The Raf's French Foreign Legion — De Gaulle, the British and the Re-emergence of French Airpower 1940-45

This book examines and analyses the relationship between the RAF, the Free French Movement and the French fighter pilots in WWII. A highly significant subject, this has been ignored by academics on both sides of the Channel. This ground-breaking study will fill a significant gap in the historiography of the War.

Bennett's painstaking research has unearthed primary source material in both Britain and France including Squadron records, diaries, oral histories and memoirs. In the post-war period the idea of French pilots serving with the RAF seemed anachronistic to both sides. For the French nation the desire to draw a veil over the war years helped to obscure many aspects of the past, and for the British the idea of French pilots did not accord with the myths of "the Few" to whom so much was owed. Those French pilots who served had to make daring escapes. Classed as deserters they risked court martial and execution if caught. They would play a vital role on D-Day and the battle for control of the skies which followed.

G. H. Bennett is Reader in History at the University of Plymouth. He is the author of ten books including Roosevelt's Peacetime Administrations 1933-41: A Documentary History of the New Deal Years (MUP) and Survivors: British Merchant Seamen in the Second World War. He lives in Cornwall.