Children's Wartime Adventure Novels

CHILDREN’S WARTIME ADVENTURE NOVELS

The Silent Generation’s Vicarious Experience of World War II

Jacqueline T. Lynch

Published by Jacqueline T. Lynch

P.O. Box 1394, Chicopee, Massachusetts  01021

Copyright © 2024 Jacqueline T. Lynch

All rights reserved.

This is dedicated to my sister Kathleen Mary Lynch

for introducing me to the Cherry Ames series.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter One - Prelude to War

Chapter Two – Let’s Hear It for the Boys

Chapter Three – Girls Just Want to Go to War

Chapter Four –  The Home Front

Chapter Five –  Patriotic Duty

Chapter Six – Stereotypes – Both Friend and Foe

Chapter Seven – Legacy

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

About the Author

introduction

The generation for whom children’s series chapter books were written during World War II would have been born in the late 1920s or early 1930s, were small children in the Great Depression, and entered their teenage years during wartime.  They were too young to know the struggle of finding work during the Depression, but not too young to be intimately affected by the lack of work suffered by the adults in their families and in their neighborhoods.  These kids knew privation, and not necessarily on a smaller scale than the adults.

When World War II engulfed the globe from 1939 to 1945, they were too young to be drafted, though a few might have entered the armed forces before the end of the war in 1945, barely passing their seventeenth birthday in their eagerness to get into the fight that had been so glamorized for them in movies. (We are primarily addressing youngsters from the United States, who would have been the intended audience for the novels discussed in this book.)  Though this generation of children experienced the war vicariously, their knowledge of the war, as we shall see, was perhaps no less informed, anxiety-filled, and grim.

The World War II-themed series novels discussed in this book were their companions in the baffling and exciting era of their already normally angst-ridden pre-teen and teen years.  The books provided entertainment, inspiration, education, and indoctrination of a kind as to what would be expected of them as teens in support of the war effort and what kind of adults they should strive to be.

Their elders expected and certainly hoped, that the war would end before these youngsters would be called upon to serve.  That it had ended before their high school graduations was a point of relief, as well as pride for their elders, to have accomplished their job of winning the war so thoroughly and thereby protecting the next generation from suffering the same fate as they. That was the greatest laurel of the victors.

The next generation, however prepared by their elders for the fight against fascism, were nonetheless launched into a new world that nobody and nothing could have prepared them for:  the atomic age, the Cold War, the Korean War, and the blessings and curses of the Silent Generation that they came to be called, navigating the cynicism and democratic betrayal of McCarthyism, sometimes chafing even if they found comfort in the conformity of suburbia, and were soon to be pushed aside in importance by the Baby Boomers.

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The Boomers, myself included, discovered their now-discarded chapter books of World War II juvenile adventures a generation after the war had ended.  The books were hand-me-downs, like clothes, old sports equipment, or toys that had been retrieved from an attic, rescued from a crate in the cellar, or discovered in a closet on a rainy day.  They were explored tentatively, with curiosity for the dramatic, often pulp-style cover art, the inscription on the flyleaf written in cursive writing to a child from an aunt or uncle, or grandparent as a present.  They smelled slightly musty, but a child destined to be a book lover counted that as only another thing to pique curiosity.

The wartime adventure series books were all the more intriguing for these offhand ways of being discovered by the Boomers; they were usually not to be found in the public library.  They were considered pulp, and most librarians did not consider them worthy to share shelf space with the Caldecott and Newbery award winners, classics their young patrons should have read.  Moreover, many of the racial and ethnic slurs used to describe the enemy, or even fellow Americans, were certainly no longer acceptable.

They were also not as well-known as the popular Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series, which numbered several volumes and were often updated in cover artwork and language to appeal to successive generations in successive reprintings, and had movie and television adaptations.

It is for this reason that the World War II chapter books were, for many Boomers, actually more fascinating than the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys series: the war books were locked in time, the characters faced troubles that were very real, and occurred in real places a child could find on the classroom globe.  They were not entirely fantasy, as were the stories about Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys, who were always smarter than the adults, lived in fictional places, and drove their own cars, for whom we knew everything would always turn out right in the end.

