Tuskegee Airmen; superpilots

yanling

Guru
Joined
Aug 30, 2007
Messages
137
Location
California
Just finished watching a "documentary" about the Tuskegee Airmen (all black fighter pilot unit in WW2).

Basically the gist was that they endured a lot of racism and eventually became the best fighter pilots in the world because they had to work that much harder to prove themselves.

They didn't allow any casualties among the B-17s they escorted over the Third Reich.

So, gentlemen, you can thank black fighter pilots for heroically ensuring that the skies were safe for the helpless white guys in the bombers to blast Hitler's Germany to pieces.

The white fighter pilots, of course, were hard working and overachieving, but incapable of superhuman feats like the tuskegee guys.

smiley5.gif


mtv11.jpg


Laurence Fishburne, star of the movie
 

jaxvid

Hall of Famer
Joined
Oct 15, 2004
Messages
7,247
Location
Michigan
Yeah, black pilots, that's why there's so many blacks on the Air Force football team
smiley5.gif


Maybe blacks have "lost interest" in flying like they did with baseball.

To me the lesson of the Tuskegee airmen is just how absolutely desperate the Army was for pilots during WWII that they would use black men to fly planes.

This is also a subject we discussed previously when the news came out that they did indeed lose a plane and weren't in fact "supermen".

Tuskgee pilots --the truth
 

Tom Iron

Mentor
Joined
Oct 25, 2006
Messages
1,597
Location
New Jersey
Has there ever been a black who designed and built a plane????????

Tom Iron...
 
Joined
May 1, 2006
Messages
461
The Tuskegee airmen had several advantages over their white counter parts.
1) They were hand selected. These were the best and&nb sp;&nb sp;&nb sp;
brightest black college students in the country.
2) Due to Mrs. Roosevelt taking a personal interest they
they were given training on a level no other US
fighter group enjoyed. including combat flying
taught by a pilot with 8 confirmed kills
3) They were given easy missions early on to allow
them to gain experience and skill instead of
being dumped into combat against experinced
German pilots.
4) When they were finally deemed ready for escort
duty they received the P-51 Mustang the best
fighter plane of WWII.
5) By the time there were flying Escort duty many
German pilots were teenagers with little
training.
And the no loses story is propaganda. The Tuskegeee
airmen's own historian one of the Tuskegee pilots admits to knowing that this is untrue.
 

yanling

Guru
Joined
Aug 30, 2007
Messages
137
Location
California
jaxvid said:
Yeah, black pilots, that's why there's so many blacks on the Air Force football team
smiley5.gif




Maybe blacks have "lost interest" in flying like they did with baseball.



To me the lesson of the Tuskegee airmen is just how absolutely desperate the Army was for pilots during WWII that they would use black men to fly planes.



This is also a subject we discussed previously when the news came out that they did indeed lose a plane and weren't in fact "supermen".



Tuskgee pilots --the truth

I know that there are a lot of blacks in the air force but they'e generally pumping gas or doing some other unglamorous job, as most air force jobs are, it seems, if they aren't air crew. I don't know of many black fighter or bomber pilots, despite what Independence Day</span> (Will Smith) or Stealth </span>(Jamie Foxx) or the recent travesty Flyboys </span>would have us think.
 

yanling

Guru
Joined
Aug 30, 2007
Messages
137
Location
California
Tom Iron said:
Has there ever been a black who designed and built a plane????????



Tom Iron...

Not that I know of, but if they did the plane would probably be lowered and painted some tacky color and half of the electrical power would be diverted to the stereo and there would be old burger king wrappers littered over the floor and a pager and 9mm glock in the map compartment.
 

yanling

Guru
Joined
Aug 30, 2007
Messages
137
Location
California
Tired old White said:
The Tuskegee airmen had several advantages over their white counter parts.

1) They were hand selected. These were the best and&am p;nb sp;&am p;nb sp;&am p;nb sp;

brightest black college students in the country.

