The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black pilots and support crews of the US Army Air Forces, trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, from 1941. The 99th Fighter Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group fought over North Africa, Sicily, Italy and Germany. The Air Force Historical Research Agency counts 992 pilots trained, 112 aerial victories and 96 Distinguished Flying Crosses.
On 7 March 1942 five men completed advanced pilot training at a new airfield outside Tuskegee, Alabama: Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr. and Second Lieutenants Mac Ross, Lemuel R. Custis, Charles H. DeBow Jr. and George S. Roberts. They were the first African Americans to earn their wings in the Army Air Forces. The attack on Pearl Harbor had brought America into the war three months earlier, and its armed forces were strictly segregated.
Nearly a thousand pilots followed them, with many thousands of mechanics, navigators and support staff. They fought on two fronts: in the air over Europe, and at home for the right to serve as equals. The unit records kept by the Air Force Historical Research Agency document both, and both beat the legends.
Segregation and the "experiment"
Before 1941 no Black American could train as a pilot in the US armed forces. On 30 October 1925 the Army War College1 produced a report titled "The Use of Negro Manpower in War", which claimed that Black soldiers were inferior to white ones and unfit for many roles. Such thinking kept Black candidates out of pilot training.
Change came from outside the Army. The Civilian Pilot Training Act of 1939 forbade exclusion by race, and Tuskegee Institute became one of six Black colleges training civilian pilots. Under political pressure, the Army Air Corps activated the all-Black 99th Pursuit Squadron in March 1941. Tuskegee Institute built Moton Field, the only primary flight school for Black Army pilot candidates2 during the war; advanced training followed at the nearby Tuskegee Army Air Field.
Contemporaries often called it the Tuskegee Experiment, and the word carried a charge: many in the Army expected the program to settle whether Black men could fly combat aircraft at all.
The 99th over North Africa and Sicily
Davis, a West Point graduate, took command of the 99th Fighter Squadron in August 1942. The squadron sailed in April 1943 and flew its first combat mission on 2 June 19431, a patrol in P-40 Warhawks from Tunisia against the island of Pantelleria. On 2 July 1943, over Sicily, First Lieutenant Charles B. Hall shot down a German FW 190, the first aerial victory credited to a Tuskegee Airman1. The same day two of his comrades became the first lost in combat.
The first months were judged harshly. A memorandum from the XII Air Support Command, based partly on reports by Colonel William Momyer, the white commander of the group the 99th flew with, called its performance poor and advised against sending a Black fighter group overseas. Davis defended the record in Washington in October 1943. The 99th stayed in combat, its reputation rose over the Anzio beachhead in early 1944, and it earned two Distinguished Unit Citations.
The 332nd and the red tails
Davis went home to take over the 332nd Fighter Group and its 100th, 301st and 302nd Fighter Squadrons. It reached Italy in early 1944 with P-39 Airacobras; by summer it was at Ramitelli, flying P-47 Thunderbolts and then P-51 Mustangs as a bomber escort group of the Fifteenth Air Force. The 99th joined it in July 1944.
To identify the group in the air, its fighters had their tails painted red3, and the pilots became the Red Tails. Between June 1944 and the end of April 1945 they flew 179 bomber escort missions3, often deep into Germany and Austria. On 24 March 1945 they escorted B-17s on the Fifteenth Air Force's longest raid, to Berlin, where Roscoe Brown, Earl Lane and Charles Brantley each shot down an Me 262 jet. The mission brought a Distinguished Unit Citation; several of its Mustangs did not come home.
The price was real. The National Museum of the US Air Force puts it at about 150 Tuskegee Airmen killed in combat or accidents3, and 32 taken prisoner.
Did they never lose a bomber?
The best known claim about the Red Tails is that they never lost a bomber to enemy fighters4. It goes back to 24 March 1945, when the Chicago Defender reported that the 332nd1 had flown its 200th mission without losing a bomber. Escorted bombers had in fact been lost the previous summer, and that very day bombers under its escort were shot down on the Berlin mission.
In 2006 Daniel Haulman, a historian at the Air Force Historical Research Agency, was studying the group's 112 aerial victories when the daily mission reports convinced him that escorted bombers had sometimes been shot down. William Holton of Tuskegee Airmen Incorporated had found the same. His first report, in March 2007, counted 25; further checking of bomber group and missing air crew reports brought the total to 27 bombers shot down by enemy aircraft on 75 of the 179 escort missions.
The correction gives the record proportion rather than shrinking it: the other six fighter groups of the Fifteenth Air Force lost an average of 46 escorted bombers each. The Red Tails were a very good escort group under constant scrutiny, not a flawless legend.
The Freeman Field mutiny, 1945
The 477th Bombardment Group, the only Black bomber group, trained on B-25s under a white commander, Colonel Robert Selway. In March 1945 it moved to Freeman Field, Indiana, where the base had two officers' clubs, officially for trainees and for supervisors. In practice the line was racial, against Army regulations.
The Black officers planned a nonviolent way of desegregating the club, a few men at a time. On 5 and 6 April 1945, 61 of them entered the white officers' club and were arrested. When Selway then ordered every officer to sign a regulation spelling out the separate facilities, 101 of the 422 Black officers at Freeman Field6 refused and were arrested. Only one man was convicted: Lieutenant Roger C. Terry, fined $150 for jostling a provost marshal1.
Davis replaced Selway. In 1995 the Air Force removed the reprimands from the files of the officers who asked for it and cleared Terry's conviction.
After the war
The 477th was still preparing for the Pacific when Japan surrendered. On 26 July 1948 President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981, which declared "equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons7 in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin". On 1 July 1949 the Air Force inactivated its last all-Black units and reassigned their men across the service.
Davis became the first Black general in the Air Force. Congress authorized a Congressional Gold Medal for the Tuskegee Airmen collectively in 2006, and President George W. Bush presented it at the Capitol on 29 March 20071. Moton Field is now the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site.
Why it matters
The Tuskegee Airmen did not end segregation on their own, and the legend of a perfect record does them no favours. The documents show something harder and better: men their own army's planners had called unfit to fly, who flew escort over the Reich while critics waited for them to fail, and in 1945 risked their careers by walking into an officers' club. When the Air Force integrated in 1949, their competence was already in its records.
For more of the war, see our guide to the greatest battles of World War II and the On This Day in Military History calendar.