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I first discovered the Cherry Ames nurse series at the insistence of my sister, Kathleen.  She is more than six years my senior, and since I was the youngest in our family, when I got old enough to read the stories, she decided I should carry the torch my several older sisters had begun and be the next in the line to read the, then, thirty-year-old volumes.

I was not much interested.  Most of my reading at the time consisted of non-fiction: books about science and animals, books on history, especially a children’s series of biographies.  I enjoyed reading about Kit Carson and Daniel Boone, Sacajawea, the Presidents, and Clara Barton was the only nurse who interested me because she was real and had brought the Civil War home to me.

I had already read several Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books (an older brother had a collection as long as my arm of the Hardy Boys), but though I enjoyed them because mysteries are always fun to read, I did not care to read a series about some nurse.  One of my other older sisters was a nurse.  She didn’t seem to have any exciting adventures.  Or at least, none that she told me about, but then I was only ten.

I finally gave in to Kathleen’s insistence that I try one.  It was Cherry Ames, Army Nurse.  The cover showed a pretty young woman with curly dark hair and dark eyes, a nurse’s cap perched on her head and her cape around her shoulders, marching expectantly toward some exciting future.  (My nurse sister, Maureen, had a cape, too.  It was useful for Halloween costumes if you wanted to be Zorro.) Behind the young woman was a red Federalist-style government building.

Despite this prosaic and decidedly undramatic cover, after only a few pages, I was hooked.  I wanted to read the rest of the books in the series and came to love not just Cherry Ames, but the genre of children’s series books set during World War II.  It was the fact that they were set during World War II that I enjoyed. (Though another attraction was that Cherry had a beloved twin brother, and I, too, have a beloved twin brother.  This allowed me to immediately identify with her.)  I liked history, and already knew rather a great deal about the Great Depression and the war than many kids my age due to being a reader, a classic film fan, and because my parents were of that generation and I was eager to listen to their stories. My father served with the Army in the South Pacific; my mother was Rosie the Riveter who worked in a war plant.  They were the generation that the original readers of these chapter books were supposed to look up to and emulate. 

Baby Boomers, many of us who were exposed to these books, could still enjoy these stories that were clearly not meant for us, but we did not need them to be updated, nor did we wish them to be updated for us as the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books had been. We wanted to be dropped into another place and another long-ago time, with all its fears and failings.  We wanted to see the world through the eyes of another generation of kids.

This book is for those kids, the so-called Silent Generation, now in their eighties and nineties, who may still carry the curious mixture of anxiety and idealism from their childhood.

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NOTE:  With some books, it will be observed, that instead of a page reference in the footnotes, only a chapter reference is noted—because these certain books were read online through the Project Gutenberg site which does not always include original pagination.

Also, note that all quoted typographical errors are left as they were originally printed.

Chapter One

Prelude to War

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Beverly Gray, Reporter

Dave Dawson at Dunkirk

A Yankee Flier with the R.A.F.

Nancy Naylor: Air Pilot

Dave Dawson with the R.A.F.

Connie Benton, Reporter

Peggy Wayne – Sky Girl

Dave Dawson in Libya

Nancy Blake, Copywriter

A Yankee Flier in the Far East

Dave Dawson at Singapore

Red Randall at Pearl Harbor

Air Mission to Algiers

Penny Marsh and Ginger Lee—Wartime Nurses

At the end of the Great Depression, there were spies and sabotage in hometown America, and to be sure, fifth-column activities were not relegated only to children’s books (the headlines were full of home-grown fascist movements and seditious plots), but they certainly were a popular plot twist in these novels.  If Americans looked anxiously at political trouble in Europe and Asia in the grip of fascism, and then braced for the worst when war broke out in 1939, children’s books seemed already poised to make the new geopolitical climate the backdrop for adventure stories. 

The protagonists in these books were usually late teens or early twenties, not kids.  There were no heroic models of the same age as the readers, who were likely ten to fourteen or fifteen years old.

