Some 160 years after the Battle of Camden during the Revolutionary War, British military forces returned to the South Carolina town in the summer of 1941, this time as allies.

They came back because Camden was the site of the first flying school (among six in the Southeast) that trained British cadets to fly during World War II.

Retired Lander University history professor Gilbert Guinn, who earned bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in history from Carolina in 1956, 1958, and 1973, remembers the Brits’ second visit to Camden as a 12-year-old boy.

“They were very friendly and had a terrific sense of humor,” said Guinn, whose fond memories of the Englishmen became the basis for decades of research on the cadets’ experience in the United States. The pilots trained in Camden and also at bases in Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.

Now Guinn’s research has come to fruition in two new books: British Naval Aviation in World War II: The U.S. Navy and Anglo-American Relations (Tauris Academic Studies, London, New York), co-authored with G.H. Bennett, head of humanities at the University of Plymouth in Britain; and The Arnold Scheme: British Pilots, the American South and the Allies’ Daring Plan (The History Press, Charleston, S.C.), which Guinn wrote on his own.

Both books look at how thousands of British aviation cadets were sent to bases in the United States because German air raids and unpredictable weather hampered training in Britain. Guinn’s own book documents the system Gen. Henry “Hap” Arnold, commander of the U.S. Army Air Forces, designed for training the British cadets at 13 Southeastern bases.

Guinn also is working on a third book with Tom Killebrew, a historian at Navarro College in Corsicana, Texas, which will tell how the British established their own flight training schools in the United States.

Guinn donated some 12 boxes of the books’ research materials to Carolina’s South Caroliniana Library. He also donated several hundred aviation books to the Rare Books and Special Collections Division of Carolina’s Thomas Cooper Library.

Together, the books and research materials provide an intriguing glimpse into one of the largely untold stories of military history, a subject that Guinn said “is gaining in popularity and is an excellent example of international cooperation.”