Red Tails

by Gregory A. Freeman

  After the questionable (at best) experience with the British crew, mission leader Musulin demanded an American plane, an American crew, and an American jumpmaster. Soon the all-American team got Musulin on the ground with Rajacic and Jibilian. Once on the ground with the downed airmen, they set to figuring out how to accomplish the airlift of so many people.

  The first problem: The hundreds of Americans had to be gathered together in one place from where they were scattered all over the region, in hiding. Second: they had to secretly build an airstrip capable of landing huge C-47 transport planes—with no tools other than crude farm implements—without alerting the Germans. Third: They had to get the big cargo planes in, land them on the makeshift runway, and take off and get back to Allied territory without the Germans shooting them down. This was a tall order, and no one was sure it would work.

  After weeks of frantic building and trying to keep the project secret from the Nazi planes overhead, the long-awaited night came. The plan was to bring the cargo planes in at night to make them less of a target for German fighters, but that made the risky landing even riskier. Hundreds of airmen, ragged and hungry from their time in the hills of Yugoslavia, waited in the dark, crouched in the brush and trees along their newly made airstrip. They were eager and hopeful, but they were worried, too. The whole plan seemed so ambitious. Could it really work?

  Success would depend on not only meticulous planning and preparation in both Bari and Pranjane, but also on flawless execution by the pilots asked to make this dangerous mission. Vujnovich knew that he could find skilled C-47 pilots who were used to flying into dangerous territory. About two thousand of the all-purpose cargo and troop transport planes had played a key role in the D-day landings in Normandy only a couple months earlier, dropping thousands of paratroopers behind enemy lines. The Air Crew Rescue Unit (ACRU), commanded by Colonel George Kraigher, Vujnovich’s good friend from their days together at Pan American airlines, would be responsible for assembling the planes and crews to make the rescue, and they had carte blanche to call on anything they needed from the Fifteenth Air Force. Kraigher would be able to tap veterans of the invasion of France to fly the missions to rescue the airmen stranded with Mihailovich, though still, this assignment would push their skills to the limit. Flying over enemy territory and dropping paratroopers is dangerous enough, but landing on an improvised airstrip that is just barely long enough, in the dark, and then taking off from that minimal runway, all without the nearby Germans attacking you . . . well, that would be a different challenge altogether.

  Kraigher’s contacts pointed him toward a unit that had shown considerable skill—the 60th Troop Carrier Group of the Twelfth Air Force.1 Operating from bases in Tunisia, Sicily, and Italy, these C-47 pilots had experience transporting paratroops from England and dropping them at Oran during the early hours of the invasion of North Africa, then participating in the battle for Tunisia, and they had towed gliders to Syracuse and dropped paratroops behind enemy lines at Catania when the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. If any C-47 pilots could pull off this mission, it was these guys.

  There was some debate in the OSS offices at Bari about whether to send in fighter planes to provide cover for the C-47s. The goal was to make the mission as stealthy as possible so as not to stir up any resistance from the Germans, so consideration was given to sending the C-47s in on their own. Every additional plane made the rescue party larger and noisier, plus any mechanical difficulties experienced by one plane could give away the position of all the others.

  But on the other hand, this was already an extremely risky plan, and the idea of sending in unarmed C-47 planes—stripped down cargo planes essentially, with none of the defensive weaponry found on bombers and other planes—didn’t sit well with Vujnovich or Kraigher. Getting into Pranjane would put the C-47 crews at risk if they had no fighter escorts, but God forbid they were attacked by the Luftwaffe on the way back when they were loaded with the rescued airmen. Hundreds of men could be shot out of the sky.

  That image so disturbed Vujnovich and Kraigher that they agreed the planes must have a fighter cover. But who? The Fifteenth Air Force could provide fighter planes and experienced pilots, but for this rescue, Vujnovich and Kraigher wanted more. They wanted fighter pilots who would not shy away from such a dangerous mission and who could be trusted to stay with those defenseless C-47s no matter what. They had heard about an oddball unit in the Fifteenth made up entirely of Negro pilots—an outlandish idea to most in the military. In 1944, black men were relegated to service and support roles in the military, and they were never seen in the cockpit of an airplane.