When the war began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939, the male characters in books for boys were invariably placed in mortal danger fighting the enemy even before the United States entered the war in December 1941. American Dave Dawson was flying in a British R.A.F. squadron, as was Stan Wilson in Al Avery’s Yankee Flier series.

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The experiences of female characters in books for girls were not warrior roles.  The mores of the time did not permit it, and warrior roles perhaps would have seemed unreal and outlandish even when females were eventually allowed to play a non-combatant role in the U.S. military, which was a difficult hurdle for a society inclined to be reticent about its sisters and daughters putting on military uniforms.  However, the girls’ books did offer a sometimes surprisingly feminist spark of independence and derring-do.  They were, in one way or another, the protectors of the home front.

We begin in the early years of World War II before America had joined the fight, was still on the sidelines but getting closer to the precipice.

Beverly Gray in Beverly Gray, Reporter by Clair Blank (1915-1965) shows spunk as a new college graduate conquering New York, a young writer of novels and plays, and a roving reporter.  She rooms with several of her former sorority sisters, who are all career-bent, several of them in the arts.  Their romances seem to take a back seat to their work ambitions, which is interestingly typical of the girls’ series books.  The Beverly Gray books numbered a prodigious twenty-six in all, published from 1934 to about 1955.  Ms. Blank published her first in the mystery series just out of high school, actually wrote the first four during high school, and never looked back.

The book is filled with so many subplots that one suspects the series is akin to a soap opera with a never-ending plot line from this book to the next, rather than a cohesive story.  Ordeals faced include a plane’s landing gear failing to engage, near drowning after their rowboat capsizes on a river in a sudden storm, a train wreck, an explosion, and, ah, yes, fifth-column spies.

Beverly mistakenly receives information outlining fortifications and defense preparations along the eastern seaboard.  She understands that saboteurs intend to use this and she must act to protect the country.  However, she does not immediately turn over the plans to the authorities because she fears being implicated in the plot and their disappearance.  Eventually, she comes to the aid of her country – and gets a big newspaper scoop in the process – to foil the spies.  Though an Army lieutenant working on the case, and her editor looking forward to the big scoop, both have confidence in her, a male friend insists, "‘...this is too serious for a girl to get mixed up in.’

"‘You think I can’t carry it through,’ she accused.

"‘I don’t think any girl could,’ he turned.

‘I’ll show you,’ she said firmly, ‘Thanks for the good advice, but I’m doing this myself.’  With that she turned and left him.

He catches up to her, and she accepts his invitation to go to a party that night.  Perhaps David was right.  Perhaps she should give up this playing detective. However, something within her rebelled at the idea.  He had roused her determination by doubting her ability.[1]

Accepting a date after an insult aside, we see that Beverly demonstrates to girl readers that stubbornness, feeling resentful at being put down, and even a certain degree of bravado are traits not necessarily immodest or unfeminine, or wrong.  It is a lesson that girls will learn time after time in these series books.  Another emotion natural to females is patriotism.  The year is 1940 and the U.S. has not yet entered the war, and no foreign enemy country is named, but the young readers are in training for what lies ahead.  Beverly is to meet the fifth-column gang at a house in the country.

Strange, she had never thought much about patriotism before, but now that she had the chance to foil a plot against her country she felt proud and thrilled to be of service.[2]

The intrigue takes her to Washington, D.C., where Beverly ponders in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial the great significance of her participation and what might have happened to the nation if the bad guys were successful.

"Perhaps all this peace and security could have been destroyed.  Pride welled up in her heart when she looked at the white stone pillars and remembered that this was all a part of America—her America, and was well worth any risk she might have taken.  It made her feel glad that perhaps she had helped a little to preserve something beautiful and real...

‘Funny,’ she said aloud, facing the statue, ‘I’ve never been the flag-waving sort of American. Oh, I stand up when the Star-Spangled Banner is played and I know all the verses of the anthem, but I never realized until the past few days what an American heritage really is.  Learning that there are people working to destroy my country made me realize how valuable it is.  I hope I’ll always be a good American.’[3]

By the end of the book, Beverly’s second novel is accepted for publication, and she and her friends head off to the New York World’s Fair, then in its second year, the theme of which was the World of Tomorrow.  That spring, while The World of Tomorrow was being envisioned with wonderful inventions and new consumer products on the Queens fairgrounds, across the Atlantic young Dave Dawson faced a more foreboding vision of the future through the perspective of a dire present.

