Red Tails

You may have seen the movie “Red Tails” or “The Tuskegee Airmen”.  In it you see actors like Cuba Gooding Jr. playing the first black fighter pilots.  This group took classes at Tuskegee.  Students built an airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen trained nearby.  This was the era of Jim Crow laws where blacks and whites couldn’t eat or learn together.  But they were able to train black pilots, navigators, mechanics, and all the other skills needed to support the first African-American Air Corp unit.  In World War II, the fighter pilots gained reputation for their escort skills and were never known to abandon bombers in their care.

The mechanics learned to repair the whole plane including engines and plane wings.  As the war progressed, women were also trained to be mechanics.

 

One thing I didn’t realize but makes sense is that pilots spent time learning military intelligence.  That meant they had to learn to identify 100’s of planes and ships from memory.  They spent hours in this little room reviewing maps, memorizing plane and boat shapes, and keeping up with military reports of the war.