The few within the few
Andrew Roberts reviews The Few: July-October 1940 by Alex Kershaw
The title of this fine and at times deeply moving book refers to the handful of American pilots - eight in all - who defied Congress's 1907 Citizenship Act and various strict Neutrality Acts in order to fly for the RAF in the Battle of Britain, 18 months before the USA entered the war. They automatically lost their American citizenship by doing so, and risked several years' imprisonment and a $10,000 fine.
These pilots acted out of very different and sometimes overlapping motives - some were adventurous thrill-seekers, others hated Nazism, others just wanted to fly the Supermarine Spitfire, but whichever reasons were uppermost, they were in the skies when Britain most desperately needed them.
Taking an oath of allegiance to a foreign monarch wasn't easy for any of them, but since they all believed that sooner or later America would be fighting Germany anyhow, these immensely brave young twenty-somethings went ahead and did it.
Eugene 'Red' Tobin was the lanky, ginger-haired son of a Los Angeles real-estate broker. His mother died of TB when he was five. An MGM pilot who flew actors around Californian film sets, he explained later: 'I just felt I wanted to fly some of these powerful machines.' Andy Mamedoff came from Thompson, Connecticut, and after he was turned down by the American air force he volunteered to fight in Finland, before the Finnish resistance collapsed. Vernon 'Shorty' Keough grew up in Brooklyn and was, at 4 ft 10 in, the shortest man to fly for the RAF. A professional skydiver with more than 500 jumps to his name, he didn't care which air force he flew for against the Luftwaffe.
These three were recruited to fly originally for the French air force by Colonel Charles Sweeny, a mercenary who had twice been expelled from West Point and whose battle 'honours' included Mexico, Venezuela, Nicaragua, the French foreign legion, Poland (versus Russia in 1920), advising Kemal Attaturk, and a spell in the Spanish Civil War. Even in a work full of larger-than-life characters Sweeny stands out, almost deserving a book in himself.
Tobin, Mamedoff and Keough went via Canada to land at St Nazaire on 30 May, 1940, just as the Dunkirk evacuation was underway. They were then held up by French bureaucracy for four days before getting to Paris, where they stayed until the government fled first to Tours and then Bordeaux. When finally it looked like the French would let them fly for them, the airfield was bombed by Stukas.
After sleeping in haylofts, hitching lifts and at some points staying only two hours ahead of the invading German forces, the three would-be airmen escaped from France a full week after the Armistice on one of the last refugee ships to leave. They arrived in Plymouth cold and seasick, and when they got to London the US Embassy scolded them for 'jeopardising neutrality'. It was only when a Tory MP called Roland Robinson took up their cause that the Air Ministry got them interviewed for the RAF, where they fought valiantly throughout the Battle of Britain, shooting down Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Stukas.
William Meade Fiske III seems like a figure straight from an Alexander Korda propaganda movie; the handsome son of a wealthy Anglophile New York banker, 'The King of Speed' won the bobsleigh gold medal in the 1928 Olympics aged 16, and then again four years later. He would probably have won again in 1936 but refused on ideological grounds to take part in Hitler's games. A Cambridge history graduate, ladies' man, debonair charmer and winner of the Cresta Run grand championship, he learnt to fly in California.
Fiske left his job on Wall Street on 18 September, 1939 and, also pretending to be Canadian, joined his British friends, including Lord Beaverbrook's son, Max Aitken, in 601 (Auxiliary) Squadron, known throughout the RAF - with reason - as 'the Millionaires'. Arthur Donahue, by contrast, grew up on a farm in Minnesota during the Depression. An Irish Catholic teetotaller, he felt that 'To fight side by side with the British people would be the greatest of privileges.'
From the moment the squadrons are scrambled - some getting into the air within two minutes - the pace of the book speeds into action. 'The sky was now crowded with darting and diving machines,' writes Kershaw, 'glinting like silverfins as they caught the sun.'
It is in the battle scenes that this book soars away heavenward like one of the Spitfires it so worships. 'We seemed to be milling about like a swarm of great gnats in this giant eerie amphitheatre above the clouds,' wrote Donahue of one engagement years later. 'A familiar sound of exploding cannon shells wracked my eardrums and my plane shook. Shrapnel banged and rattled and white tracers streamed by.'
The Americans were well received on bases such as Leconfield, Kenley, Middle Wallop and Tangmere. 'They were typical Americans,' recalled an RAF contemporary, 'amusing, always ready with some devastating wisecrack.' It was in defending Tangmere that Fiske was killed in August 1940. Only a few feet away from the pilot of a Hurricane was a fuel tank containing up to 85 gallons of high-octane fuel; in landing his plane after being hit by a Stuka's tail-end gunner, rather than bailing out, Fiske received burns that were to kill him two agonising days later.
Aged 28, Fiske was buried nearby at St Mary's Boxgrove, with both the Union flag and Stars and Stripes on his coffin. His headstone there reads: 'An American citizen who died that English might live.' Later that same day Churchill made his 'Never in the field of human conflict' speech.
>>>!!!>>>Hugh Reilley, who came from Detroit but also pretended to be Canadian in order to join up, was killed by the ME-109 flown by the top German ace Werner Molders, who had 50 kills to his name by the end of the Battle of Britain. In all, of the eight Americans who fought in that battle, only John Haviland of 151 Squadron, who had learnt to fly while at Nottingham University and went into battle after less than 20 hours flying fighters, survived the war. Art Donahue and Eugene Tobin's bodies were never found.<<<!!!<<<
(Reilly's family has since challenged this successfully, his son providing his Canadian birth certificate. He is now considered a Canadian hero and still well deserving of a <S>alute.)
During the rest of the war, 244 American citizens flew with the RAF Eagle Squadrons. By the end of this scintillating book, one is left feeling profoundly humble and thankful they did.