***

R. Sidney Bowen

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Dave Dawson at Dunkirk by R. Sidney Bowen is the first of the long and popular series. Robert Sidney Bowen (1900-1977) served in World War I as an aviator and that experience lent familiarity with planes and aerial dogfights in his stories.  He worked as a journalist and magazine editor and wrote many books for boys, but the two wartime series of Dave Dawson and Red Randall remain the most well-known. 

Published in 1941, the story begins precisely on May 10, 1940. Dave and his widowed father arrived on the Dixie Clipper from Port Washington Bay, Long Island, to Lisbon, Portugal. The famous Boeing flying boat launched transatlantic service in 1939, the flight took nearly twenty-one hours. His father has been sent by the U.S. government to Paris. Dave had pleaded to come along. To fly to a Europe at peace was something, but to fly to a Europe at war was something extra special. It was a trip a fellow would remember all the days of his life. It was an adventure that he’d tell his grandchildren all about some day.[4]  Dave has no inkling of the adventures the series would bring him. 

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We will note here and often in coming chapters that among most of the various children’s series books one common theme seems to be that the main character has only one parent, or is orphaned.  What excuse by the author or publisher there can be for making this a part of the protagonist’s background we can only guess, except it seems to indicate that the character is made more independent in such a scenario. 

Many of these books will provide lessons in geography to their readers as much as in current geopolitics.

Fighting between the Nazis and the British and French allies was still centered between the Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line and had been for eight months.  Dave, with a keen eye for a teenager, notes batteries of anti-aircraft guns placed about the city, army trucks and small tanks. There are blackouts at night.  This day, May 10th, is his seventeenth birthday. 

A French officer, Lieutenant Defoe, is supposed to take him and his father on a tour of the Maginot Line.  Dave bathes, dresses, and goes to his father’s room to wake him, but his father is not there, nor his belongings. 

Dave learns his father is in England, and was called over immediately for business with the American ambassador.  Too rushed to tell his son?  Or leave a note?  He will be gone for three days.  It is planned that Lt. Defoe will bring Dave to Calais, where a British destroyer will take him to Dover, then London by train.  Plans have a way of falling apart, even when one is not in the middle of a war zone.

On the drive to Calais, they run into throngs of refugees, moving inch by inch, panicked people fleeing the oncoming German army.  Then they are strafed by Heinkels and Messerschmitts and Stuka dive bombers.  Dave watches in

horror.

‘You’ll pay for this!’ he shouted, ‘You’ll pay for this if it takes the Allies a thousand years. And I’ll do my share in helping them too!’[5]  He helps an old woman and covers her body in a bombing. He loses consciousness.  Dave is an all-American boy, with a taste for action and seems fearless.  Immediately, the young male reader can identify with him and live vicariously through Dave’s amazing adventures. 

Dave wakes up hours later under a tree at night, head pounding, no wounds, just the lump on the side of his head.  He runs toward car lights.  He had been the star half miler on the Boston Latin High School track team.  The oncoming vehicle is from the British Volunteer Ambulance Service. The driver is an English youth about his age, Freddy Farmer. It is a meeting of fate, for Dave and Freddy will spend the rest of the book, and fourteen more books, as fast friends and partners in the job of saving the world from the enemy.

Freddy has sandy hair, clear blue eyes nice strong looking teeth.  One look and Dave knew instantly that he could like this friendly English boy a lot.[6]  Good dental hygiene is important, boys.

Freddy explains he is not really an ambulance driver, not until he’s eighteen and he won’t be seventeen until next month. He was in school outside Paris and his family has called him back to England. He is just bringing the ambulance from Paris to Belgium where it is needed, then plans to go on to England.

