The Real Red Tails: Unheard Voices of the Tuskegee Airmen

They came from church pews and scout halls, from mill towns and city classrooms. Some had never stood beside an airplane, but they would learn to live by one. They were told their heads, their hands, even their hearts were not fit for flight. They answered with discipline, courage, and an unbreakable bond. These are the Tuskegee Airmen. In the late 1930s, the world was poised for war. Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, had shaken off their post-World War I doldrums and had emerged as a giant military power, threatening any country that stood in its way. In Asia, the Japanese were not much better, laying siege to China and asserting their superior military power throughout the continent. Then on December 7, 1941, they bombed the American naval base in Pearl Harbor, and a sleeping giant, according to Winston Churchill, was awakened. In America, African Americans were still fighting a war of their own. Seventy years past the end of the Civil War, they still had not been assimilated into the larger American society. Even the American military remained segregated. The military was really only reflecting the segregation and discrimination that was going on in the greater society. That's where that point of view about the inability of blacks to do highly technical tasks, that's where that whole idea evolved. In the White House, President Franklin Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor were sympathetic to the Eleanor, in particular, was looking to help elevate the prominence of African Americans in wider American society. One opportunity began to present itself more and more to Mrs. Roosevelt, recruiting highly qualified black soldiers into a pilot corps to help with the war effort. One of those men was Charles McGee. For Charles McGee, the runway began long before Moton Field. It started with a minister-educator father's creed. Walk straight and tall, help others, and with Boy Scouts and church. That taught respect and resilience. Together, these things accumulated and kind of became the things that guided me through life. He learned early that names would fly before he ever did. Balconies and theaters, slurs on sidewalks, lessons in composure and purpose. Sticks and stones will break my bones, but names won't hurt me any, so that became just a way that I looked at things. Although there was segregation in the school, still it didn't hinder the education that I received. The Army Air Corps had long closed its cockpit doors to black Americans, but a civilian program, CPT, had begun to pry them open years earlier. The aim of that program was to turn out, I think, about 10,000 pilot or flying trainees or flying cadets a year. Black schools were left out. There was an uproar, again, with the black newspapers, black politicians, the whole black community. The War Department relented and permitted blacks to be trained at six black colleges and universities, one of which was Howard University and one of which was Tuskegee. At Howard, a young engineer named Elmer D. Jones took the CPT controls. Because of my interest in aviation, I volunteered happily to learn how to fly, and of course I wouldn't have been able to afford flight training on my own, but this was a wonderful program. Advanced training drew him to Tuskegee, before uniforms, before war, where Chief Charles A. Anderson ran the civilian flight line. It was here that another door opened in the nation's capital. Eleanor Roosevelt has sort of always been sympathetic to the black cause. When, for instance, she went to Tuskegee, she was also taken over to Kennedy Field, where the flying program was underway, and insisted on taking this flight with Chief Anderson, much to the consternation of the Secret Service people who were there. It was an uphill battle, but for this extraordinary group of black airmen, flight was a goal worth fighting for, and Tuskegee was to be the seedbed of their dream. Three years ago, this was just another farm in Alabama. More than trees had to be cleared away, there was misunderstanding, and distrust, and prejudice to be cleared away, and today there are fighter planes flying overhead. By spring 1942, the Army Air Forces would come to Alabama for more than civics lectures. Tuskegee Institute trained primary cadets at Moton Field. The Army built an airfield for basic and advance. The first black pilots earned silver wings, and in the barracks and on the line, standards were unyielding. Colonel Noel Parrish steadied a fledgling program when others sought to fail it. Colonel Parrish, Noel F. Parrish, he said that either you can fly this airplane, or you can't fly it, and you know in those days and times you flew by the seat of your pants. In a way, he saved the program. He personally believed that people should be given the opportunity to prove themselves not relegated just based on their color or other circumstances. All of those instructors were volunteers, and his instruction to them was, if you got a problem, come to me and I'll take care of it. Physical conditioning was as relentless as the syllabus. Strength