News-Info-Alerts

Re: Tuskeegee Airmen

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: August 06, 2002

"Red Tail Angels ruled the skies

By MARY CHALLENDER Register Staff Writer

They never asked for a memorial, never dreamed that anyone would ever care enough to build them one.


All the 12 young black men from Iowa wanted back then, during the bloody middle stages of World War II, was the chance to fly and to prove themselves.

They enrolled in the Negro Pilot Training Program - located in Alabama at the famed Tuskegee Institute because no white air base would take them - and took their place in history among the first black pilots ever to serve in the U.S. military.

They suffered the humiliation of Jim Crow dining cars, back-of-the-bus seating and a social status even below German prisoners of war because they knew with service and sacrifice they could demand the nation's respect.

Some of them didn't make it.

Maurice Esters of Webster City was killed in action.

William Bibb of Ottumwa died in a midair collision with a Chinese jet in 1955.

Luther Smith of Des Moines was horribly injured and spent seven months as a prisoner of war.

Those who survived went on to become engineers and school administrators, movie producers and career military officers.

They saw the military integrated and the South desegregated and black teachers hired in Des Moines.

Now, half a century later, the Iowa Tuskegee Airmen are finally getting a memorial in their home state, at the Iowa Air National Guard's new main entrance on the north side of the Des Moines airport.

To be dedicated this fall, the memorial will consist of a full-size fiberglass shell of a P-51D Mustang and will be part of a larger display of fighter aircraft flown by the 132nd Fighter Wing.

The recognition is long overdue, says Robert Morris, who took a break from developing a museum for black officers who trained at Fort Des Moines during World War I to work with the Iowa Air National Guard on the Tuskegee project.

The two groups of black volunteers have much in common, he said. Both were considered experiments. And both sacrificed to bring equality to black
Americans.

Only seven of the 12 Tuskegee pilots are still living today, two in Iowa. The survivors say they are deeply honored by the memorial, but what they appreciate even more is that it will help people to remember.

People should remember, they said, that there was a time, not so long ago, when the United States was a very unjust society.

And a group of Iowans were among those who paid a high price to help make it better.

Luther Smith was enthralled by airplanes.

Weekends and summer days, the Des Moines teenager would ride his bike the eight miles or so to the airport where he'd help the mechanics maintain and service the airplanes flying in and out of the city.

After graduating from Roosevelt High School, he studied mechanical engineering for two years at the University of Iowa. He earned his pilot's license at age 21 under the Civilian Pilot Training Program.

When the Army Air Corps cracked the door to black aviators in 1941, following a lawsuit filed by a student at Howard University, Smith, now 81 and living in Villanova, Pa., was one of the first Iowans to sign up.

He began training at Tuskegee in September 1942 in a class with three other Iowans - Maurice Esters of Webster City, Oscar Glass of Des Moines and Joseph Gomer of Iowa Falls.

Gomer had been waiting impatiently for a chance to serve. Despite a high draft number, he hadn't been called, although most of his white friends in town had been.

"I wanted to go in," recalled Gomer, now 82 and living in Duluth, Minn. "They didn't need us."

In July 1942, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Fort Leavenworth, Kan. They sent him home. Although the country was in the middle of a war, they had nothing for him to do.

Under the Civilian Pilot Training program, Gomer had learned to fly before he could drive. It wasn't love of airplanes that took him to Tuskegee, though, he said.

"That was the only thing available," he said.

Gomer and the other recruits travelled by Pullman to Tuskegee. When the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line, Gomer waged his first war with segregation.

Getting up to go to breakfast, he and the other Iowans were shown to seats at the very back of the dining car. Then a curtain was pulled across, separating them from the other diners.

"I got up and pulled it back a couple of times then they pulled it closed again," Gomer said. "Finally, we got up and walked out."

Although incidents like these were frustrating, the Iowans knew there were larger issues at stake.

"We were fighting two wars, fighting against the Axis powers abroad and fighting for first-class citizenship at home," Gomer said. "We represented 14 million black Americans."

The training at Tuskegee, on an airfield designed by famous black Iowa engineer Archie Alexander, was a nine-month program. Going in, the recruits were warned that only 20 percent of them would make it.

The recruits from Iowa did far better than average. Among the 20 graduates of the May 1943 class who received their Army Air Corps aviation wings were three of the four Iowans. Only Oscar Glass failed to complete the program.

The three Iowans were all commissioned as second lieutenants and assigned to squadrons in the 332nd Fighter Group. In December, the 332nd was shipped to Italy.

At first the fighter group, flying single-engine fighter planes, was assigned to patrol flights over the Mediterranean Sea. They were stationed in Italy in March 1944 when Mount Vesuvius erupted. Flying at dawn over the volcano, Gomer remembers the beauty of the flowing red lava and the sun rising over the Mediterranean.

In June 1944, the 332nd was reassigned to long-range bomber escort duty, protecting bombers from being intercepted by enemy aircraft before they could reach their targets.

The bombers and their crews were all white. The 332nd, from top to bottom, was black.

In the air, the two groups were a team. On the ground, Smith said, "we had no association with the white units."

The targets of the bombers were in Germany, Italy, Greece, Romania, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and France. Nearly every mission, the 332nd was carried headlong into confrontation with enemy aircraft.

Through the course of the war, about 450 Tuskegee Airmen flew into battle. They destroyed or damaged 409 enemy planes and sank a Nazi ship. Their biggest claim to fame, though, was that in more than 200 bomber escort missions, they never lost a single bomber to enemy aircraft.

