About: Eagle Squadrons   Sponge Permalink

An Entity of Type : owl:Thing, within Data Space : 134.155.108.49:8890 associated with source dataset(s)

The Eagle Squadrons were three fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force (RAF), formed with volunteer pilots from the United States during the early days of World War II (circa 1940), prior to America's entry into the war in December 1941. Charles Sweeny, a wealthy businessman living in London, began recruiting American citizens to fight as a US volunteer detachment in the French Air force, echoing the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I. Following the Fall of France in 1940, a dozen of these recruits joined the RAF.

AttributesValues
rdfs:label
  • Eagle Squadrons
rdfs:comment
  • The Eagle Squadrons were three fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force (RAF), formed with volunteer pilots from the United States during the early days of World War II (circa 1940), prior to America's entry into the war in December 1941. Charles Sweeny, a wealthy businessman living in London, began recruiting American citizens to fight as a US volunteer detachment in the French Air force, echoing the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I. Following the Fall of France in 1940, a dozen of these recruits joined the RAF.
sameAs
dcterms:subject
dbkwik:military/pr...iPageUsesTemplate
abstract
  • The Eagle Squadrons were three fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force (RAF), formed with volunteer pilots from the United States during the early days of World War II (circa 1940), prior to America's entry into the war in December 1941. Before America's entry into the War, many US recruits simply crossed the border and joined the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) to learn to fly and fight. Many early recruits had originally gone to Europe to fight for Finland against the Soviets in the Winter War. Some of the recruits were men rejected by the USAAF as "lacking in intrinsic flying ability", who instead enlisted with the RCAF. Charles Sweeny, a wealthy businessman living in London, began recruiting American citizens to fight as a US volunteer detachment in the French Air force, echoing the Lafayette Escadrille of World War I. Following the Fall of France in 1940, a dozen of these recruits joined the RAF. Sweeny's efforts were also coordinated in Canada by World War I air ace Billy Bishop and with artist Clayton Knight who formed the Clayton Knight Committee, who, by the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, had processed and approved 6,700 applications from Americans to join the RCAF or RAF. Sweeny and his rich society contacts bore the cost (over $100,000) of processing and bringing the US trainees to the United Kingdom for training.
Alternative Linked Data Views: ODE     Raw Data in: CXML | CSV | RDF ( N-Triples N3/Turtle JSON XML ) | OData ( Atom JSON ) | Microdata ( JSON HTML) | JSON-LD    About   
This material is Open Knowledge   W3C Semantic Web Technology [RDF Data] Valid XHTML + RDFa
OpenLink Virtuoso version 07.20.3217, on Linux (x86_64-pc-linux-gnu), Standard Edition
Data on this page belongs to its respective rights holders.
Virtuoso Faceted Browser Copyright © 2009-2012 OpenLink Software