2) Due to Mrs. Roosevelt taking a personal interest they

they were given training on a level no other US

fighter group enjoyed. including combat flying

taught by a pilot with 8 confirmed kills

3) They were given easy missions early on to allow

them to gain experience and skill instead of

being dumped into combat against experinced

German pilots.

4) When they were finally deemed ready for escort

duty they received the P-51 Mustang the best

fighter plane of WWII.

5) By the time there were flying Escort duty many

German pilots were teenagers with little

training.

And the no loses story is propaganda. The Tuskegeee

airmen's own historian one of the Tuskegee pilots admits to knowing that this is untrue.

You're right -- by late 1944, other than the few elite geschwader who flew FW-190 Ds or ME 262s, the Luftwaffe was largely a non-factor and many American bombers reduced the number of air gunners in a plane by one or even two.
 

Poacher

Mentor
Joined
Jul 30, 2005
Messages
943
The enemy propaganda has been so effective that I would be willing to bet that more Americans know about the Tuskegee airmen than know the names Chuck Yeager, Kelly Johnson or Billy Mitchell. Sad.
 

Bart

Hall of Famer
Joined
Feb 6, 2005
Messages
4,329
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03 /31/AR2007033101327_pf.html


Report: Tuskegee Airmen Lost 25 Bombers



The Associated Press
Sunday, April 1, 2007; 2:05 AM






MONTGOMERY, Ala. -- At least 25 bombers being escorted by the Tuskegee Airmen over Europe during World War II were shot down by enemy aircraft, according to a new Air Force report.


(snio)


The 25 planes were shot down on five days: June 9, July 12, July 18 and July 20, 1944 and March 24, 1945, the Montgomery Advertiser reported.


"All of these records have been here all along," Haulman said. "It was just a matter of putting them together."Edited by: Bart
 

White Shogun

Hall of Famer
Joined
Mar 2, 2005
Messages
6,285
We did a thread on the Tuskegee Airmen a while back, with lots of nice posts and real facts about the unit:

tuskegee airmen

andd Tired Old White posted this tidbit:

Tuskegee Airmen

Enjoy.
 

Bart

Hall of Famer
Joined
Feb 6, 2005
Messages
4,329
A poster at Amren reveals the truth of the situation. Airmen story is a lot of hype and little else.


[url]http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2006/12/records_said_to .php[/url]



An interesting-but conveniently ommitted fact; during 1942-1943, there were less than 150 American fighter pilots TOTAL, over all of Western Europe on any given day. You think maybe those particular (all-white) guys had an especially hard (impossible ) job? You bet. When the Tuskegee Airmen hit Germany, Germany was spent, and her skies were black (no pun intended ) with Allied aircraft.


For the majority of their service, the Tuskegee Group flew in the Mediteranian theater, where, without a doubt, the allies had OVERWHELMING AIR SUPERIORITY. The Luftwaffe could never hope to put up enough fighters to counter the US there.
No, the Germans put up a SAVAGE fight on the ground in North Africa, and especially Italy, but their air presence was terribly weak...they could not allocate the aircraft from Russia or Germany. Flak accounted for the greatest danger to Allied aircraft there. Granted, the Tuskegee airmen did fly over Ploesti, but again, the flak there was incredible.


Another point about the relative conditions facing Mediteranean vs. German-Theater airmen;
The Mediteranean bomber raids were more often at medium to low altitude. They were less vulnerable to all kinds of threats for that reason...hardly safe, though, and those conditions imposed their own terrible burdens.


More importantly, as the war dragged on, and the Tuskegee Group started flying over Germany, the actual groundspace of Germany was SHRINKING. As we rolled up the borders and occupied more land, the ammount of antiaircraft guns (flak guns) actually grew in density in the remaining space.
Follow me? They packed more AA guns into a tighter space around the dwindling targets. Thus, the ratio of flak-to- fighter kills increased even higher. Less fighters and pilots to defend Germany, more flak guns packed tighter around less targets.