  But this unit of Negro fliers had made a reputation for themselves. They were damn good pilots, they were thought to be fearless, and they never, ever left the side of a damaged bomber. Most impressive was their record of never having lost a bomber to enemy fighters.2 They sounded exactly like the pilots for Operation Halyard. Vujnovich and Kraigher wanted the Red Tails.

  Given the nickname because of the distinctive red vertical tail fin on their fighter planes, the Red Tails were better known in later years as the Tuskegee Airmen. This group of black men volunteered to fly for their country and were allowed to do so only after a long and contentious debate. Even as America was gearing up in the early 1940s for what seemed certain to be a major war, the idea of allowing black men to fly airplanes was outrageous to many. Flying planes, especially fighters, was one of the glamorous jobs in the military, and up to that point blacks weren’t even allowed in the more typical positions in the ranks. More than 350,000 black men served in World War I and about 700 of them were officers, but as World War II approached, almost all officers were white, and most black troops were allowed to serve only as truck drivers, stevedores, and in service positions, such as waiters and janitors.3 The U.S. military had considered the question of integration years earlier, but a series of studies on black soldiers’ performance in World War I—most of them of dubious scientific quality—concluded that segregation was necessary to maintain the quality of the military. The most influential of the studies came from the Army War College and was titled “The Use of Negro Manpower in War.”4 That report noted that the black man is physically qualified for combat, but “the negro is profoundly superstitious” and “he is by nature subservient and naturally believes himself to be inferior to the white.” It went on to warn that while the black man is “jolly, trustable, and lively by nature,” the military cannot “expect to draw leadership material from his race.” The report also noted that “he has not the physical courage of the white. He simply cannot control himself in fear of some danger in the degree that the white can.” And “the negro is unmoral. He simply does not see that some things are wrong.”

  Black leaders in the 1930s and 1940s considered aviation the primary target for integrating the military, in part because the field was the most advanced of all military sectors, with the technology improving at a rapid clip and the prominence of the air role in the next war becoming clearer every day. The public also was fascinated with the romance and adventure of flying. Pilots were the subject of comic books, movies, and radio shows, and the world thrilled to the exploits of Charles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart, and other aviators. The freedom of flight also appealed in a special way to black men, who had to contend with the everyday racism and Jim Crow laws of the time. Red Tails pilot Harvey Alexander said he could not escape the discrimination on the ground, “but up in the air, I was free as a bird because I was in control. I decided what to do and when to do it and how to do it. Each time I landed, that good feeling left me because I was back on the ground and back into the same old–same old.”5

  The threat of war gave momentum to the effort by black leaders and some military officials to expand the role of blacks. Mobilization efforts would force the nation to realize that some long-held traditions would have to change, with one of the most prominent being the role of women. With most able-bodied men busy with
the military in some capacity, the women of America had to step into the previously all-male dominion of the factory. At a time when production of planes, munitions, and other war materiel could mean the difference between winning and losing the war, the country could not be held back by the impropriety of women doing the dirty, hard labor traditionally reserved for men.

  In the same vein, the military might have found it hard to say no to black men who wanted to risk their lives flying airplanes and fighting the enemy. But it did say no, stubbornly and with little second-guessing. The separation of the races was such a strong societal imperative—nationwide, not just in the South, where Jim Crow laws formalized the discrimination—that the military could not bring itself to allow black men the same stature as whites. President Roosevelt had announced in 1938 his plan to greatly expand the country’s aviation training program in anticipation of wartime needs, but in 1940, the Army Air Corps—renamed the Army Air Forces the next year—was content to have blacks make up only 2 percent of its personnel, all of them engaged in menial labor around the bases. The Air Corps was particularly resistant to any attempt to integrate the armed forces, excluding blacks more than any other branch of the military except possibly the Marine Corps. But with the dogs of war howling over the horizon, black community leaders, newspapers, and black colleges pressed relentlessly for the Air Corps to accept black men as pilots. Using the threat of a future war to their advantage, they asked how the country could exclude young, eager, able-bodied men from putting themselves in the line of fire for their country. How could the country claim to be doing everything possible for victory when it was turning away volunteers?

