Dreams of flight

Southern Living, Oct 1996 by Butler, Wanda

Three men stand in an abandoned airfield alive with memories. Here, at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama, their futures began over 50 years ago. They were called the Tuskegee Airmen-and in their hearts these many years later, they are still the Tuskegee Airmen.

As an elite group of flyers, the Airmen soared in the name of freedom over the warriddled skies of North Africa, Sicily, Anzio, and Berlin. But the journey to liftoff in those days of World War II was not easy.

These three-Lt. Col. Herbert E. Carter, Capt. Louis R. Purnell, and Lt. Col. Woodrow W. Crockett-have returned this day to tell the story.

In the late 1930s, the quiet college town of Tuskegee had no hint it would be propelled into aviation history. Neither did Carter, an Amory, Mississippi, native. He first arrived in Tuskegee to attend prep school in the ninth grade. "If you finished there, you could attend college. I was going to be a veterinarian," says the retiree, a sweep of silver hair framing his animated face, "but they didn't offer a vet degree."

What they did offer was a flying school, a civilian program to develop a pool of pilots. "But the War Department had no intentions of calling up black pilots," Carter says. "It was determined that blacks didn't have the aptness, dexterity, or other qualities to operate aircraft." Carter opted for the program anyway, knowing the slim chances of getting into the Army Air Corps (which later became the Air Force). He obtained his private pilot's license and received further training for a commercial license. Then he waited.

Nothing happened until 1941 when a student at Howard University in Washington, D.C., filed suit to gain admittance into flight training. Soon afterward, President Roosevelt opened the application process to "colored" pilots.

The response was overwhelming. Thousands of young black men, long denied the chance of playing an active part in the military, volunteered. The flight training school opened at Tuskegee.

"By July 2, 1942, my class finished," recalls Carter. "We thought we'd be in the war by Thanksgiving, but Christmas found us still in Alabama." Finally in April 1943, Tuskegee's 99th Fighter Squadron left for North Africa. "Our mission," says Carter, "was to find and destroy targets such as ammo dumps, railways, anything to stop enemy supplies."

But it wasn't until the invasion at Anzio that the 99th began flying P40s in air combat operations against a large number of enemy aircraft. After other assignments, the group was transferred to the 15th Strategic Air Force in June 1944 to provide long-range escort of heavy bombers (B-24s and B-17s), flying P-47s for one month, then the "dream airplane"-the P-51 Mustang. In July 1945, the 99th Fighter Squadron joined the 332nd Fighter Group (composed of three other black squadrons), making the 332nd the only four-squadron group in the Mediterranean theater.

"In over 200 missions we never lost a bomber to enemy air action," reports Carter. "We took great pride in our record and our unit, and wanted our bomber pilots, as well as the Germans, to know who we were. The 332nd's P-51s had their tails painted red-that's how we became known as the Redtails."

Captain Purnell, striding across Moton Field, builds on his friend's reminiscences. Intense eyes behind rimless glasses study the one remaining hangar from the Tuskegee primary aviation cadet training days. '"You know," he says, "there's an old theory about the bumblebee-because of its wingspan-toweight ratio, it should not be able to fly. But the bee, unaware of this, flies anyhow. The same was true of us."

On much the same timetable as his colleagues, Purnell, a student at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania headed to Tuskegee in the summer of '41 to take the nonmilitary advanced course for pilots. "I finished in September," he remembers, "but my color prevented me from going any further." Frustrated, he considered filing suit, but then the Corps accepted black pilots. "Two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, I reported to Tuskegee Army Air Field as an aviation cadet," he says.

After earning his wings in 1942, Purnell became part of the 99th Fighter Squadron-and waiting.

"We were undoubtedly the most highly trained squadron in the U.S., but the Air Corps brass couldn't decide what to do with us. We flew and flew for nearly a whole year simply to maintain our proficiency. It looked as though the black squadron was in danger of becoming a white elephant."

When the squadron was finally dispatched to North Africa, Purnell became a specialist in dive-bombing and strafing. "By the time we moved to northern Sicily, I had completed my tour-50 missions," he says.

The Airmen soon gained respect "There's nothing like combat to draw people together," says Purnell. "After a while the whites requested our presence to escort their bombers. We overcame the misconceptions about blacks in the military and accomplished what was believed impossible."

Quietly absorbing the conversation, Crockett, the third Airman strolling the old field, squints up at a bright Alabama sun and remembers his own reasons for flying. "It was purely economical," smiles the Texarkana, Arkansas, native. "I had to leave school in 1940 because I was unable to afford the $6a-month tuition, so I decided to join the Army. My plan was to save my money for three years and come back to finish my education."