Quote:
Originally Posted by mark46th
"IIRC, I thing Hoover's FBI tried to limit American volunteers of the Spanish Civil War from certain roles in WWII.....but that American volunteers were otherwise perceived by the general public as neutral to positive.....until the post WWII Communist threat emerged more clearly." Flagg
So does this make the Lafayette Escadrille bad guys? The Flying Tigers? Eagle Squadron? Or any American vet returning from war for that matter...
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Not necessarily.
I wonder what official/unofficial US government opinion was for those examples as well?
I suspect they were neither strongly opposed by government, nor prevented from future US military service as I think all three fighter pilot examples could(and did?) rejoin US forces for the big fight.
I recall reading a little bit about a few American servicemen/pilots who joined The Flying Tigers(Pappy Boyington I think?), from distant memory I recall it being unofficially sanctioned, perhaps?
The reason why I picked the volunteers for the Spanish Civil War was due to:
1)Very mixed bag of external actors with different agendas(Soviet Union, Germany, etc), much like ISIS and other groups and their respective funding/support streams. Not two sided, but quite a few sided in some respects.
2)Very large and mixed bag of international volunteers on the ground mixed with the locals.
3)The at least superficial similarities between recent Communist converts to the cause and recent Islamic militant converts to the cause.
4)The media emphasized it heavily then, as now.