AVG pilot passes.....

[Oldpilot]

Originally Posted by Stig Jarlevik

Dan

Just out of curiosity, have you done any trace of the ancestry of the AVG individuals? Just looked at the list of those still living and the name Kenneth Jernstedt was there. His name sounds incredibly Swedish.... Cheers
Stig

Stig, Americans are now all bent out of shape (sorry for the colloquialism!) about immigration, rather forgetting that the first third of the 20th century was notable for foreigners. My parents arrived for example in 1928. There were two huge waves, one beginning in the 1840s with the Irish especially, fleeing the famine, and continuing into the early years of the 20th century. These included great numbers of Germans and Scandinavians settling the western prairie. Then there was another huge wave of Europeans including southern Europeans following WWI.

Almost everyone I knew, growing up during WW2, was the son or grandson of immigrants. A WASP (white Anglo-Saxon Protestant) was a rarity in Concord, Massachusetts, where there was one family so Italian that the boys were named Primo, Secondo, and Tercero.

Which is a long way of saying that many of the AVGs probably had a grandmother at least who didn't speak English. The same was true of the American military generally: wherever it went, except perhaps in Japan, you could be sure of finding a corporal who spoke the language. (Most Japanese-Americans were sent to fight in Italy because their loyalty was suspect.)

Blue skies! -- Dan Ford
Coming in September: Flying Tigers: Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers, 1941-1942