Their devotion to their task won them the nickname "Red Tail Angels" from the bomber crews, who knew when they saw the red-painted tails of the 332nd's fighter planes, they would be well-protected.

That devotion to duty came at a heavy price. Sixty-six Tuskegee Airmen were killed in combat and 32 more became prisoners of war.

Maurice Esters, one of the first black Iowans to win his wings, was lost in August 1944 after developing engine trouble in a mission over the Adriatic Sea west of Yugoslavia and parachuting into the water. He was declared dead on June 27, 1945.

A few months later, in October, while flying on his 133rd mission, over Yugoslavia near Zagreb, Smith's plane went up in flames. In the days before ejection seats, he tried to roll it so he could fall free. But the plane fell into a tailspin, making it impossible to drop free safely.

Smith tried to climb back in, jamming his right foot between the rudder bar and the foot brake, but the wind ripped off his oxygen mask, causing him to pass out.

Somehow, while unconscious, he pulled the ripcord of his parachute. He landed in a tree, his right hip badly broken, his right foot turned around backwards.

German soldiers rescued him from the tree, he said, and made him a prisoner of war. He spent the next seven months in captivity, most of it hospitalized with dysentery and bone infection.

When Smith was finally liberated by Allied soldiers in May 1945, he weighed only 70 pounds - down from 145. He spent the next two years hospitalized. Although doctors were able to save his injured leg, it was 7 inches shorter. Smith's career as a pilot was over.

Instead, Smith took his Purple Heart and went back to school at the University of Iowa. He became one of the nation's first black aerospace engineers, working 37 years for General Electric in the company's missile and space division.

In 1995, Smith was among World War II veterans selected by President Clinton for a 50th anniversary V-E Day celebration trip to the United Kingdom, Czech Republic and Russia.

A member of the Iowa Aviation Hall of Fame, Smith said he's never regretted risking his life for a country that treated him like a second-class citizen.

"I knew this was my home, it was worth fighting for and I felt the better I did my job, the better the possibility things would improve here at home," he said.

Gomer survived 68 missions as a Tuskegee Airman, but it was a close thing.

By the fall of 1944, he'd already crash-landed a P-39, lost all three of his original tent mates as well as one replacement, and had his P-47 shot up by a German fighter.

"A fighter plane fired a cannon through the nose cone," Gomer said. "If he'd been a better shot, I wouldn't be around now."

Feeling he was close to losing the Russian roulette game he was playing, Gomer finally asked to be rotated. He got out on Christmas Day, 1944.

He was sent home on the S.S. America, a converted ocean liner that carried thousands of troops - all white as far as Gomer could tell.

A first lieutenant, Gomer lined up with the other officers to board the ship first. But when his turn came, the captain checking everyone in ordered him to the end of the line. Several long, seething hours later, he finally was allowed on the ship, the very last person to board.

"That was the only time I ever had the killer instinct that fighter pilots are supposed to have," Gomer said. "If I felt toward the Germans the way I felt toward that white redneck captain, I would have been an ace several times over. Or dead."

After the war, Gomer elected to stay with the military. Despite the racial barriers, the Army offered opportunity, he said.

In the Korean War - after the military had been desegregated by presidential order - Gomer flew a racially integrated C-119 troop carrier. A captain, he was the only black officer in the outfit.

Gomer retired from the military in 1964 as a major, then worked for the U.S. Forestry Service for 21 years - "another white-male occupation," he jokes.

Although it bothers Gomer that many people today know next to nothing about the accomplishments of the Tuskegee Airmen, he is deeply touched by those who have made a point of giving the airmen their due, from Secretary of State Colin Powell to a black astronaut he met in St. Paul.

The group whose thanks mattered most to Gomer, though, may have been the 459th Bomb Group, the guys who flew aboard the planes Gomer's group gave their lives to protect.

In 1995, the group was holding its annual reunion in St. Paul, Minn. When they heard there was a Red Tail pilot living in the state, they invited Gomer and his wife to attend.

At the banquet, some of the men in the group approached Gomer with tears in their eyes.

"We've been waiting 50 years to thank you for saving our butts," they told him. ****

Only 450 of the 992 pilots who completed the flight training program at Tuskegee ended up being sent overseas.

The rest, like James Bowman, 79, of Des Moines, were assigned to bases in the United States where they struggled daily to maintain their equanimity under the humiliations of life in a segregated society.

Bowman, a retired Des Moines schools administrator, said at Walterboro Airfield in South Carolina in 1945, there were also German prisoners of war, each wearing a big POW on their back.

"They could go in and use the white officers" bathrooms and we couldn't," he said. "We were used to segregation - we had to be to live - but when prisoners could use the officers" bathrooms because they were white and we couldn't, that was a hard one for me to take."

Despite experiences like these, however, the Tuskegee pilots said they had no time for bitterness.

"We wanted to make sure we contributed to the extent we could," Bowman said.

The group that suffered most, many of the pilots said, were the airmen who were washed out of the program, often for the most contrived of reasons. Those men deserve to be honored too, they said.

There is one thing the airmen want to get straight: Their story isn't just black history, it's Iowa history.

With determination, education and training, they were able to help make a better world. That's a lesson that transcends race, Smith said.

"I think the Tuskegee Airmen are a powerful symbol to all Americans, black and white, because we were able to overcome great adversity and still succeed," he said.

Copyright © 2002, The Des Moines Register"