S3 E9 - The Tuskegee Airmen: Making America the GREATEST

Black pilots of World War II were virtually unknown outside the Negro Press of the time, until Charles Francis named them The Tuskegee Airmen is his 1950s book with their name as its title.  After two motion pictures and numerous documentaries they now have their own holiday and parks highways and bridges named after them.

What is the truth about these men?  Who were they, what did they do, and is their story a war story or a civil rights struggle?

There certainly was racism in America in the 1940’s, but how did that compare to the rest of the world?  There were people fighting for equality, but who was doing the fighting?  It was people - Americans -  black and white.

The Tuskegee American as black Americans indeed fought against the Nazis, only because America made it possible.

Commentary on trending issues brought to you with a moderate perspective.

Transcript

From unsung fighting men in the nineteen fifties, to heroes of the twenty-twenties, the legend of The Tuskegee Airmen is a hard one to live up to.  Is their story one of fighting Racism, or fighting the Nazis, today on The Tenth Man.

Everyone knows about the Tuskegee Airmen nowadays.  They have been recognized by President George W. Bush with a congressional medal.   Interstate 75 in Detroit is named after them.  This Thursday, the fourth Thursday in March is Tuskegee Airmen Day. There have been movies, books and documentaries to tell their story, and they are famous for never having lost a bomber to enemy fighters, and for fighting for a country that did not appreciate their sacrifice. But is there not a bit more to this story?

People telling the story always say that American Negroes have fought in all our nation’s wars, without giving sources or details.  We’ll go back just to the Civil War, in 1863, right after the Battle of Gettysburg.  

Union losses were so large, and the war had gone on for so long, and many volunteers’ enlistments were ending, such that the country began drafting young men. They didn’t draft women, and they didn’t draft Black Americans.  They only drafted white men.  So young Irish men fleeing the great famine and landing in New York found themselves being forced to go fight to free slaves, while free blacks were not so obligated.  The white boys rioted and the New York Times defended its building just like the Rooftop Koreans in the Rodney King riots, except the Times used fully automatic weapons.  The New York Times deployed gatling guns on its steps to protect its property from angry white boys who didn’t want to go to war to free the negro. 

The same thing happened in Montreal in 1917.  After the WWI Battle of the Somme, Canada started drafting French Canadian boys who didn’t feel like they should have to fight for England or France either one.  When they failed to volunteer in the same numbers as Canadian Anglophones, conscription began, and riots were the result. Five men were killed in a weekend of rioting when fired on by Canadian troops. 

You see fighting a war and discrimination are both way more complicated than mere black and white, and all armies have historically been segregated by geography, culture, race and other factors.

We’ll talk some more about WWI because it’s the prelude to WWII for the Tuskegee airmen.  Just like the battle of the Somme, the German spring offensive of 1918 drained the allies of troops.  Russia was in revolution and Germany’s eastern front collapsed.  Hundreds of thousands of German troops were coming west and the allies needed help.

Democrats in the American South didn’t want a repeat of the Civil War, with only white boys dying. So the Southern draft boards sent proportionally more black boys to be soldiers than white.  Once they got to training and were sent overseas, the Army found the draft boards had pushed through many negro boys who were physically or mentally unqualified.  Pershing was faced with quotas from the civil rights supporters and unqualified soldiers from the Jim Crow south.  Every slot filled by an African American who could not do the job, represented a slot of manpower that was missing.  So in the interwar years the Army commissioned a study to create a policy for using African Americans.  This was the famous study of 1925 which supposedly determined blacks could not fight with whites because they were inferior. 

The 1925 study evaluated the past poor performance of black troops, including in WWI, and explained why it was not their fault, using the science of the day.  The Army did not create discrimination, it reflected the discrimination rampant in the world which was slowly being overcome in the United States, as our heritage and Constitution forced us to do so.

People of color were not universally considered unsuited for combat; the defeat of Custer’s 7th cavalry by the Sioux or the British by the Zulu just a few years prior would erase any such notion.  But one thing the US learned from the Europeans as well as in their own Indian Wars was that some tribes were more warlike than others, and the science of the day was applied to the culture of the American Negro.  You may have read excerpts of the study but probably missed the gist of it.

First, the Army didn’t want to be forced to accept unqualified recruits from the Jim Crow south just to make sure blacks were killed in the same numbers as whites, blacks having borne only 3% of the casualties in WWI despite being 11% of the population. 

Second the Army didn’t want to be a laboratory for the Civil Rights Cause for groups like the NAACP which also wanted the Army to accept Negro boys without conditions, just like the Jim Crow Democrats.  Black leaders said that the Russians had no trouble using peasant boys in battle.   Of course the Russians sacrificed those boys in human wave attacks in WWII but the Army was accused of racism when it saved them from such a fate.

