The military has always been a conservative environment, but the American military before the Second World War was also extremely racist and consistently segregated, as was the whole of American society. According to white generals, black soldiers, then called Negroes, lacked “physical courage” and “psychological virtues”, making them “inherently inferior” to white soldiers. And because they were, they were not allowed to fly or handle heavy equipment.
But the army was not inviolable either. Under pressure from the NAACP, the Negro Press Agency and some more liberal congressmen to create a tactical unit for blacks, they had to give in.
In July 1941, months before America entered the war, the 99th Pursuit Squadron was formed to include black pilots who had completed their training at Tuskegee. The school curriculum was made specifically for black young men who wanted to become military pilots, of course with a fig in their pocket and the intention that none of them would succeed. They really did their best to do that. Cadets had to endure humiliation, injustice and the double rules of the game just to prove that they could fly, if only someone would give them a chance.
Niger
Alexander Jefferson was shot down over Germany in August 1944. He was trying to hit a German radar station when anti-aircraft defences hit him. He crashed the plane and was incapacitated. As he regained his awareness of the world around him, he saw a German rifle pointing at him. Someone shouted at him, “Naeger! Naeger!”
Alexander thought, “Oh, shit! Not even in Germany!” When he recalled the incident decades later, he laughed out loud, and he didn’t feel like laughing then. He thought that the German soldier was humiliating him, like the Americans, with a slang term for a busty woman. It turned out that it was just the German pronunciation of the word nigger.
When a soldier brought him as a prisoner before his superior, a German officer saluted him. “I was treated like an officer throughout my time as a prisoner of war”, he recalled how the German enemy showed him respect that his compatriots never did.
Alexander also successfully carried out part of the so-called Tuskegee Experiment, as the 477th Bomb Group, founded in 1944, was called. Until then, black pilots had only been allowed to fly single-engine or twin-engine aircraft, but now it was decided to train them to fly bombers. Again, with a fig in their pocket.
As they had already flown many missions over European theatres, they were sent back to America to train on B25 bombers. In Indiana, they got into disputes with their white colleagues. They accused them of openly defying the whites in the white officers’ club, and 100 black officers ended up behind bars. It was up to a young lawyer, Thurood Marshal, to set them free, and he did so, only one of them was later convicted and had to pay a fine.
The Tuskegee leadership has flagrantly broken all the rules with segregated officer clubs. Officers’ clubs were not just for relaxation and fun. Traditionally, the commanding officer went there and all his subordinates followed him. They stayed as long as he stayed, because by socialising they strengthened their bonds with each other.
When the new commander of Tuskegee told the black airmen bluntly that they were inferior to the white airmen, that he would not allow racial mixing and that black officers were not allowed to join the “white” officers’ club, he not only damaged relations, but he also let the black officers know that they were not really officers at all.
Colonel Noel Parrish was much better placed to lead the base, which had a total of around 2 000 black soldiers and support staff. On 3 August 1943, 12 black officers entered the white section of the restaurant, which stood on the ground floor of the base. They were trying to order food.
A white waiter asked them to move to the black section. They showed him a letter from the Ministry of Defence, which said that they could not be refused favours on the basis of race on the base.
Colonel Parrish got involved and persuaded the white officers to allow their black colleagues to eat where they wanted. This peacefully made the restaurant racially integrated.
No room for blacks
Hiram Mann was already “old” when he joined the army. He was 21 and married. One day he arrived at the base to go on an important mission. The army doctor did not allow him or his comrades to take off. They had no time to rest after the last flight.
Another pilot was in Mann’s plane, which he affectionately called Boss Lady, or Mistress, as he affectionately called his wife. He did not return. “I often think about this. I think to myself: the hand of God.”
And there was nothing godly about training black soldiers to be pilots, navigators, mechanics and other personnel needed at the airport. The army chose Tuskegee because the Tuskegee Institute had all the necessary infrastructure and had already been training civilian pilots before the war.
The army took care of everything else. For example, it built special, segregated living quarters, because blacks were not allowed to live with white soldiers. The army also had full control over training. It supplied the planes, the study books, the clothes, the parachutes and everything the cadets needed. To enrol, they had to have graduated from college, be nearing the end of their studies, or have passed a demanding entrance exam.
In March 1942, America got its first five black pilots, and they got their silver wings. More than 1,000 more black pilots were trained in Tuskegee by 1946.
Carl Johnson was 18 years old when he was ordered to report to Tuskegee. The army paid for his and 14 other black cadets’ tickets for a dormitory in which they would spend the 24-hour ride from Fort Worth to Texas, Alabama, in comfort.