was safety. You have to be in physical conditioning all the way in order to fly that airplane. Physical conditioning was say 60, 70 percent of flying. Another path fed Tuskegee's ranks. In Philadelphia, a teenager chased a dream into the enlistment office. When the war started, I was only 15 years old, and so there was a little chance that I was going to be going in the service. However, I did have the fine bug, so I started buying all of the aviation magazines I could find and studying up on aviation in general. I finally end up in the customs house of Philadelphia. Big sign, sign up. So I go up to the recruiting sergeant and I said, I want to be a pilot. So he says, you do? He says, okay, well fill out these forms. So I filled out several forms, and I'm thinking this is some kind of joke. I told him, I says, hey, who are you kidding? You know, they don't want colored people to fly. He says, oh no, we have a program at Tuskegee. You haven't heard about it? No. He says, yeah, they're training black pilots. Broadwater's path wound through basic at Keesler, retests that cut classmates in half, and into primary at Moton Field, where exhilaration met risk. We had one classmate, four of us in the room, and he was definitely afraid of the airplane. That particular gentleman, finally on his last day, and I believe they were about to wash him out if he did not solo on this last flight. Anyway, I'd come down from a solo flight, and I went over and looked at the board, and I saw he wasn't, he was not on the ground. He was up flying. I hear the ambulance go tearing out of the compound, and you know, a chill went up my spine, and they'd had a minor collision in the traffic pattern. One of them got killed, my roommate. That was probably the saddest time of my whole career in the service. At West Point, to run the program, the Army chose Benjamin O. Davis, a tough but fair graduate of West Point. Davis was born in Washington, D.C., and was the son of an Army infantryman. He was trained by his father to be resilient and strategic. At West Point, he was given the silent treatment by his fellow cadets for the entirety of his matriculation, yet he persisted. Training pressed on. BT-13s, AT-6s, B-25s. Skills sharpened for fighters and bombers alike. Everything would be needed. Across the rails, McGee and Francis learned the Mason-Dixon by soot and seating. Then the cadet grind, eyes recalibrated to horizons, and the joy of first solo. It was a real, a real thrill to realize that suddenly you've got the stick, and there's nobody back there or in front of you, rather, watching you to see whether you're doing it right. You're on your own. The 99th Pursuit Squadron shipped to North Africa. Their P-40s were tough, their welcome mixed. The 332nd would form at Selfridge Field, then to Michigan under a West Pointer who wore duty like a spine, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr. We had great admiration for him. The manner in which he walked about and so on was inspiring and fearsome in a way, too. At first, the 332nds was told to do harbor and coastal patrol. They flew Bell P-39 Airacobras in Italy. Less horsepower, a different fight. Then the skies changed. We went directly to Italy after completing training in December of 43. They fought lies, they fought heartbreak, and they won. Now they fight the enemy on his own soil. Over Vienna, McGee's rat race began. Altitude unwinding, tracers crossing, heart rates up. The enemy aircraft approaching were spotted, and you're usually dispatched by a flight of two or four, and that's where what we call the rat racing begins. You're maneuvering to try to get on the tail. If they persist and don't outrun you going home, to get on their tail and destroy the aircraft. You don't try to take a life. You'd hope that pilot, if you do damage aircraft, gets a chance to bail out, but you don't think about that then because somebody might be trying to, and is trying to get on your tail. They escorted bombers deep into Germany and the Balkans. Their fighters flashed red, warning opponents and inspiring allies. The red tails stayed close, by order and by conviction. Our commander, General Davis, told his pilots that you're here to protect those bombers, and to paraphrase what he might have said, he told them that don't go off looking for victories on your own. In all the escort missions that we flew deep into Europe, we never lost a bomber to enemy aircraft. Mechanics kept Mustangs lethal. Service squadrons rebuilt what Flak tore. Elmer Jones commanded those quiet victories. Wing changes and changes of landing gears, extensive repair of the aircraft skin, engine changes, things like that, that was turned over to us. I would like to have seen more recognition given to the support troops, you know, people behind the heroes, you might say. Not all roads reach combat. Broadwater's B-25 group never deployed. The war ended as bomb bays waited, but the fight for a cockpit didn't stop with VJ Day. Upon getting out of the service, I got out on March 46, because I needed to get back to school. I realized that I didn't have much of a future without even a high