Third, the Army bent over backwards giving African Americans opportunities.  It was so hard to find qualified negroes to commission as officers – many were court martialed for cowardice in WWI – that the Army doubled up on officers in black units.  A white officer was assigned to mentor each black officer to ensure the success of the unit, and spare the black soldier the dangers of poor leadership. 

The Army stated all the science opposed to using black troops, but concluded that the negro should be allowed to prove himself fit for any and all duties, and to be assigned anywhere he was capable.  But only according to his ability, not according to any quota.

There are two important facts about the data in the 1925 study which are overlooked.  The first one is that the “inferiority” level of the draftees was tied more closely to geography than to race.  Education in the south was decades behind that of the north.  Mental test scores of African Americans lagged behind those of whites mainly because most blacks lived in the south.  Taken on a geographic basis, Ohio boys did better than Mississippi boys, and all draftees from the northern states, white or black, scored higher on Army aptitude tests than did white boys from the south.  You can view graphs of the scores by state right in the report and see for yourself.

But one state is missing from the comparison.  New York, Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania are all compared to the southern states.  But not Michigan.  Why not?

Because the boys from Michigan were extra dumb.  It’s the truth.  Michigan had something called “the goiter belt”.  A large number of Michigan boys were born to mothers who had an iodine deficiency during pregnancy and developed goiter.  These boys were of reduced mental capacity compared to average, and it was the same Army testing that discovered it.   Yet there were no rights advocates demanding these young men be made Army officers.  So again, it’s culture and health, nature and nurture, and life is way more complex than skin color. 

In fact racism against blacks in America was the least of the world’s problems.  Eighty two years ago in April 1942, Jimmy Doolittle’s bombers, sixteen B-25’s, took off from the USS Hornet to bomb Japan, then flying on to China.  The Japanese executed two of the flyers as war criminals in retaliation.   That’s terrible but insignificant.  Because they then executed 250,000 Chinese to punish those who had given food, shelter and aid to the Americans.  Racism in America?  The Japanese butchered millions of members of their very own race. 

Nor were the Europeans free from prejudice.  The French and British drafted troops, men of color, from their colonies to fight for them, and many died in higher numbers than did the British and French citizens.  Many others in their colonies starved, such as the Bengal Famine which killed possibly 3.8 million people in 1943.  

After the Battle of France in 1940, the Germans executed between one and two thousand Black Senegalese fighting for the French. Previously, in the interwar years, when the French sent black colonials to occupy the Rhine valley, Germany forced sterilization on any mixed-race children that resulted. 

Then there were the Jews under the Nazis.  Speaking of the Jews, the Army stated in its study that it should not give special treatment to the negro, any more than it should to the Italian or the Jew. 

America, then as now was less racist than the rest of the world. And although today’s America haters want you to think that the blacks were just victims and that civil rights was the only thing they thought about,  in fact, like most of us, they recognized we lived in an imperfect world and were making their way as best they could.

While there were strong black leaders pushing for the advancement of black Americans, it was white Americans who made it happen.  WWI General John Pershing who commanded the American Expeditionary Force and loaned black regiments to the French, had proudly commanded the Buffalo Soldiers in the 1916 expedition into Mexico pursuing Pancho Villa.  Later, as Commandant of West Point this “Black Jack” Pershing told the Corps of Cadets they would do well to become soldiers as fine as the black troops he had led.

 The black press and civil rights organizations pushed for blacks to be trained as aviators, but it was white leaders who made it happen.  Senator Henry Schwartz  pushed for it in a March 1939 bill, and a white president – FDR – took action, ordered the first squadron formed in March of 1941.  America started the Tuskegee Experiment before WWII even began with the start of training, and the first black squadron was formed before America entered the war.  Five million scarce dollars were allocated and the training airfield was built in six months.

The Tuskegee Airmen are remembered most for the exploits of the 332nd Fighter Group comprising four squadrons flying P39s, P-40s, P47s and P51s.  They flew in Africa and Italy doing first ground support and later bomber escort missions.   They did a commendable job considering on the one hand that by the time they were deployed in 1943 the enemy air forces were getting weaker from attrition, but  German pilots were never rotated home so surviving experienced pilots continued to fight right up through the end of the war.  The 99th Pursuit Squadron, deployed a year before the other three squadrons of the group, suffered considerable losses.  Also, as a segregated unit, they were their own mentors; while assigned to white fighter groups, they had no experienced combat pilots flying with their own squadron.  These are personal observations and I could not say what the impact was.