Then, add in that the American 8th AirForce had a HUGE number of bombers and fighters literally covering the German targets. Our superiority was complete.

In the last weeks of the war, the air offensive was called OFF, because there simply was nothing left to bomb, and we'd be dropping bombs on our own troops, anyway!

These were the conditions coming into play as the mythically perfect Tuskegee Airmen flew into Germany.

Sorry folks, it just isn't that glorious a picture. They were fighter pilots. That's it.

Now, at the same time, the "all-white" fighter pilots were facing much higher numbers of vastly more experienced and deadly German pilots, over Germany itself. While the Luftwaffe's numbers were already spread thin accross europe and Russia, there still were a lot more experienced pilots-and viable aircraft, fuel, munitions and ground support in 1942, 1943, and 1944, than in late 1944 or 1945.


By the time the Tuskegee Group flew over Germany, the vaunted Luftwaffe was a skeleton, composed of a very few experienced pilots, and a trickling stream of complete greenhorns who had NO experience.
They were also flying aircraft (by-and large) that were world class in 1939 and 1940, but were outmatched in late 1944 by up-to-date versions of the P-51 Mustang, and the venerable, huge, fast, if ungainly looking P-47 Thunderbolt. But the Tuskegee Airmen all had P-51s over Germany, so they had the best.


I know the Bf109 and various models of the FW 190 (German fighters) were still great aircraft in the hands of experienced pilots, but for a nineteen year old with ten hours solo flight time, they were coffins. That's right, the average flight experience of a German fighter pilot in 1944-45 was about 100 hours-compared to nearly 500 for an American. And there were indeed many Germans in 1944-45 who climbed into their flying coffins with ten hours solo time. Not exactly aces.
Yes, there were indeed a few ME-262 Swallows (the awesome new jet fighters) taking off to meet bombers, but every half-experienced historian knows they were desperately short in numbers, and they appeared at the very end of the war, when even German airfields were dissapearing, there was no fuel, and almost as little pilots. They were largely shot down as they had to perform their very long glide-path down to landing (which left them totally, totally vulnerable-especially as they were OUT OF FUEL...they guzzled that up while they spun circles around US aircraft, blasting them out of the sky.

So an allied fighter jumps an out <DEL>of</DEL> fuel ME-262 as it helplessly glides around in descending circles to land, and that's a big score. NOT. Just another encounter in war. Some accounts brag about Tuskegee Airmen shooting down the ME-262s. Well, they may well have done this in even combat, but in most cases across the board, the ME-262 was blown up on the ground (parked there), or as it landed, out of fuel.


But I digress a bit. The Tuskegee airmen may well have been superb. They certainly did their job, and God bless them. They are a point of historical and social value. I salute them...not for being BLACK airmen, but for being airmen. They fought and did their part. They were not supermen. They were not perfect. In fact, their mythic record is likey just that...a myth. There are lots of MYTHS in war history. Add the issue of racial insanity we have today in the West, and look out. The claim of never losing a bomber to enemy fighters always sounded absurd, even when one figured in that a) the Tuskegee group never faced the number or quality of German fighter pilots as did their white counterparts, and b) Flak was the most deadly weapon, even in Germany.
But, whatever. We have so many silly MYTHS about blacks vs. whites. This is just another.


Posted by Orion</A>
 
Joined
Oct 24, 2005
Messages
1,248
Location
Illinois
Poacher said:
The enemy propaganda has been so effective that I would be willing to bet that more Americans know about the Tuskegee airmen than know the names Chuck Yeager, Kelly Johnson or Billy Mitchell. Sad.
Or Don Blakeslee, Hub Jemke, Don Gentile, John Godfrey, Jim Goodson, Kid Hofer, Robert Johnson, Robert Schilling, Chesty Petterson, I could just go on.
The T-Airmen were never given straffing missions- where most of the casualties occured. These missions helped the GIs, but that was for the white pilots. The T-men also were given the easy escort missions.
 