Dave’s life is changed by the incident.  He was an American and America was neutral, of course. Yet after what he’d seen this day he was filled with a burning desire to do something to help beat back Hitler and defeat him. He knew that there had been a lot of boys his age who had taken part in the last World War. He was big for his age, too, and strong as an ox. He decided that when he got to London and found his father he would ask Dad if there wasn’t something he could do to help. Nothing else seemed important, now.  The important thing was to help stop all this business that was taking place in Europe.[7]

Driving along, the boys are lost.  They stop to get directions, and Germans take them prisoners as spies.  This can happen when one stops to ask for directions.

Among his many handy attributes, like being strong as an ox, Dave had taken flying lessons at home and had even made his first solo, but is too young for a private pilot’s license.  He would like someday to be in the Army Air Corps. Freddy likes flying too, and has flown solo with his aero club.  He had tried to join the R.A.F. when war broke out but was too young. 

They are brought to be interrogated by the Kommandant at field headquarters. Dave discovers that while he was unconscious, he had been robbed of money and his passport.  They are given a room with cots and a blanket, a couple of broken chairs, and are locked in. Freddy worries about losing the ambulance to the Germans. Dave suggests they try stealing it back. They are given food on a tray, and a bundle of old clothes. 

Dave suggests they save some bread for later as they might need it if they escape.  He has a queer feeling and tingle on the back of his neck—which always means trouble ahead and would in future books.

What he had seen since leaving Paris had added years to his way of thinking, if not to his body. A fierce anger at the injustices wrought had sprung up within him. He wanted to do something about it. What, he did not know. But today there had been born in him a blazing desire to do what he could to spare Europe, and perhaps the whole world, from the bullets and bombs and the tyranny of the Nazi legions.  He tells Freddy, "‘We may be kids and not old enough to enlist, Freddy, but there must be something we can do to help.’"[8]

We can imagine the frustration that not being able to help win the war was shared by the young reader, who would have been relegated to saving paper and scrap iron and bacon grease.  Aww, gee whiz.  It’s not fair.

They have seen a map on the wall with pins in it in the Kommandant’s office downstairs.  They plan to get a good look at it and share the info with allied commanders when they escape.  Dave thinks they are in the town of Estalle (Étalle?) on the Belgian-German frontier.

Kommandant, a colonel, threatens to have them shot. He has found a marked map under the seat of the ambulance, which Freddy claims not to know was there. Brave Freddy remarks, I won’t answer a single one of your questions even though you do shoot me!

Dave felt like throwing his arms about the young Farmer and hugging him. Here was the kind of cool, calm courage for which the British were famous the world over.[9]

Freddy did know about the map, he had marked his route until it got too dark.  He reckons the Germans must have put in the rest to make up lies to have reason to shoot them. I knew a Jewish boy in England who escaped with his family from the German Gestapo and he told me about the tricks they play to scare you into telling them things.[10]  Here is the introduction of Jews as a victim of the Nazis, but the depth of the horror was yet to be known to the world, certainly not yet known to young Dave and Freddy.

They escape, and there is a great description of setting, of the suspense of waking in the night to listen to sounds – but these adventures, though vivid and entertaining, are works of imagination, not of personal experience or research to the point of the in-depth information and accuracy of experience as related in the nursing stories intended for girls.

Acts of bravery require physical prowess and skill from the boys, and there are many references to their strong young bodies.  The author propounds, There is a limit to the endurance of even the strongest men, and Dave and Freddy had most certainly proved themselves to be men, not just mere boys, during those hours of mad flight across enemy held ground.[11]

They have walked eight or nine miles in the night.  They see a German biplane used for reconnaissance.  When the fliers land and go into a farmhouse, the boys steal the plane.  They are spotted and shot at with rifles, but the boys take off.

As they fly over Belgium, a Messerschmitt follows them.  It is forcing them down, but Dave sees they have reached the Belgian lines where it would be safe to land, only half a mile away.  The fighting American spirit of Lexington and Concord flamed up in his chest.[12]  Other enemy planes swarm around. Dave is determined to make it. He puts the plane into an almost vertical dive. They are shot down, and Dave guides the crippled Arado plane to the ground, snagging on a bomb crater.  Belgian troops approach, and Dave and Freddy tell them in French not to shoot.

They tell the headquarters about their map information. 

"‘You are very brave boys, you know?’

