The formation of the 99th Pursuit Squadron

By early June 1941 earth-moving machines were already at work in the fields outside the small town of Tuskegee in Alabama. On 1 June construction began there on an airfield, soon to be named Moton Field, where Black cadets were to undergo the first stage of training as military pilots, and on 7 June the War Department approved a contract with the Tuskegee Institute, a college for African Americans, to run a primary flying school for the army. For the unit that was waiting for these pilots it was a turning point. The 99th Pursuit Squadron, the first flying unit made up of Black servicemen in the history of the American armed forces, had existed since the spring, but it did not have a single pilot.

Some chronologies state that on 2 June 1941 “the Tuskegee Airmen begin with the formation of the 99th Fighter Squadron”. This date is borne out neither by the unit’s records nor by the chronology of the Tuskegee Airmen compiled by the US Air Force Historical Research Agency. The squadron was constituted on paper on 19 March 1941 and activated on 22 March at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois. It received the name 99th Fighter Squadron only on 15 May 1942, because until then the US Army called fighters pursuit aircraft. In the squadron’s history the date 2 June belongs to a different year: on 2 June 1943 it flew its first combat mission in Tunisia. In June 1941, by contrast, preparations were under way for training its pilots.

Flying for whites only

Until 1941 no Black American had ever been a military pilot of the United States. In the First World War African Americans who volunteered for aviation were turned away. The army kept Black soldiers in separate regiments, such as the 9th and 10th Cavalry and the 24th and 25th Infantry, commanded by white officers. The Southern states had Jim Crow laws requiring separate schools, railway carriages, waiting rooms and lavatories, and the military, like much of the federal administration, practised racial segregation throughout the country. The army’s aviation arm, the Air Corps, was entirely white: it accepted pilot candidates only from among white men with at least two years of college.

A door was opened only by the Civilian Pilot Training Program, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt announced at the end of 1938. Thanks to an amendment by Congressman Everett Dirksen, the act of June 1939 forbade excluding anyone from the programme on grounds of race, and six Black colleges joined it, among them Howard University in Washington and the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. In October 1939 Tuskegee was certified as a civilian flying school, and in July 1940 its chief instructor became Charles Alfred Anderson, an experienced Black pilot who had been flying since 1929.

In the spring and summer of 1940 the issue acquired political weight. As Congress was passing the first peacetime draft in American history, African American activists, led by Walter White of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the leader of the sleeping-car porters’ union, A. Philip Randolph, demanded that Black Americans be admitted to every branch of the armed forces. The Selective Service Act of 16 September 1940 prohibited racial discrimination, but on 9 October the White House announced that the army would remain segregated and that Black Americans would serve in all branches, aviation included, but in separate units. In the middle of an election campaign Roosevelt tried to soften the outrage: Colonel Benjamin O. Davis became the first Black general in the US Army, and Judge William H. Hastie, the first Black federal judge, became civilian aide on Black servicemen to the Secretary of War, Henry Stimson. On 24 October 1940 the War Department instructed the Air Corps to prepare a plan for forming a Black pursuit squadron.

Yancey Williams’s lawsuit

The plan, drawn up by the flying training command at Maxwell Field in Montgomery and supplemented by the air staff in Washington, provided for the pilots to train at Tuskegee and the mechanics and other ground specialists at the technical schools at Chanute Field. At the end of 1940 it was reviewed in the War Department by, among others, Hastie. He objected: he believed that Black pilots should be trained in the existing schools alongside whites, and that building a separate base for them in the Deep South would entrench segregation for years. The Chief of the Air Corps, General Henry H. Arnold, and his staff held, on the contrary, that mixed training was impossible. Arnold argued that Black pilots could not be assigned to existing units, because Black officers would then be commanding white enlisted men, which he called an “impossible social problem”.

A lawsuit hastened the decision. Yancey Williams, an engineering student at Howard University who had completed a flying course under the civilian programme and held a pilot’s licence, applied in November 1940 for admission as an aviation cadet. He was told that his application was being held in abeyance because there were no units in which “colored applicants” could be trained. On 16 January 1941 the War Department publicly announced that a Black pursuit squadron would be formed in the Air Corps, and the next day Williams, with the support of NAACP lawyers, sued the War Department in Washington, naming among the defendants Stimson, the Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall, and Arnold. The announcement of a separate squadron deprived the suit of its main argument: the army could now claim that it did accept Black candidates, only into “separate but equal” units. The NAACP and the African American press protested at first, since they were demanding full integration of the military rather than a separate unit, but in the end most activists concluded that a separate squadron was better than none.