school education, so I then went and applied for a job with an airline as a pilot. This guy shows up, PR guy, very dapper, you know, a little briefcase, and he said the Airline Pilots Association has an agreement with and it says they will not hire Negroes. I said, you gotta be joking. He turned to air traffic control, climbed to senior executive service, and helped craft the rules that light our night skies. McGee returned to stateside after 136 combat missions, 80-plus in tactical P-39s, 50-plus in P-47s and P-51s. There were no parades in Tuskegee, but there was more flying to do. Then we returned to Tuskegee and entered instructor training because we began to replace the white pilots that had taught us. Korea called for his hands again. Same Mustang, new mountains and tree lines. P-51 pilots were in immediate demand. It's a different regime and a different type of flying. It's all with all low altitude, in and among the trees, and finding the targets and working to support the protection of our troops on the ground. Then jets in the Philippines, later reconnaissance over Vietnam, outrunning tracers at night, dodging hits by day. We were preparing to do some daylight reconnaissance in the area and intelligence hadn't, I guess they knew something was there, they weren't sure what it was because they hadn't told us to expect the type of fire that was thrown back at us. They were firing away at us. They'd turned those guns away from army targets and on us, took a hit out in the wing, and fortunately it was in the wing because if it had been in the cockpit, I'm not sure I'd be here to talk about it. At Maxwell Field, integration on paper met whites only in parks and barbershops. McGee kept his bearing and explained the inexplicable to a daughter within blocks of a forbidden swing set. The Air Force had declared integration. It was a very slow operation in many areas, in particular the south, and Maxwell had not changed that that much. In fact, one of my early experiences there was sitting down in the barber chair, the barber shop, and suddenly the white barber realized that I was Negro and he didn't cut Negro hair. I had had to explain to Charlene, who was still a little past the toddling stage, but explained to her we had found a home, a rental home, a block from a park, but the park was still only white only. In time, he would command at home and overseas, fly 27 of 30 active duty years, and help draw a map for a service where skill displaced color. Looking back on the career, you can see that progress and the change, so it gives you a good feeling that what you aspired and held out there as a target was still slowly becoming a possibility, that you were treated based on your ability and so on and not color. The chief of staff at that time made the announcement that Colonel McGee had more combat hours and more flying hours than any single pilot in the United States Air Force. Integration didn't arrive with a fanfare. It arrived in orders, in assignments, and in the quiet competence that closed the argument. Segregation was inefficient for the military, for the Air Force, because it didn't permit the prudent distribution of talent where it was needed. In time, the nation would pin a fourth star on Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and salute a general whose standard became a beacon for cadets across the nation. As I and others look back on it, the impact that General Davis had on the military, the Air Force, and the nation at that time is as significant as the war itself, World War II itself, because that was truly a turning point in my mind for the nation. Today, we advance to the rank of four-star general Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a hero in war, a leader in peace, a pioneer for freedom, opportunity, and basic human dignity. He earned this honor a long time ago. Our armed forces today are a model for America and for the world of how people of different backgrounds working together for the common good can perform at a far more outstanding level than they ever could have divided. Perhaps no one is more responsible for that achievement than the person we honor today. To all of us, General Davis, you are the very embodiment of the principle that from diversity we can build an even stronger unity and that in diversity we can find the strength to prevail and advance. They fought the enemy and the stereotype. They proved that discipline, not myth, defines an aviator. They proved that teams win wars. Pilots, crew chiefs, armorers, service squadrons, commanders, and spouses. The men who wore red tails rarely spoke first to themselves. They spoke of what the experience should still mean. That's been our goal, preserve the legacy, motivate young people, particularly minorities, to mentor them into the aviation and aerospace career. For the importance it means to our country, preserving our freedom, being willing to serve a country even with its problems. When asked if it was worth it through balcony seats, barbershop refusals, night tracers, and day hits, the answers land where they began. Duty, dignity, discipline, and the sky open.