Freddy flushed and looked uncomfortable. ‘We only want to do everything we can to help.’ he said quietly.  There is no flushing with pride, no we’re number one crowing.  They are heroes, and heroes, we are taught in these books, are always humble.

The tired Belgian officer clicked his heels and saluted the two boys. They returned the salute and as Dave looked into the Belgian’s eyes he saw a look there he would never forget as long as he lived. That officer knew what was coming toward him from the Albert Canal. He knew that he would stay where he was and face it. And he also knew that he would probably never live to see another sunrise. In a few words he had told of all that was in his thoughts. He had simply said, ‘Soon we shall be very busy here.’[13]

Dave Dawson, as will the other characters in the series books examined here, invariably displays a live for today energy and pragmatism of facing death for the sake of a greater good that might well be astonishing for later generations of youngsters.

"The Belgian’s loyalty and great courage stirred Dave to the depths of his soul. He impulsively reached out and grasped the officer’s hand and shook it.

‘I hope you beat the stuffing out of them. Lieutenant,’ he said in a flush of words. ‘Freddy and I will be rooting for you, and how!’[14]

Taken by a sergeant in a scouting car through the lines, they get hit by a shrapnel barrage and all hide under the car.  For the first few seconds his entire body had been paralyzed with fear, but when he didn’t die at once his brain grew kind of numb, and the roaring thunder didn’t seem to have so much effect upon him. It wasn’t because of a greater courage coming to his rescue. And it wasn’t a lack of fear, either. It was simply that in the midst of a furious bombardment the minds of human beings are too stunned by the sound to register any kind of emotion.[15]

They continue when it is over, along craters in the road.  "Two youths, sixteen and seventeen, had beaten the Germans at their own game. Instead of revealing information of value to the Germans, they had escaped with German information valuable to the Allies.

Dave leaned his head back and sighed restfully. It sure made a fellow feel good to have been of some help. And it made him feel twice as good to have a pal like Freddy Farmer along with him.  Freddy had certainly proved his mettle in the tight corners.[16]

There is more hot pursuit by Germans on the road.  Blast Hitler, I say! Freddy remarks when a Belgian scout is shot.[17]

The boys take over the scouting car, and Freddy drives.  Trying to get to Namur, an advancing squadron of German planes above them heads in the same direction. Namur is afire with bombing. Two Belgian soldiers on motorcycles drive up. They follow them to the newly moved headquarters. A bomb explodes in front of them, and the boys are knocked unconscious. Dave wakes in a hospital, being spoken to by a British captain. Freddy is asleep in the next bed.  They’ve been unconscious for eight days.

The medical officer already knows about the boys’ adventure. I fancy that you two chaps are rather famous, now, you know?

‘Rot, sir,’ Freddy said with true British modesty. ‘I fancy anyone could have done it. And a much better job of it, too.’[18]

General Caldwell arrives.  They tell their tale. The boys heap honors on the other. The general reviews the map with them. He gives them pins and tells them to try to replicate the German markers on the map from memory. They work on it for more than an hour. The General tells them they have done a good job and the King will want to hear of them.  The boys stay in hospital for a few more days. On the third day, they hear that Belgium has surrendered. The British Army is now exposed to the Germans racing down from Holland.  There is only one door of escape left. That door is Dunkirk![19]

The field hospital must evacuate.  The boys offer to help. They will drive ambulances, and make several trips. The reader is treated to vivid descriptions of bombing, bomb craters, night driving, and men’s weariness.  The boys get their wounded on board the last train. Dave and Freddy are prevented from boarding by another Stuka bombing. Weary, they sleep under a bridge. They wake at dawn to hear German troops marching.  They wait until dark, under the perpetual thunder of guns. They sleep another night hiding in a cave.  Finally, the enemy division moves away. The boys walk, following the bombed-out railroad track toward Dunkirk.