A squadron without pilots

On 19 March 1941 the War Department constituted the 99th Pursuit Squadron, and on 22 March it was activated at Chanute Field. Its first commander was a white officer, Captain Harold R. Maddux, and its core consisted of fourteen Black non-commissioned officers transferred from the 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments to handle discipline and administration. From March some 270 Black enlisted men were trained at Chanute as aircraft mechanics, armourers, radio operators and supply clerks.

Meanwhile at Tuskegee the search was on for money and land for airfields. On 29 March 1941 the Institute was visited by the President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt. She climbed into a Piper Cub, in which Anderson took her up for a flight of about half an hour. After landing she is said to have remarked: “Well, you can fly all right.” Eleanor Roosevelt was a trustee of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a foundation supporting African American education, and helped the Institute obtain a loan from it to build the airfield. Pictures of the First Lady in a Black pilot’s aircraft went round the press, although, contrary to later legend, flight training at Tuskegee had already been going on for a year and a half.

In early April the Institute chose a site a few kilometres north of the campus for the future Moton Field. Once construction had begun there in June and the War Department had approved the flying school contract, Captain Noel F. Parrish, the white instructor who was to supervise the training, arrived at Tuskegee in the middle of the month. On 20 June the Air Corps became part of the newly created United States Army Air Forces, and on 25 June, under the threat of the march on Washington by Black Americans that Randolph had announced, Roosevelt banned racial discrimination in employment in the defence industries. He did not abolish segregation in the armed forces.

The first class of cadets

On 12 July 1941 work began, a dozen or so kilometres from the town, on a second and much larger airfield, Tuskegee Army Air Field, which was to belong to the army and serve for advanced training. On 19 July the first class of cadets, designated 42-C, began. It numbered thirteen men, the most senior of whom was Captain Benjamin O. Davis Jr., son of the newly promoted general. In 1936 Davis had graduated from the Military Academy at West Point as its first Black graduate since 1889. For four years his fellow cadets barely spoke to him; he lived alone and ate alone, and yet he finished 35th in a class of 276. His request for assignment to aviation had been turned down at the time, because the Air Corps did not accept Black officers. Now he was to command Black airmen.

Primary training began on 21 August, for the first few days still at the Institute’s old airfield, and from 25 August at Moton Field. The 99th Squadron itself was moved from Chanute to Maxwell Field on 5 November, and on 10 November 1941 to Tuskegee. The washout rate was harsh: of the thirteen cadets in the first class, only five received their pilot’s wings on 7 March 1942 – Davis and four second lieutenants, who became the first Black pilots of the 99th Squadron. In the summer of 1942 Davis, by now a lieutenant colonel, took command of it.

Significance

The squadron waited a long time for the front, because the high command did not know where to use it. In April 1943, equipped with Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighters, it sailed for North Africa, and on 2 June 1943, from an airfield in Tunisia, it flew its first combat mission, a patrol over the Mediterranean. It then attacked the Italian island of Pantelleria and fought over Sicily. The commander of the white group to which it had been attached rated its pilots as lacking aggressiveness and unfit for combat, and in Washington the idea of moving the unit to the rear began to be considered. A comparison ordered in Washington showed, however, that the squadron performed no differently from other P-40 units, and in January 1944 its pilots shot down more than a dozen German aircraft over the beachhead at Anzio.

From 1944 Black airmen fought in Italy in the 332nd Fighter Group under Davis’s command, which the 99th Squadron also joined in July 1944. The group escorted heavy bombers over Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania and Poland; between June 1944 and April 1945 it flew 179 escort missions, and enemy fighters shot down bombers under its protection on only seven of them. From the red tails of their aircraft – first P-47 Thunderbolts, then P-51 Mustangs – they were known as the “Red Tails”. During the war nearly a thousand pilots were trained at Tuskegee; the figure usually given is 992.

Segregation was not broken during the war. White officers still commanded Black units at home; Hastie resigned in January 1943 in protest at the air arm’s policies; and in April 1945 more than a hundred Black officers were arrested at Freeman Field in Indiana for trying to enter the white officers’ club. Only on 26 July 1948 did President Harry Truman, by Executive Order 9981, require equal treatment in the armed forces regardless of race, and in 1949 the now independent United States Air Force became the first of the services to disband its last Black group and distribute its men among integrated units. In 1954 Davis became the first Black general in the US Air Force.