There have been complaints that the airmen flew obsolete planes.  The Army put planes into service appropriate to the role, and the white Army pilots flying P-39s on Guadalcanal the previous autumn – if they had any complaints they fell on deaf ears.  That airplane and the P-47 were commonly used as ground attack planes throughout the war.  The Aztek Eagles, the Mexican squadron flying ground attack with the US in the Pacific was still in P47s in 1945.  By 1944, the four black squadrons were merged into a single fighter group, and they moved to bomber escort duty in newer planes.

While we tend to remember the pilots, don’t forget we were fielding entire squadrons of negroes in every role.  This was the challenge the Army had to meet. Democrats would not tolerate putting blacks and whites together, so the Army had to create a complete fighting force.   The Tuskegee Airmen were not just pilots.

There were black pilots, sure,  but also black mechanics, black armorers, black instrument repair men, black tin benders – aviation structural mechanics, and handlers of bombs and fuel.  In addition to truck drivers, parachute riggers, runway and building maintenance men, postal clerks, and every other role required of the modern air force.  Including the corporals, sergeants and technical sergeants, all intelligent and highly trained black men, to keep it all going. 

On the officer’s side there were also doctors, supply officers, chaplains, meteorologists and navigators.

Was this a victory for Black Americans? Why it was a victory for America period.  No other Army in the world accomplished this.

We said there were many other roles besides pilots and named some ground crewmen who were enlisted.   Were there enlisted air crew, and more important, who was Sergeant Kinchloe, the black radio operator in Stalag 13 of Hogan’s Heroes? 

Supposedly taken prisoner in 1942, the character of Kinch, from Detroit and seemingly named for one of Michigan’s SAC bases, Kinch was a token, because the prisoners in Luft Stalags were all air crew.  Kinch could have been a radio gunner on a bomber but we sent none of those to Europe with black crewmen.  We’ll talk about this scandal near the close. 

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The Tuskegee Experiment was a victory for all Americans.  While the American study in 1925 said – perhaps cautiously – that the negro should be permitted to perform any job where he is able, Britain’s Royal Air Force specifically banned any but Europeans from flying its planes starting with its creation in WWI.  Canada followed Britain’s policy and while the US was training pilots by the hundreds in 1941, Canada allowed but a single black pilot to slip through and not until a year later. 

If you still doubt that America was the least racist, or that nationality matters more than race, then you should know the story of the 303 squadron of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain.  They were experienced combat pilots of the Polish Air Force who had fought the Germans in Poland and France.  After having shot down Messerschmitts in 1939 flying obsolete high-wing fighters with only two machine guns, coming to England the British treated them like losers.  Assigned to a segregated squadron, they were put into months of training,  told to speak English, made to ride bicycles to simulate formation flying until finally on yet another training flight they broke away to attack a formation of Germans they spotted, and after shooting one down, forced the British to declare them an operational squadron.  Flying Hurricanse rather than the nimble Spitfires  – this one squadron of “Polacks” as they were called – plus a Czech – shot down more Germans planes than any other squadron in the Roual Air Force, despite joining the Battle of Britain two months later.  The Tuskegee Airmen were not treated any worse than these white men, and certainly did not perform any better. 

The Poles were so good, the planes they had flown in Poland were so old, that they struggled to remember to drop the landing gear on their modern Hurricane fighters so as not to belly land.  The planes in Poland had had a fixed undercarriage. 

 The Tuskegee Airmen may have been treated poorly but it wasn’t because they were different from anyone else. They were treated the same as everyone else.

You have to respect the Tuskegee Airmen because they fought for this country and did a commendable job.  Most of us never have the privilege of serving this country in combat and many of these men did, and they are part of The Greatest Generation.  

But don’t make the mistake of believing what you are told about them in either the Hollywood movies or on the history channel.  The movie Tuskegee Airmen starting Cuba Gooding and Laurence Fishburne ends with a full screen print saying “The 332nd Fighter Group never lost a single bomber to enemy action”’ 

That’s just false.  This myth was invented by the Negro Press during the war when loss records were still classified, and no one could prove it false until it had become part of the myth.  It’s fake news, so don’t blame the pilots themselves who never claimed this.

Well not totally fake because their loss record was very good. 

There’s another myth that they didn’t lose bombers because they stayed with them.  Staying with the bombers was 15th Air Force policy, and the bomber groups applauded the practice before the 332nd ever escorted its first bomber. 

Besides, there usually was one fighter group flying escort outbound to the target and another group on the return. The group on return escort might send one squadron on a fighter sweep, but again this was 15th Air Force standard practice.