  With a close presidential election coming in November 1940, Roosevelt realized that he could lose the black vote and announced on September 16, 1940, that the Air Corps would soon begin accepting black pilots. They would not train or serve alongside white pilots, but most in the black community still saw this as a major step forward.6 The Tuskegee Institute, a black college in Tuskegee, Alabama, volunteered to have the black pilots training program near its school, and thus the Tuskegee Airmen were born. The War Department would build hundreds of pilot training facilities across the country by 1945, but Tuskegee Army Air Field was the one that drew the attention of black Americans. White Americans scarcely knew it existed and gave it little thought if they did. Even leaders in the Army Air Forces dismissed what was going on in Tuskegee as “the experiment” and did not expect much from the results. The men training in Tuskegee knew they were being watched—by the black community hoping they would succeed and break down more barriers, and by the military establishment that was not at all convinced these men could fly airplanes like white pilots.

  The Tuskegee Airmen trainees responded by going beyond what was expected of them, racking up exceptionally high test scores and proficiency ratings, the first steps toward what would become their reputation for excellence. As the first group of pilots completed training, the 101st, 301st, and 302nd fighter squadrons, together making up the 332nd Fighter Group, transferred to Ramitelli Airfield on the Adriatic coast of Italy to join the Fifteenth Air Force in May 1944. The base was isolated, used by no one but the black airmen, and it did not appear on the maps provided to other American fliers. Not only were the Tuskegee Airmen segregated from whites, but few in the Fifteenth even knew that black pilots were among their colleagues. Those who did encounter the black fliers away from Ramitelli responded with skepticism to these pilots from “the experiment,” and the Tuskegee Airmen encountered more of the usual discrimination regarding housing and socializing. But it was not long before the black pilots began proving their mettle in the air. They began flying escorts for the Fifteenth’s bombing missions in July 1944, and soon the bomber crews were happy to see the brand-new P-51 Mustangs with the bright red tail fin flying alongside.

  The Red Tails had clear instructions from General Nathan Twining, commander of the Fifteenth Air Force.7 His bombers were flying deep into enemy territory to destroy industrial targets, but too many of the planes weren’t making it back. Twining had concluded that the high losses were the result of fighter escorts doing too much “happy hunting”—breaking away from the bombers they were escorting to engage Luftwaffe fighters and score kills. The general explained to Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr., the commander of the 332nd Fighter Group, that happy hunting wasn’t necessarily contrary to the pilots’ mission objectives, as the German planes posed a threat to the bombers if they came in too close, but that it still could be a bad strategy. In many cases, the Luftwaffe intentionally sent up a couple of planes to draw off the fighter escorts, and then other German fighters would swoop in to attack the bomber formation. The American fighters usually survived—in some ways it was less dangerous to go hunting than to stay with the formation where all the enemy attacks were concentrated—but by the time they returned to their bombers, many might have been lost. And even if the fighter planes had shot down a German fighter or two while happy hunting, they weren’t worth the risk to the bombers. Aside from the threat to the mission, Twining explained, it just wasn’t cost-efficient to lose so many bombers.8

  Losing one fighter plane—German or American—meant losing about $50,000 and one man, Twining explained. When a bomber went down, that was $225,000 and a crew of ten or eleven men. He recounted how one squadron had shot down nine enemy fighters one day while happy hunting during a bombing run—costing the enemy $450,000 and nine men. But while the American fighters were away, they lost seven B-17s from their formation—$1.5 million and seventy-seven men.