They arrived at the train station. “The train driver said to us: ‘No, you don’t get a sleeper. One of the future classmates rebelled, saying that they would not get on the train until they were let into the sleeping car. “But they told us, ‘Either you get on the train or you go to jail’.” And they got on the train.
They were given their first seats behind the locomotive. The army bought them food vouchers, but they couldn’t eat because blacks weren’t allowed in the dining car. So they rode hungry for hours until the train stopped briefly in New Orleans and one of them jumped on to do some shopping.
They arrived in Tuskegee in the middle of the night. The station was small, with one side reserved for whites and the other for blacks. “The officer who came to pick us up said to us, ‘You are a really miserable bunch.'” And they did look miserable, because the smog from the locomotive was constantly escaping through the window into the carriage.
The military base they came to was segregated, and the city was segregated. Johnson went there maybe once or twice in the course of his schooling. He was not tempted.
As he started his studies just before the end of the war, he should have finished in October 1946, but he was absent for two weeks due to an appendicitis operation. By the time he returned, 12 pilots from his year had their “wings”. He did not believe that he had also passed the school. “I was sure I was going to be eliminated.” He would not be the first. Dozens of students from the final year were flown out of the black pilot and navigator program.
“I was allowed to go to Atlanta for the weekend. When I came back, they told me they were looking for me. There was a general in Tuskegee who was in charge of all this. They told him about this last cadet they still had.” That was him, the last cadet to graduate from the pilot school in Tuskegee.
That was in 1946, so he could no longer serve in the Second World War, but he remained in the army. It was formally desegregated in 1948, but “many countries ignored it”. When he was stationed at Enid Air Force Base in Oklahoma, he had to share a room with a supply handler because they had no room for a black pilot.
He eventually joined the National Guard in Ohio. “They had one black unit. They didn’t have one black anywhere in the division, only in our battalion. We were all blacks. Even the commander was black.” Nevertheless, Johnson made a career in the army. During his 31 years of service, he flew in the Korean War and was an air battalion commander in Vietnam.
He was decorated several times, but he did not talk about it, just as his older colleagues returning from combat did not talk about their war successes during his schooling. “Not once did they mention that their plane had been hit. They never bragged, not even a little. I didn’t even know what they had achieved, I only found out much later. All I knew was that they were good pilots because I had flown with them.”
Silence on days gone by
The daughter of Malvin Greston Whitfield, better known by his nickname Marvelous Mal, only found out that her father was a Tuskegee Airman when CNN called to interview him. They mentioned his war story in passing, wanting to talk to him because he was a two-time Olympic champion in the middle-distance event.
One of his colleagues from Tuskegee still recalled at his grave how he ran even in Ohio and how no one could believe how he reconciled his obsession with running with his military service. He won two Olympic gold medals in London in 1948 and set an Olympic record in the 800 metres. The fact that he had won bronze in the 400 metres was no longer on anyone’s mind when he won two gold medals.
Neither did his daughter, which made her think all the more about why her father had not told her about his war career. She called him. “He laughed and cried on the phone, but he didn’t want to tell me anything,” she later explained. Only eventually did he open up and explain that he didn’t want to remember a time when it was really hard to be an African-American in the army.
He told her that those were the hardest years of his life. Never before and never since had he experienced so much injustice and humiliation. Then he told her about how close he and his comrades had been, how they had helped each other to be able to handle the worst equipment they could get.
But it wasn’t just during school that it was hard. When they finished, they were sent to the battlefields, where they got into more conflicts, this time with their white comrades. Racism in the American ranks was also strong on the battlefields, so the black pilots of Tuskegee had to fight their way out on their own.
They flew over Sicily, Europe and North Africa, while the Red-Tailed Angels, as bomber crews were called when they weren’t called Lone Eagles or Blacks, pierced the skies of the Mediterranean. They successfully destroyed more than 260 enemy aircraft, sank one ship and destroyed many buildings. Many of them died in battle, but nobody talked about it. They were black.
On 24 March 1944, a fleet led by Colonel Benjamin O. Davis flew from Ramitelli, Italy, and escorted a group of bombers to Berlin. It was their longest escort mission of World War II, as 43 fighter aircraft helped the B-17 bombers make their way into the heart of Germany and back.
The mission was to destroy the Daimler Benz tank factory in Berlin, but it was heavily guarded. Anti-aircraft fire thundered from the ground and German planes took to the air. They were much faster than the American planes, but it is true that the American planes were easier to manoeuvre and ran out of fuel later than the German planes. The supposedly incompetent black pilots took advantage of this and made the best of the bad planes they had. They ended up shooting down three German planes and destroying a Daimler Benz tank factory.
