The Eagle Squadron drew its first blood last week. In a daylight sweep over German-occupied French territory, these U.S. fliers who had volunteered into the R.A.F. had been ordered to cling to the wings of a bomber squadron, and not run jauntily off for dogfights.
It was a dirty, responsible assignment. It was particularly mean now that the Germans had withdrawn substantial numbers of fighters from the Russian battle and brought them back to stop the ever-increasing R.A.F. pestilence, bombings by day and night which carried just about as much weight as the German attacks on Britain last summer.
This was the Eagles' first really large-scale job—though they had had weeks of patrol action.* They did their job really well. Attacked by several Messerschmitts, they shot down three, damaged two others. The youngest of them all, Gregory Augustus Daymond, 20, a Montana-born commercial pilot who once flew in South Africa for an ice-cream king, bagged one. At short range he shot away a " 'schmitter's" aileron, and the plane lurched and floated down so awkwardly that Daymond "didn't wait to see what happened because I was quite satisfied I had got him." Four days later in a similar action Eagle
Daymond shot down his second Nazi plane. But in drawing blood, the Eagles shed it. They lost Pilot Officer William Isaac Hall of Springfield, Vt. But they hoped he was all right; the last they saw of his damaged machine, it was gliding toward open country, wheels down.
* A second Eagle Squadron is nearly ready to undertake offensive action, other trained and training Eagles to be organized into a third, and 48 more young adventurers to be trained into further squadrons.