regle and cliffnemo, you may find
SilverWings of interest. From a thread running at
http://www.pprune.org/aviation-histo...a-florida.html
Did you know some of you chaps contributed to the war effort even before starting training? Lifted from the link.
A constant stream of relatively fast unescorted passenger ships crossing the Atlantic, kept the cadets enrolling in 5BFTS at the rate of 100 every nine weeks. The ships had a good safety record made possible by naval intelligence obtained from the ultra secret Enigma code-breaking carried out at Bletchley Park near Milton Keynes. Even so, it required excellent seamanship to avoid contact with the 120 U-Boats operating in the Atlantic on any one day in 1943! One such crossing was dramatic however in May 1941. The "Britannic" was carrying cadets destined for the Arnold Scheme. Unknown to the cadets the ship was being used as bait for the German battlecruisers "Bismarck" and "Prince Eugen". It worked and the German warships sailed into the ambush prepared by the Royal Navy.