Eagles for the allies: Recruiting American volunteers for the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force, 1939-1945.

摘要

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the recruitment of American volunteers by and for Britain and Canada's air forces during the Second World War. Both nations experienced crippling shortages of experienced pilots early in the war, and after the fall of France in June 1940 became increasingly willing to draw on the large, untapped pool of aviators in the United States.; Charles Sweeny, an expatriate American businessman living in London, advanced the idea of an American-piloted fighter squadron in the Royal Air Force (RAF) to draw pilots to the Allied cause. Britain's Air Ministry approved the plan, and Sweeny brought in his uncle, Colonel Charles Sweeny, to handle recruitment in the United States. Colonel Sweeny, a former soldier-of-fortune and French Legionnaire, had been recruiting pilots for France before its collapse. Largely due to the exertions of the Sweenys, the RAF activated No. 71 Squadron in September 1940 as the first of three "Eagle" squadrons of American volunteer pilots.; Independent of the Sweeny effort, American aviation artist Clayton Knight and Canadian businessman Homer Smith, both former World War I pilots, set up an office in New York City in 1940 to recruit fliers for the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF). The activities of the Clayton Knight Committee (as their organization became known) grew increasingly successful, and by January 1941 the Knight Committee, financed by the RCAF and RAF, became the vehicle for both Britain and Canada's recruiting efforts. When the committee shut its doors in mid-1942, it had processed nearly 49,000 applications and dispatched 2,000 volunteers to the RCAF and RAF.; Drawing upon an array of primary and secondary sources, including previously untapped government records and private correspondence from American, British, and Canadian archives, the author demonstrates the significance of the Sweeny and Knight Committee recruiting efforts in the context of the overall war effort, comparing it to other recruiting operations conducted during the two World Wars.