Grit, courage, and a fighting spirit resolved never to give up, forced them forward foot after foot, yard after yard, and mile after mile.  After about 18 or 19 miles, they meet a British soldier. He takes them the rest of the way in his motorcycle and sidecar.  The boys tell him their names, and he already knows about them, Why you lads are heroes! The whole blinking army’s been talking of what you nippers did.[20]

Another harrowing ride. Dunkirk is on fire. The massive evacuation at Dunkirk is described, the devastation of the beach and soldiers wading out to boats, fishing smacks, yawls, barges, and destroyers.

Dave and Freddy stood rooted in their tracks staring wide eyed at the historic event that will live forever in the minds of men.[21]

It is late May, or early June of 1940.  Another air attack, explosions on the beach, then British Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Defiants arrive to fight the German Heinkels and Stukas and Messerschmitts. The boys rush out to save a man shot in a power boat.  A great fire burned in Dave’s lungs, and his arms became like bars of lead that required every remaining ounce of his strength to lift up and cut down into the water again. But he fought back the aches, and the pains, and the gnawing fatigue.  And so did Freddy Farmer there by his side.[22]

Hauling themselves into the boat, they take control from the motionless bullet riddled body and prevent the boat from hitting the rocks.  Dave primes the engine and the boat pulls off safely.  They go to pick up as many of the soldiers as they can, as a Nazi torpedo hits a vessel.  He and Freddy start pulling men from the water.  They are surprised to discover General Caldwell among the men they rescue.  He tells them the info they gave him allowed thousands of men to reach Dunkirk, who would have been trapped in France and Belgium.  And to you two England owes a debt she will never be able to repay.[23]

They cross the Channel and see the White Cliffs of Dover.

Three days later, Dave is in Freddy’s home in London, the boys now reunited with both their fathers.  (Freddy also has only one parent.) They await the arrival of General Caldwell, Dave hopes they will be allowed into the R.A.F., even though they are young.  He explains to his father, "Well, it’s just that nothing else seems important now, except trimming the pants off the Nazis.  And I want to help, no matter what kind of help it is."[24]  Unless it’s saving bacon grease and paper.

His father understands and is staying in England to help in government.  The general arrives and gives each boy an expensive wristwatch with the inscription To One of the Two Finest and Bravest Boys I Ever Met. General H. V. K. Caldwell.

He tells them the King and Queen are waiting to receive them at Buckingham Palace with their fathers.  They will be allowed to enter the Royal Air Force.

Though highly entertaining, this book and the series that followed it are not exactly representative of what teenage readers might encounter should they suddenly decide to go to England and join the R.A.F.  However, it has been noted that enlistments increased after many Hollywood war movies.  Did these books for young readers have the same effect on boys who, like Dave and Freddy, were on the cusp of being old enough to join?

***

While Dave and Freddy are awaiting their commissions to the R.A.F., another American named Stan Wilson has already joined and will take part in the Battle of Britain, which occurred from July through September 1940.

A Yankee Flier with the R.A.F., published by Grosset & Dunlap, Inc. in 1941, was written by Al Avery, whose real name was Rutherford G. Montgomery (1894-1985), a prolific author of many books, who also had varied careers as a teacher, school principal, judge, and like R. Sidney Bowen, was also a World War I aviator, having served with the U.S. Air Corps from 1917 to 1919.  It may be his experience as a wartime aviator that gives his prose in the Yankee Flier series such vivid, and yet terse description, almost like a post-mission report.

While the series is meant for teen boys, the writing is frank, mature, and refrains from the enthusiastic inspirational tones of other books like the Dave Dawson series, or what we have come to term propaganda. 

We learn from the first pages of the book that Stan has a secret past which will follow him through the novel.  The author resists the temptation to blurt this out all at once in an info dump of plot exposition (as I will in a moment with this book), but skillfully and gradually releases a bit of information in chapters to come until, at last, we are reassured that Stan is not a Nazi spy.

Somebody else is.

Before the war, Stan had flown as a test pilot back home in the States, and was especially skilled and knowledgeable with the new Hendee Hawk plane, when he was framed by fifth columnists who sold information on the plans to the Nazis.  A government investigation proved him innocent, but not before his reputation was ruined.  He joined the R.A.F., telling superiors he is Canadian to hide his past, and wants to get back at the Nazi war machine for ruining his good name.

