The Aztec Eagles of WWII: Mexican Air Force Squadron 201
by Mary Jo McConahay
In pre-Columbian times, Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park was a verdant space reserved for the rest and recreation of Aztec rulers. Today it is a fifteen-hundred-acre oasis in the middle of the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. In the park stands a castle where six “Boy Heroes” fell, military cadets defending a hill against U.S. troops in 1847 during the Mexican-American War.
Ironically, another monument stands nearby, this one commemorating a Mexican air unit that flew under U.S. command in World War II. The Mexican Air Force Squadron 201, nicknamed the “Aztec Eagles” by its members, consisted of three hundred pilots and crew trained in the United States who made bombing runs over Luzon and Formosa in 1945 and ferried aircraft from Papua New Guinea to Pacific theater airfields for Allies fighting Japan. Eight of the Aztec Eagles were killed in the line of duty.
The big monument to the Aztec Eagles and the little excitement their name arouses is a contrast that symbolizes Mexico’s split attitude toward participation in the war. Both Washington and Mexico City knew some military participation was necessary to ensure that Mexico would have a seat at the table in the new postwar world order. But for historical reasons, supporting Washington was not a popular cause among the Mexi can people. The United States was the Big Brother to the north who had taken away a large chunk of Mexican territory and threw a long shadow over the country.
Toward the war’s end, however, Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho found a way to support the Allies militarily with a pretext that played upon Mexican pride. In May 1942, two Mexican tankers supplying oil to the United States had been sunk by U-boats, one on the way to New York, the other returning from Pennsylvania. Mexico declared war on the Axis. In 1944, President Ávila Camacho sent the aerial fighter squadron to fight with the Allies and “to clean the national honor” for Mexico’s sunken ships.
After the war, the Aztec Eagles were welcomed back home with a grand parade in Mexico City before being promptly shuttled into the background of the national landscape. The Mexicans received new fighter aircraft and other war matériel through the U.S. Lend-Lease program that aided U.S. allies. But the image of a fighting partnership with Washington did not fit the Mexican profile of independence from the United States. Ávila Camacho’s successor, Miguel Alemán Valdés, turned his back on much of what his predecessor had done—and besides, no one in the ruling party wanted to entertain the prospect of war heroes competing with its handpicked, old-boy network candidates for political offices. The flying veterans faded into history, despite some ceremonial appearances over the years.
More:
https://www.thehistoryreader.com/military-history/aztec-eagles-of-wwii-mexican-air-force-squadron-201/