of American women pilots offering services. I am sure that Churchill's intiial response would be no (He had an odd attitude to women) but if the Nazis had taken a different course and kept pressure on Fighter Comand rather than London a point may be reached where a couple of hundred pilots from anywhere would be accepted.

I was assuming that these women (probably inspired or led by a surviving Amelia Earhart) originally having been got together for Spain but somehow not being in time

[Fellatio Nelson]

So, basic construct is to have a band of foreign female fighter pilots in 1940?

i) They may have been used had there been an actual invasion or there were literally no more/very few RAF replacement pilots available. (Women were to play a part in an anti-invasion force, although whether this kind of force was seen as genuinely necessary of just good for morale is a different matter.)

ii) In such a scenario, would not the British use women from the Air Transport Auxiliary; i.e. those women pilots who flew aircraft from the factories to the squadron airfields.

iii) In such dire circumstances, would they employ a few hundred foreign female pilots who'd recently pledged to fight in Spain for the Communists? A little risky. (IN 1940 there was no Anglo-Russian pact; indeed, Churchill came close to declaring war on the USSR as a consequence of her invasion of Finland and friendship pact with Germany.

iv) Attitudes to women combatants in the UK esp. in 1940. Whilst if the Germans were marching up Whitehall I could certainly see some women involved in guerrilla warfare (as per Span. Civil War); I could not, however see Waafs or ATS manning the barricades with bazookas etc. They also played an important role in espionage and manning AAA tracking sites. Perhaps the Soviet Union offers an example of using women when war forces it to (although they also had the Commie dogma of equality driving it): fighter pilots, snipers, HQ radio operators and staff, sometimes also driving tanks in all-female crews; not female marines of infantry.

So it is not outrageous to see female fighter pilots in 1940, but I doubt they would accept literally hundreds of foreign volunteers from a dubious political background.

[Melvin Loh]

Well, what about from my previous thread on an int'l Flying Tigers sqn who see service in the Spanish CW, with the likes of black WWI air ace Eugene Bullard, and who are able to in 1940 volunteer their services to the RAF ?