That’s the policy so let’s look at the results.   The statistics say the Tuskegee Airmen did not do so well when it came to closing with and destroying the enemy.  They were in the war zone for twenty-three months, almost two years, and flew about 1600 missions.  They shot down 112 aircraft, or 0.07 enemy planes per mission. 

By comparison the white pilots in the 357th fighter group were in combat just over half as long – 15 months – flew one fifth as many missions – 313 – yet had more than five times as many kills – 609.  They shot down exactly half as many planes as the Tuskegee Airmen did – 56 - on one day alone.  Their kills per mission was over 1.9 or twenty seven times the rate of the black pilots.

The Polish pilots in the RAF squadron we mentioned earlier shot down 58 planes between August 30 and October 11, 1940 and they were just one squadron.  One squadron shot down half as many planes in six weeks as the entire Tuskegee Airmen fighter group did in two years.

The History Channel tells the story of the Gruesome Twosome and the day 1LT Lee Archer became an Ace.  In fact, while several of the Tuskegee Airmen shot down four enemy planes, Archer included, and while Archer shot down three in one day, he did not shoot down the five planes that mark an ace, and there was not a single ace in their group. 

However, the white 357th fighter group mentioned earlier produced twenty seven aces. The numbers don’t lie, and the job of a fighter pilot is to close with and destroy the enemy.  There were white pilots like Chuck Yeager, who was a double ace and who shot down five planes in just one day. 

And the white fighter groups comprised just three squadrons.  There happened to be four black squadrons and they were put together into one fighter group, so even with one extra squadron, with one-third more planes, pilots, and guns, the Tuskegee Airmen accomplished less than their white contemporaries.

There are other myths, like they shot down the first ME-262 jet and they sank a destroyer.  This is all pure Hollywood.  They suffered discrimination, they learned to fly, they went to war, they did their jobs and did a commendable job.  Leave it at that.

Except for one problem – not all of them went to war.  When you think of the Tuskegee Airmen you think of fighter pilots, but there were also all the staff and ground crewmen we mentioned earlier. What we did not mention were the men of bomber command.

Because we also trained black bomber pilots, and co pilots.  We trained black navigators, bombardiers, radiomen and aerial gunners, like Colonel Hogan’s “Kinch”.  But in 1945 when they should have been preparing to go overseas, they were having a race riot instead.  At this time 79 years ago, white Marines were dying by the thousands on Iwo Jima.  But the black pilots we had trained to fly the same medium bombers used on the Doolittle raid were protesting because they couldn’t drink beer in the same officer’s club as the white instructors.

Tough words, we admit.  Segregation was wrong, and in this case was even against Army regulations.  And maybe these men had truly had their belly full. 

But they were training for war and did not go.  Maybe it’s not surprising then, that white guys, and Indian, Jewish, Italian and Mexican guys, who saw their buddies blown to bits on Iwo took a different view of those Tuskegee Airmen when they all returned from the war.  And don’t forget the French-Canadian-Americans, including Private Gagnon, one of the flag raisers on Mt Suribachi and a distant relative.  It’s not surprising at all when twelve thousand white boys died on Iwo, and just two black Marines with them, that racism didn’t automatically disappear based on some missions in Italy.

Because maybe those black pilots who wanted to drink beer with the white guys were in the right, but they absolutely were known civil rights activists because one of them went on to become the famously racist African American mayor of Detroit, and that was Lt Coleman Young. If Young ever intended to go to war, the fact remains that he did not. The B25’s of the 477th didn’t bomb Tokyo; they never left the states.  Coleman Young was perhaps a great defender of civil rights, but of Democracy and Freedom, he was not.

America was and is the greatest country in the world because it’s established on principles we all have trouble living up to. Should we have trained black pilots sooner? Maybe, or just maybe we did it right on time.  We were ahead of everyone else.  Tuskegee Airmen became the first black commanders of a fighter squadron, a fighter group, a bombardment squadron, a bombardment group, an Air Force wing, or an Air Force base.  Not just in the US Air Force, but in the world, and we need to remember that.

Three of the Tuskegee Airmen went on to become generals.  What country’s armed forces today has minority black generals, other than the US?  This information isn’t really out there but the British have none as of 2016.  Do the French? The Russians?  The Chinese?  Have you ever seen one?  Well America has them.

That’s why America is better than all these countries, plus Canada, Australia, Netherlands, New Zealand, everybody.

The Tuskegee Airmen were not supermen, but they were part of the greatest generation.  

In the words of Daniel Haulman, PhD, a white man who is a highly regarded expert on the group, “Their story is not just about what white men did to Black men, but also about what white and Black men did for each other, and what white and Black men did together against a common enemy.”

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