General Discussion

He was one of the few Black fighter pilots in WWII but he was not the only one:

Tuskegee Airmen
African-American military pilots during World War II

tuskegeeairmen.org

The Tuskegee Airmen were a group of primarily African-American military pilots and airmen who fought in World War II. They formed the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the United States Army Air Forces. The name also applies to the navigators, bombardiers, mechanics, instructors, crew chiefs, nurses, cooks, and other support personnel. The Tuskegee Airmen received praise for their excellent combat record earned while protecting American bombers from enemy fighters.

Wikipedia

Harry Stewart Jr., decorated Tuskegee Airmen combat pilot, dies at 100

He flew 43 missions over Europe during World War II but later could not find work as a commercial pilot because of discriminatory practices.
February 5, 2025

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2025/02/05/harry-stewart-tuskegee-airman-dead-obituary/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-apps/imrs.php?src=&w=1440&impolicy=high_res



https://allthatsinteresting.com/tuskegee-airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen’s Incredible Heroism During World War II


First Lieutenant Charles B. Hall, in his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. The swastika represents a Luftwaffe plane he shot down.

In April 1943, the 99th Pursuit Squadron was sent to fight in North Africa and then Sicily. But the Tuskegee Airmen were initially given older, clunkier planes than their white counterparts, a big obstacle while flying.

“The Tuskegee Airmen initially flew the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. This was a prewar design and almost obsolete,” the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum reports. “They were briefly equipped with Bell P-39 Airacobras in March of 1944. It’s widely thought that this was an even less capable design and it was used by very few of the U.S. front line fighter units in the war.”
Charles Hall In A P 40

U.S. Air ForceFirst Lieutenant Charles B. Hall, in his Curtiss P-40 Warhawk. The swastika represents a Luftwaffe plane he shot down.

And it wasn’t just Tuskegee Airmen pilots who faced racist obstacles. Mechanics did too. Airman Walter Suggs told NPR that the U.S. government “expected [the airmen] to fail and they kind of put them in that situation, the Afro-Americans, so they would fail. So they wouldn’t give them parts or anything like that.” Still, the men found creative solutions to their problems.

For example, Suggs explained, if an airplane returned with a “hole” in it and the airmen couldn’t get the parts that they needed, “they would go out and measure it and then they would go into the mess hall… where you could find these empty cans. They would take them, cut them up into a patch, and they would take it and go out and rivet it to the aircraft.”

Despite these ongoing challenges, the Tuskegee Airmen served valiantly on the battlefield. Known for the distinctive red tails on their planes, they flew more than 15,000 individual sorties, destroyed 36 German planes in the air and 237 on the ground, and demolished approximately 1,000 enemy rail cars and transport vehicles. And when they served in bomber crews with the 477th Bombardment Group (the predecessor of the 477th Composite Group) in 1944, the Tuskegee Airmen were so effective in combat that a rumor emerged that they hadn’t lost a single bomber.

(This wasn’t quite true — some two dozen of the bombers they escorted were shot down — but they did have a much higher success rate than other American fighter escort groups during World War II.)