NONE OF AMERICA'S BUSINESS

Mike Kolendorski had a dramatic announcement for his family: he was going to England to join the Royal Air Force. It was a decision he had made by himself, without consulting any of his relatives. The reaction he received was predictable, considering the mood of Americans toward England in the spring of 1940.

His family told Mike that he was crazy—the war was England's worry, not his. As an American, he had no quarrel with the Germans. And as a Californian, he did not owe the British one damn thing. California was not at war with Germany and had never, not even in 1776, been a British colony. He would be much better off, he was told, if he stayed home and got a good job.

Besides, it looked as though the British had already lost the war. The British Army had just been chased out of France—what was left of it had been evacuated from Dunkirk, wherever the hell that was—and it looked like Hitler was going to invade England any day. Before the summer was over, the German army would probably be in London.

This was a popular point of view among Americans in the spring and summer of 1940, when Britain faced Germany and its vaunted Luftwaffe all alone. Even the American ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy (father of future president John F. Kennedy), was telling anyone who would listen that the British were not only losing the war, but that they had no chance of winning it.

Many American reporters in Britain shared Kennedy's opinion that "chances now seem[ed] less than even that the British Isles [could] hold out" for six months "against intensive bombing followed by an attempted invasion." It was hard to understand why anybody would want to volunteer to join the air force of a country that was going to lose. Besides, the war was none of America's business.

The reasons for wanting to join the Royal Air Force were hard to express, even for a young Polish-American who knew all the answers. Hardly any of the American volunteers, in the RAF or any other branches of the British armed services, could explain their motives very clearly. This was partly because they were young and inarticulate, partly because their reasons were difficult to put into words, and partly because they did not really know the reasons themselves.

Mike Kolendorski did have concrete reasons for wanting to leave home and join the RAF. He and his family still had close ties with Poland, and they spoke Polish at home. Going into the British air force was the best way he knew to fight the enemy who had overrun his family's homeland. He had very strong feelings about this—so strong, in fact, that they would prove to be his undoing.

But most did not have such clear-cut motives. Some joined out of idealism; they had read Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and wanted to fight the Nazis like Hemingway's hero fought the Fascists in Spain. Others had the feeling that the United States would be in the war sooner or later and that their experiences in the RAF might prove useful later on in the US forces. Some were just restless and looking for a bit of excitement; one volunteer said that it was like running away to join the circus.

One American who volunteered to join the Royal Air Force, James A. Goodson, was just mad as hell at the Germans. He had been aboard the British ocean liner Athenia when it was torpedoed by a U-boat on the day that war was declared in September 1939. The idea of joining up occurred to him when he landed in Scotland with some other survivors. In Glasgow he happened to pass a recruiting station and asked one of the men on duty, "Can I join your RAF?" (He actually did not join until he recrossed the Atlantic and made his way to Canada to join the RCAF—Royal Canadian Air Force.)

American author Mary Lee Settle volunteered for the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) of the RAF. She is not exactly sure why she joined. She puts it down to being romantic.

Another volunteer who went through Canada to join the RAF explained that he was twenty years old at the time, not going anywhere in particular, and brainless. He had heard that the British were looking for pilots to fight the Germans. Because he was young and stupid and interested in airplanes, he thought he might as well give it a try and join the RAF. In other words, it was a form of temporary insanity.

As an afterthought, he mentioned that all of his relatives tended to agree with him. They thought he was a goddamn screwball; it was bad enough to be drafted into the American army, but to volunteer—and with the British air force, at that—was something they just could not get over.

The idea to recruit American pilots for foreign forces first occurred to Colonel Charles Sweeny, a wealthy American businessman with family connections in London. His original intention was to send his recruits to France and l'Armée de l'Air, the French air force. This plan was modeled on the precedent of the Lafayette Escadrille, a group of Americans who volunteered to fly for France in the First World War.

Thirty-two of Sweeny's l'Armée de l'Air volunteers reached France in early 1940. But when France surrendered in June of that year, the Americans found themselves trapped by the advancing German forces. Four of them were killed; nine others were taken prisoner. Six of the group managed to escape to England, and five of these found their way into the Royal Air Force.

The young volunteers may have been vague about their reasons for joining, and sometimes did not seem to have any reason at all, but Britain's Royal Air Force had one solid reason for accepting the Americans—they were desperate for pilots.

After the British army had been evacuated from Dunkirk in June 1940, the Luftwaffe began operating from airfields in northern France. With the Germans just across the channel from the beaches of southern England, the British Air Ministry had a dire need for trained pilots. Prime Minister Winston Churchill had already referred to the upcoming air battle as the "Battle of Britain." It was certain that RAF Fighter Command would be needing as many trained pilots as it could get.

American volunteers were not the only source for pilots—Fighter Command was scouring flyers from everyplace available. The Royal Navy...