Valley veteran insists that 'historical study' on Tuskegee unit is a myth
EDITOR:
I would like to take this opportunity to voice serious exception to an article written by the Los Angeles Times concerning the Tuskegee Airmen and printed in The Vindicator on Dec. 24.
Being in my 70s and having served on active duty in the U.S. Air Force during the 1950s and early 1960s and having had personal conversations with several World War II Tuskegee Airmen and members of bombing crews that they protected, I can state with absolute certainty that the "historical study" by Daniel Haulman and William Holton is in reality the "myth." It's also a first-class job of historical revisionism coming over 60 years after the fact.
Discrediting our true American heroes seems to be a popular pastime these days. Well, I will present some historical facts that will hopefully put their "study" where it belongs -- in the fiction section of the library.
During the 1940s and World War II, and on into the 1950s and 1960s, there was a great deal of racism among the whites toward blacks in our armed forces. In the face of this insidious, burning racism the odds against the Tuskegee Airmen receiving the same quality of flight training as their white counterparts and their chances of success were bleak indeed.
Nevertheless, the 332nd Fighter Group, famously (and rightfully so) known as the Tuskegee Airmen, became some of the finest combat aviators in this nation's history -- indeed, in the entire world.
Haulman and Holton are naive indeed if they put their faith in a couple of 60-plus-year-old combat flight reports, because they, of all people, should know about the inaccuracy and errors in hundreds (thousands) of these reports during WWII, Korea and Vietnam. We had a word for many of these reports: "SNAFU" -- meaning situation normal, all fouled up.
Now here is one hard, incontrovertible fact that both Haulman and Holton and their one WWII bomber pilot "witness" should have considered before they presented their "study." The bomber pilot said his plane was shot down over Austria in 1944 and later became "sure" that he was being escorted by the 332nd Fighter Group because he "ended up in the same POW camp as one of the black airmen." This statement is so ludicrous as to be totally laughable. Prisoners of war were shuttled all over Europe from POW camp to POW camp, regardless of where they were captured or shot down.
But here's the historical coup de grace that shoots down the bomber pilot's memory as a credible witness -- the 332nd Fighter Group had a very distinctive calling card: They painted the tails of all their fighter planes a brilliant fire-engine red. This was to distinguish the Tuskegee Airmen from all other fighter groups in the air, and to announce to the crews of the bombers that they were escorting and protecting that "the Tuskegee Airmen are here and you're going home safe, buddy."
The bomber-pilot "witness" that Haulman and Holton depended upon for part of their "proof" for their "historical study" would have had his field of vision of the sky outside his bomber filled with the flashing, zooming, brilliant red tails of the 332nd swarming all around him, protecting his plane and crew from the Axis fighters. This would have been a startling, memorable scene.
Mighty strange that this "witness" didn't remember that fact -- only that he had spoken with a Tuskegee Airman POW in the same camp as himself. Also mighty strange is the fact that not one other American bomber crew out of the thousands upon thousands of bombing raids over Europe has ever been known to step forward in the past 60 years to tell the same tale as this "witness." Nope. Sorry, buddy, you did not have the 332nd protecting you the day you were shot down in 1944.
Quite a few Tuskegee Airmen gave their lives in combat in WWII, but they never lost one single American bomber that they were escorting and protecting. The racists and the historical revisionists have had over 60 years to bring forth proof otherwise. They have never been able to do it because the Tuskegee Airmen's perfect, unblemished record is a stone-hard fact, not just a legend.
LEE GUY
Boardman