  Davis got the message. His men had to stay with the bombers, no matter what. They weren’t to strike out on their own in search of kills that would boost their individual careers, and their top priority had to be protecting those bombers at all costs to themselves. On more than one occasion, Davis told his fighter pilots, “Don’t come back if you lose a bomber.”

  The Tuskegee Airmen carried out Davis’s orders, knowing all the while that being as good as the white pilots wasn’t good enough. If they were to prove to the military and the public that this program for black pilots was more than just a social experiment or politicians throwing a bone to black community leaders, they had to go beyond what anyone expected of them. Like his fellow Tuskegee pilots, Roscoe Brown, with the 100th Pursuit Squadron, knew that his job was to protect the bombers and not to become heroes by scoring as many kills as possible. “We knew that if we let the bombers get shot down, even if we shot down a lot of fighters, we would probably lose our opportunity to fly,” he said. “The race factor was there all the time.”

  For the next five months, the 332nd Fighter Group flew bomber escorts and other missions in which they struck rail traffic and other infrastructure in Europe, including flights to accompany bombers targeting the German oil production sites in Ploiesti, Romania. By December of 1944, the reputation of the 332nd was growing among the all-white bomber crews.9

  “Unofficially you are known by an untold number of bomber crews as the Red Tails, who can be depended upon and whose appearance means certain protection from enemy fighters,” Davis told his men. “The bomber crews have told others about your accomplishments, and your good reputation has preceded you into many parts where you may think you are unknown.”10

  Alex Jefferson, a Red Tail pilot who was shot down on his nineteenth mission, was greeted like a celebrity of sorts when he arrived at the prisoner-of-war camp Stalag Luft III, which held five thousand American and British air officers.11 The prisoners were allowed to select their new bunk mates from among the incoming prisoners, and Jefferson suddenly found himself popular. The Germans often tried to sneak in English-speaking spies masquerading as captured American airmen, but the POWs could be pretty certain that the one black man in the lineup wasn’t German. Jefferson found his new bunk mate when a man walked up and, in the strongest Southern drawl he had ever heard, said, “Ah think I’ll take this boy.” Jefferson was bemused by how the same airman pr
obably would have shunned him back in the States but now saw him as an asset.

  Many of the POWs were shocked to see a black American pilot because they had been prisoners so long that they hadn’t heard of the Tuskegee Airmen. The Tuskegee program didn’t get much publicity outside of the black community, and the Air Forces made no effort whatsoever to promote it within the ranks. But some who had been shot down only recently knew of the Red Tails’ courage and had heard the rumors that the pilots were black. One prisoner greeted Jefferson warmly. One man ran up to Jefferson soon after his arrival and hugged him tightly, yelling, “You’re a Red Tail!”12 Letting go of the somewhat embarrassed Jefferson, the man continued. “You goddamn Red Tails are the best damn unit! If the Red Tails had been with us, we’d have made it back home. You guys saved our asses so many times!”

  The airman’s enthusiasm for the Red Tails was not unusual, though many aircrews didn’t realize who was flying the planes. Larry Fleischer, a navigator-bombardier in the 777th Bomb Squadron based near Ramitelli, told of how the Tuskegee Airmen stayed closer to their bombers than their white counterparts.13 “They didn’t get way out,” he said. “A lot of times, those other guys were so far out that if some aircraft came out of the clouds, they wouldn’t have been able to get over there quick enough. But [the Red Tails] escorted us.” Fleischer and his crewmates couldn’t figure out why the Red Tails were such good escorts. “All the [other] guys just come out there, leave early, before we’re completely out of enemy territory. And here are these guys. I mean, when we would see them we’d say, ‘Man, we got it made today,’ because they were right there, all the time. They were our lifesavers.” The copilot on Fleischer’s crew, George C. Barnett, said, “They just gave us comfort, where the other escorts didn’t. You know, we were glad to have the other escorts but we would have preferred to have the Red Tails escorting us.”