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His pals in this story are March Allison, a wry and sarcastic Brit who is their leader, and at first gets off the wrong foot with Stan; and Bill O’Malley, a stereotyped battling, blarney-gushing Irishman, who is wild and fearless, and has an endless appetite, especially for pie.  The trio battles Nazis and another American in their group, Arch Garret, who is the Nazi spy.  Almost as damning, he is portrayed as a braggart and a coward, which in boys’ books of this period is a terrible fault, indeed.

They fly Spitfires, and the book is filled with fast-paced action in the sky, with only brief interludes in the officers’ mess at the base.  Even here, we are not left with a feeling of safety:  They were all talking and joking, but at any moment they might be called to face the grim specter of death high in the clouds.[25]

On the next mission, another member of their squad dies in the dogfight. Stan said nothing for a minute.  He knew that the words of the flight lieutenant were likely the last he would say about Tommy Lane’s last ride.[26]

We hear a lot about Stukas and Heinkels, the Browning machine guns of the Spitfires with the expectation that the young male readers would be interested in the technical details, and we may imagine many of them had models of such at home.

Likewise, the air maneuvers are discussed: Allison’s ship rolled over suddenly and fell away, then hit a step spiral climb.  For a few seconds it knifed along its back. The maneuver threw the seven fighters off for a moment, giving Stan time to get more lift and more ceiling.[27]

Though the books for girls contain much more physical description of the characters, and often what they’re wearing, we do learn that Stan is six feet tall, 200 pounds of muscular body and looked like the Colorado University half-back he had been who once had been picked All-American.  Stan wouldn’t have admitted it, he wouldn’t have dared, but he had once been a great blocking back.[28] We learn that Garret is a bad apple because he brags and is a coward.  Integrity, we learn, is about courage and not bragging; being humble; being quick with one’s fists, but being respectful to those in authority.

Unless you’re Bill O’Malley. The wild Irishman comes in as a replacement for the dead Tommy Lane, and immediately jumps off the page as an irrepressible and uncontrollable scamp, but decidedly brave and gutsy in all he does.  He earns respect for being good-humored and outrageous, and pulling stunts such as forcing a German Heinkel down, taking the pilot at gunpoint and removing the machine gun from the plane to keep as a trophy.  He is tall, thin, has red hair, and Stan admires him for being a first-class fighting man.[29]  O’Malley’s phonetic brogue is peppered with superlatives, oaths, and frequently disparaging those he dislikes as a spalpeen.

In another air battle, Stan must bail out of his Spitfire over the English Channel.  He is faced with a decision: to land his plane safely in France—since he is running out of gas due to treachery by the Nazi spy Garret—or he can try to head for home but knows he will never reach England safely.  He decides to bail, for the comparable honor of an almost certain death, ditching the plane in the water rather than letting the Germans get it.

His chute bellied out and the shoulder straps wrenched at him.  A second later he was ripped loose and whirled away from the crumpled wreck...as his numbed fingers tore at the buckles he wondered what it felt like to drown. The sea was close now.  A bleak gray expanse of waves that reached hungry arms upward to receive another human sacrifice...The icy fingers of the water were eating into his flesh.[30]

However, O’Malley spots Stan’s location, signals he will send help, and a fishing boat will bring Stan back to fight another day.

The novel is comprised of quick vignettes, one air battle after another.  He and O’Malley achieve a harrowing impromptu landing on a carrier after they are shot down.

The plane will be returned by the Navy long after the fliers return to their base, which raises some suspicion, which Garret has already been fanning, that Stan is a Nazi spy and gave the plane up to the Germans.  The commander is ready to ground Stan, but proof arrives that Stan is innocent of past charges. He is told that, with his name cleared, and since he is also revealed to be an American and not Canadian, he is free to leave the R.A.F. and join the United States Army, which is not yet at war.  Stan prefers to stay with the R.A.F.  I’m staying until the war is over.  In a way, I figure it’s our fight, too, sir.[31]

He has no idea how prophetic the remark is, but now Stan has another enemy to fight, and that is the turncoat Garret.  Stan relies on his mettle, and, after forcing down a German plane that had been following