"Y'all is confused. Vous make le steep turn trop bankay."
This hodgepodge of Basic English, pid gin French and Southern drawl, punctuated by flyers' gestures, is the lingua franca in use at a U.S. Army school for French Army aviation cadets. Before they arrived at Hawthorne Field in Orangeburg, S.C., the French trainees, fresh from service abroad, were taught 40 hours of Basic English. Meanwhile the field's American instructors were given a short course in French. But when the two groups met in the pressing routine of learning to fly, rote-learned vocabularies...
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