By: Jocelyn Knorr
‘Masters of the Air’, an Apple TV original series and spiritual successor to the wildly successful ‘Band of Brothers’, has been taking the internet by storm. One of the plot beats has the Tuskegee Airmen, African-American pilots, turning up to save our main characters. It’s a great moment—but the Tuskegee Airmen were real, and their story is much more fascinating than the TV version.
The Tuskegee Airmen were the first Black pilots in the US military. The 99th squadron was created during WWII in 1941, to be trained on single-engine pursuit planes. The NAACP and organizations like it had been lobbying for the US military to allow Black people to become pilots for ages, but disavowed the segregated approach as they considered it to perpetuate prejudice and discrimination. Nonetheless, Franklin D. Roosevelt had the 99th Pursuit Squadron created as an all-Black pilot unit of the US Army Air Corps, today known as the US Army Air Force.
Their base of operations opened on July 19th, in Tuskegee, Tennessee—the first class graduated the following March. Tuskegee was chosen specifically because of the civilian piloting infrastructure already in place, as well as the high levels of skill those civilian pilots showed on aptitude exams.
These airmen were further trained in the then-French colony of Morocco before their first mission; on June 2, 1943, they carried out a strafing attack on an Italian island in the Mediterranean. Three more squadrons quickly followed, eventually forming the 332nd Fighter Group. The 332nd fought in many air conflicts of the European theatre, and later historians would note it as one of the most successful fighter groups of the war; they earned two Presidential Unit Citations, one for the longest bomber escort mission to Berlin and the other for discovering a secret German destroyer in the Italian harbor of Trieste.
Tuskegee Airfield also produced the second-ever group of Black airmen, the 477th Bombardment group. These pilots flew the B-25 double-engine bombers seen in ‘Masters of the Air’. However, equipment and personnel shortages plagued this unit, and V-J day came to pass before it could be officially deployed.
As a whole, 992 pilots graduated from the Tuskegee Airfield program, talented pilots each and every one. These men were lauded as heroes, but outside of the war, many never spoke of their experiences—there are many stories of families never knowing the truth of their relative’s military service until long after their deaths. However, the legacy of the Tuskegee airmen is not to be forgotten soon, in part because of Executive Order No. 9981, signed by Harry S. Truman, enacted because of these brave airmen and leading to the eventual desegregation of the US Army.
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