Great information. My father was an American licensed pilot who volunteered for the RAF program and went to the RAF flight school in Miami, OK in 1942. He had received a Piper Cub J-3 for his 18th birthday in 1940 in Detroit and earned his private pilots license after that and he sold his airplane to support his family after his father died and he volunteered for this program.
It's my understanding that his classmates were all American pilots and they completed OCS (Officers Candidate School) while in Flight School. When he graduated he was a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Air Corp and received RAF Wings and Army Air Corp Wings on graduation day. He continued his Army Air Corp training in Palm Springs and March Air Force Base and then spent about 6 months ferrying fighters, transports and bombers to Great Britain. He said he thinks he flew the Atlantic in almost every airplane in the inventory of planes the USA was sending to Great Britain.
He then was primarily a transport pilot in Africa, India and the Pacific, and finished the war as a captain and pilot for a well known General based on Guam, regularly flying to Hawaii and Manila in C-46 and C-47. He then went on to McCord AFB and then March AFB and retired several years after the introduction of the B-47 at March AFB.
He did talk of a few tense moments and fists flying after his first few flights to Great Britain, when he and his American buddies would walk into an RAF Officers club for the first time wearing RAF wings, and the Brits thinking they were fake. Later some of those RAF pilots became his life long friends. Their was a group of former graduates of the Miami, OK flight school that used to get together, but I'm sure most of them, like my dad, are now gone.
Thanks for all the great info, my dad rarely talked about those days.