Joined
Dec 18, 2004
Messages
2,947
The problem is not that the Tuskegee Airmen get so much attention now, but that the best American fighter pilots of WWII have been forgotten. When I ask people to name an American WWII fighter pilot, the name they usually come up with is Chuck Yeager, or sometimes Pappy Boyington. Yeager had 11 air victories in WWII, but his fame is from the TV commercials he did, and to some extent being the first man to exceed the speed of sound.
 

ToughJ.Riggins

Hall of Famer
Joined
Nov 19, 2006
Messages
5,063
Location
Ontario Canada
I would also note that Germany was short on oil right from the beginning of the War. The Germans tried to capture Royal Dutch oil fields at the beginning of the war, I believe this effort had already failed by the beginning of 1940. The company Royal Dutch Shell was headed by a Dutchman Henri Deterding and a Jewish Brit Marcus Samuel. Royal Dutch was the strongest oil player in the East. Standard Oil was the strongest in the West, but it had already been broken up at the beginning of the 20th century by a Supreme Court decision. Royal Dutch had many oil fields in places like Sumatra in Indonesia.

So right from the beginning of the war it was decided by Hitler that their war machine would be run on liquefied coal. Running tanks on liquefied coal seemed to work fine but for the Luftwaffe it gave them a disadvantage in their fighter planes in air combat. Liquefied coal is not as potent a fuel for machinery as gasoline and it caused the German planes to lose some air mobility. By the end of the war American Allied Planes were vastly superior to Luftwaffe planes.
 

DixieDestroyer

Hall of Famer
Joined
Jan 19, 2007
Messages
9,464
Location
Dixieland
screamingeagle said:
Poacher said:
The enemy propaganda has been so effective that I would be willing to bet that more Americans know about the Tuskegee airmen than know the names Chuck Yeager, Kelly Johnson or Billy Mitchell. Sad.
Or Don Blakeslee, Hub Jemke, Don Gentile, John Godfrey, Jim Goodson, Kid Hofer, Robert Johnson, Robert Schilling, Chesty Petterson, I could just go on.
The T-Airmen were never given straffing missions- where most of the casualties occured. These missions helped the GIs, but that was for the white pilots. The T-men also were given the easy escort missions.

Ya'll don't forget WW1 fighter/ace Eddie Rickenbacker!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Rickenbacker
 
Joined
Oct 24, 2005
Messages
1,248
Location
Illinois
I also forgot Francis Grabinski, the top ace in the ETO. In the Pacific theater we Had Richard Bong, America's ace of aces, and Tommy Mcguire. Then there were the Flying Tigers with Tex Hill and others.

I also saw some PBS show about the history of aviation. In the WW II segment they interviewed a T-airman who shot down a ME-262. They implied that only the T-men could shoot down a ME-262- something you would expect from natural athletes. Other air groups shot down a 262 because they had a short range and need longer runways.
 

yanling

Guru
Joined
Aug 30, 2007
Messages
137
Location
California
Don't forget David McCambell, American ace of aces in the Pacific War (34 confirmed kills, including 9 in one sortie)!

The P-51D (and postwar K) was as fine a piece of aviation equipment as any in the war, and is probably the best combination of range, speed, and general air combat capability of any piston engined fighter in the war.

That being said, it was outperformed in many situational parameters by the Vought F4U.

Foreign makes like the Ki-84 and Fw-190D/Ta-152 had inferior range to the P-51 but both were in many aspects superior to the P-51, particularly the Ta-152 in the high altitude interceptor role.

Of course the later Axis fighters could not be made in adequate numbers and could not be piloted by qualified personnel in any case.

The Me-262 was sensational, period. It's main drawbacks were its long takeoff run which made it difficult to operate from improvised airfields in 1945, its low service life-unreliable engines, and critical lack of high octane fuel.

