Wings Over Terrell: The British Are Coming

In the spring of 1941 Britain had been at war with Germany for a year and a half, its skies too dangerous and its weather too foul to train new pilots fast enough. So the Royal Air Force looked across the Atlantic — and, under the Lend-Lease arrangement, sent its cadets to learn to fly over the wide, clear skies of North Texas. The very first and largest of these schools, No. 1 British Flying Training School, opened at Terrell. Between 1941 and 1945 more than two thousand young British and American airmen earned their wings here, many of them teenagers far from home. The town of barely ten thousand took them in: families brought cadets to Sunday dinner, wrote letters to anxious mothers in England, and taught them what Texans meant by words like 'fixin' to.' This driving tour follows that story — from the airfield where they flew, to the downtown that adopted them, to the quiet plot where the town still tends the graves of the twenty who never went home.