Tuskegee Airmen to Receive Congressional Gold Medal
By Michael E. Ruane and Avis Thomas-LesterWashington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 29, 2007; Page A01
When Charles E. McGee slid his P-51 fighter, “Kitten,” onto the tail of the fleeing German FW-190 in the skies over Austria in 1944, he fired his six big machine guns and struck a blow for civil rights back home.
Walter L. McCreary did the same a few months later, when his P-51 was hit by flak on a strafing run over Hungary and the cockpit floor began to slosh with what he thought was leaking gasoline.
And so did Woodrow W. Crockett’s ground crews a few months after that, when they stopped a supply train and commandeered special gas tanks so their pilots could fly without running out of fuel.
Today, members of the famed black World War II aviation cadre now called the Tuskegee Airmen will be honored in the Capitol Rotunda for their history-making feats.
In a ceremony at 1 p.m., the airmen, including McGee, McCreary and Crockett, will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor that Congress can give to civilians. President Bush is scheduled to speak, along with Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state, who received the medal in 1991.
The achievement of men such as McGee, McCreary and Crockett was simple: They were bold in battle and capable in command — at a time when many in the military thought blacks could be neither.
“What we accomplished hasn’t always been recognized for, really, what it meant to the country,” McGee said this week. “There was meaning there, you might say, in a civil rights area that preceded what we know as the civil rights movement.”
From 1942 through 1946, 994 black fighter and bomber pilots were trained at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, according to the group’s Web site. More than 400 served in combat overseas, flying patrol and strafing missions and serving as bomber escorts from bases in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.
Ground and support crews were trained at Tuskegee and elsewhere, and all were assigned to exclusively black aviation units that went overseas. Once in combat, they excelled.
“It really was the first time that a large group of blacks were involved in a technical area successfully,” McGee said. “It really set the background that dispelled the myths, the biases — in some cases, outright racism — that had been a part of Army policy.”
And it helped to change the country, he said.
McGee, 87, of Bethesda, was an engineering student at the University of Illinois as World War II approached.
Sensing that the air corps might be good duty, he applied for the fledgling black aviators’ outfit that would blossom at Tuskegee. His flight training began in an open cockpit biplane and progressed to the war’s early fighters.
He was shipped overseas and wound up outside Naples, Italy, in January 1944. At first, he flew patrols in a P-39, an oddball aircraft with an engine in the middle and a door that opened like a car’s. But he soon graduated to the powerful P-51C.
He and others in the all-black 332d Fighter Group had the tails of their planes painted the distinctive red that would make them the famous Red Tails.
McGee also had the word “Kitten” painted in big, red letters on the nose of his plane in honor of his wife, Frances, whose nickname was Kitten, and to salute his crew chief, who kept his aircraft’s engine purring.
With the P-51, McGee said his job was bomber escort, and he was instructed to stay with the bombers unless ordered to attack marauding German fighters.
One day, McGee said, he was so ordered, and during a dogfight managed to get behind a German fighter, the FW-190, and shoot it down. “The pilot did not get out,” he said. It was his only kill.
McGee went on to fly 136 missions in World War II — he said white fighter pilots usually flew about 50. He flew 100 missions during the Korean War and 173 in Vietnam. The reason: Although the military was by then happy to have black pilots, he said, “the airlines weren’t ready.”
Walter L. McCreary, 89, of Burke, the son of a railroad worker, was raised in San Antonio and had graduated from Tuskegee University in 1940 when he got a draft notice. He already had a civilian pilot’s license and signed up for the Tuskegee Army Air Corps program, becoming one of the first pilots of the all-black 100th Fighter Squadron.
He was also shipped overseas in January 1944 and, like McGee, was based outside Naples. He flew 88 missions in the P-39, the P-47 and the P-51. He said he learned firsthand that strafing was the most hazardous.
During a strafing run Oct. 12, 1944, on his 89th mission, he was hit by enemy flak.
“I was on a mission to the Danube to shoot anything floating in the river,” he said Tuesday. Unbeknown to him, he said, there was an enemy antiaircraft school on the ground in the area — and the gunners started practicing on him.
One shell exploded just in front of him, he said. A second blew up a little closer, and, as he pulled up the nose of his plane, a third went off right under the belly.
The P-51 is liquid-cooled,” he said. The flak “tore the radiator out, so the plane didn’t fly very well.” A liquid he at first thought was gasoline began leaking onto the cockpit floor. When it didn’t ignite, he realized it was probably coolant, but he also knew that it was time to bail out.
On the ground, he was turned over to German soldiers and transported to a German prison camp in what is now Poland.
He was there for eight months and did not try to escape. He is sometimes asked why. “Escape, and pass for what?” he said he responded. “I mean, if I was a Caucasian, maybe I could blend in. No way could I blend in.”
McCreary said he was not racially harassed or mistreated by his German captors or fellow prisoners. He said that a solidarity developed among POWs that seemed to span racial lines.
“From the time that I was captured until the time I arrived [back home] in the United States, I didn’t know who I was, racially,” he said. “No one ever mentioned it.”
He said he did not encounter racism again until he and other former POWs had been freed and, on their way home, were taken to eat in a segregated cafeteria in St. Louis. The staff objected to McCreary. A fellow POW, a rangy, white Texan, summoned the manager, took him by the collar and said: “We just got through fighting one war, and we will start another one right now,” McCreary related.
“That was . . . the bonding that existed,” he said.
McCreary said he has mixed emotions about today’s accolade, which required broad support from Congress.
“It was earned under the most difficult terms,” he said, during a time when many in Congress “identified us as being ignorant, didn’t have the intelligence, didn’t have the coordination and didn’t have the leadership to become military.”
“I’m not one who carries hate,” he said. “When we were flying at 30,000 feet above the bombers” and their white crews, he said, he and his comrades would chuckle and remark that the white aviators had no idea that they were under the watchful eyes of supposedly inept black fighter pilots.
But it is the pilots who always get the glory, Crockett said. There were thousands of dedicated Tuskegee Airmen who were not pilots, and yesterday, during a gathering at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, Crockett, 88, of Annandale, told one of his favorite stories about the unsung ground crews.
It happened March 23, 1945, the day before a big raid on Berlin, and has come down in Tuskegee lore as “the great train robbery.”
Crockett, a pilot and operations officer from rural Arkansas, was based in Italy and learned that the long mission would require his P-51s to carry more gas than their two 70-gallon drop tanks could hold. Base officials “came to me and asked me how many planes we had with 110-gallon tanks,” he recalled. “I said only three. We knew we needed some more larger fuel tanks.”
The men searched in vain for the bigger tanks. With less than 24 hours before the mission, word came that an Allied supply train carrying the larger tanks was en route. The crews hatched a plan to secure the tanks, Crockett said.
“They went and held up the train and took the larger tanks,” he said. “Then they worked all night to put them on the P-51s. It took a lot of work, because they had to first drain, then take off, the 70-gallon tanks, put the 110s on and then fuel them. They worked all night to get the planes ready, but by 5 or 6 in the morning, we were ready to go.”
Yesterday, as he pondered today’s Capitol Hill honor, Crockett said he was happy that Tuskegee’s aviators are getting their due.
But deep inside, he feels a little of the sting he felt when he returned from Europe to find that he was still not afforded the privileges he fought for.
“It’s more then 60 years later,” he said. “Sixty years is a long time — a very long time.”