They returned to the base glorified, but it was all over when they returned home. Jefferson recalled, “We got on a boat, we came into New York harbour, the flags were flying, there was the Statue of Liberty. We went down the gangplank and a soldier on the bottom said, ‘Whites to the right, blacks to the left.'” That was the heroes’ welcome.
Among them was Robert Martin, who flew 63 and a half combat sorties during the war. That half would have become his 64th flight if he had not been shot down over what was then Yugoslavia.
Eleanor, ally of black pilots
Black pilots flew more than 1000 combat sorties over Europe and North Africa, even though their superiors did not believe in them. Dozens of them died trying to save their planes from enemy fire, but even that was not talked about, even though they had a powerful ally behind them.
In April 1941, months before America entered the war, Eleanor Roosevelt visited Tuskegee. A black drill instructor offered to show her around the training grounds from an aeroplane. He had learned to fly himself, in a plane he had bought years before with his savings.
Eleanor agreed, but because she was a damned politician and not just the President’s wife, she demanded to be photographed and filmed. The result was a series of photographs and a 40-minute film, which she used to pressure her husband to allow the creation of a black unit and to persuade people to raise their voices for black airmen.
But they fared worse in Tuskegee. By 1943, the army had organised the 99th Pursuit Squadron and three more as part of 33 Squadron. All four were trained for combat, and Tuskegee was also the training ground for the squadrons’ reserve pilots.
Because segregation was strict, African-Americans could only train at Tuskegee, which meant that by 1944 it was completely overcrowded. The lack of space was embarrassing and humiliating. It was clear to the men that the government would rather cram them into a single building than allow them to train with white airmen. As a result, their morale went down.
Overcrowding has also been inefficient and costly. Even when there were plenty of other airports available, the government did not give in. Thus, at the height of the training at Tuskegee, there were as many as 600 cadets, some of whom were just starting out and others who were about to graduate. There was always a complete crowd in the classrooms and corridors, which also made the drills slower. And because they were, the crowds were even bigger.
However, because the training was too slow, not as many pilots came out of the school as they should have. The rule dictated that fighter pilots had to stay on the ground after 50 combat sorties because these sorties were too exhausting and dangerous. Instead of being sent home and given new assignments, black pilots had to fly at least 70 to 80 combat sorties in a row before they were allowed to rest.
On the contrary, they had far too many officers. In fact, there were five or six times too many, and because they had no work, they started inventing new jobs for them, and almost everybody got an assistant, and the assistant got an assistant.
Daniel Cappie James Jr. started his career in Tuskegee when he joined the Air Force in July 1943. At the end of the war, he remained in the army and flew in the Korean and Vietnam wars. In 1969, he was appointed Commander of the Tripoli Air Base. In Libya, the previous year, a putsch led by Colonel Gaddafi had ousted the reigning monarch, King Idris, from his throne.
Now Gaddafi has ordered the Americans to close their large air base, but before it could be formally handed over to the state, Gaddafi deployed his forces there.
James later recalled, “One day Gaddafi was leading a convoy of semi-trucks. They drove straight through the living quarters of my base at full speed. I closed the ramp and met Gaddafi just a few metres from the ramp. He had a prestigious gun and a current, and he had his hand on it. I had my .45 pistol on my belt. I told him to take his hand off the stream. If he tried to pull the gun out, he would never be able to open the stream. He never sent any more semi-trucks.”
Because he was so calm in the eyes of Gaddafi, Daniel James was promoted to Brigadier. He was not the only Tuskegee graduate who managed to get a rank. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became the first black general in the US Air Force. Lucius Theus retired as a Major General after devoting most of his 36-year career to improving the military bureaucracy.
After the war, when people talked about war heroes, hardly anyone had black soldiers in front of their eyes. They faded into the background, and many became involved in the struggle for the rights of black Americans, challenging historians who wrote the stories a little differently.
“We fought the Nazis and won. Then we had to go back home and fight racism. And we were going to win this battle too”, one of them recalled.
And they got it. Their wartime achievements have dispelled the previously held belief that they were not intelligent or coordinated enough to fly planes. They have also done away forever with the belief that they are not patriotic and brave. Thus, after the war, many remained in the army and took up important positions.
In the end, the army ended segregation, at least formally, before the country did: until April 1948, black and white soldiers were segregated, when they were reunited, and that was before President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, desegregating the armed forces.
In 2007, when President George W. Bush, whose father was a fighter pilot, finally gave the elderly graduates of Tuskegee an acknowledgement of their wartime achievements and an apology for their attitude, they were photographed as if they were a fortune. Captain Art Pruitt quipped on one occasion, “These guys are rock stars.” They weren’t during the war.