Its superiority is emphatically demonstrated that every leading aircraft designer in the world wanted to study the Me-262 because it was the wave of the future. It was in most respects barring its inferior engines superior to the North American P/F-80 then starting to equip USAAF units in Germany.

But back on topic, the Tuskegee airmen were undoubtedly a good unit but are more a publicity stunt that got attention because they were different from all the other good units, which were of course white.

As an Asian American, I look to the accomplishments of Japanese-American units serving in the ETO during WW2 and feel great pride in their achievements (including their high battle casualties due to relentlessness in the attack, and their large number of decorations), but I'm not going to start a riot because there haven't been a whole lot of movies about them.

Black Americans get some kind of token unit in a highly technical white man's battle arena where whites did almost all the building-designing-planning-fighting-dying and they feel like you owe them the world and the credit for your success.
 

Gary

Mentor
Joined
Dec 28, 2004
Messages
1,050
Yes blacks are the best pilots in the world and the best jets are made in the Sudan.European Air Force's like Britian,Germany and Russia can't compare with the highly educated black pilots from such super powers as Kenya,Ethiopia and Nigeria. These super pilots fly much needed food from Africa with there over abundance to famine nations with starving people like Sweden,Norway and Finland.
 

jaxvid

Hall of Famer
Joined
Oct 15, 2004
Messages
7,247
Location
Michigan
I sense a small bit of sarcasm in the last post.
smiley36.gif


C'mon gary in another couple of millenia those Africans would have invented a wheel and maybe even a written language. I understand the kalahari bushman once had plans to make a paper airplane, they had the correct method for folding it and everything, problem was they just didn't know how to make paper.
 

Gary

Mentor
Joined
Dec 28, 2004
Messages
1,050
Yes Jaxvid I must confess there may have bit just a wee bit of sarcasm in my post! By the way all kidding aside I enjoy your posts. You make good sense and have valid points.
I like this site it's like an officer's club where White Brothers can come and discuss sports/other topics that interest us. That is why I can't stand trolls who come in uninvited and try to stir up trouble. I think we can do more if we keep unity among ourselves. A MAN'S RACE IS HIS NATION !!
 

Solomon Kane

Mentor
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
783
Yeah, I think we can safely say these guys were and are greatly overrated--which does not of course mean that they did not serve and do not deserve our respect. They seem to have been decent patriots and decent pilots who were brought together as a propaganda ploy.

The real injustice is that we are *forced* to hear about them every year via Black History month, the propaganda of which seems to affirm that everything good and true about America has its roots in some hitherto obscure black person.

But then I guess this is one reason why Blacks need a Black History month--their accomplishments are perhaps so few and insignificant you need to award them a full scale propaganda campaign to make sure we all know about them.

As for the white man--well as the old Latin saying has it:"Si monumentum requiris, circumspice!"

Yanling, glad you're here. Your posts have been excellent. I have great respect for Asian-Americans because they have shown respect for America and her traditions and history. And the "Nisei" were an excellent unit. Students of WW2 know about them because *their actions speak for themselves*, and they don't need some artifical media campaign to promote themselves.
smiley20.gif
 

Gary

Mentor
Joined
Dec 28, 2004
Messages
1,050
I got to know the Air Force recruiter here and went to his office with my sons sometimes. He told me he had to have pictures of blacks-male/female on the wall or get into trouble with the top brass. Most blacks don't score high enough on the ASVB test to get into the Air Force so they lower the standards to meet the number of blacks the government wants.
Oddly enough from this area with 5 high schools not one person joined in 4 years so he had to leave and close the office-the Navy left 6 years ago.
If the government wants the military to be black,gay and hispanic then let them. White males should hit the gym and workout to build strong bodies to defend themselves and there loved ones.Also learn some self-defense-Judo, Karate, Wrestling, Boxing, Savate,Etc.Edited by: Gary
 

jared

Mentor
Joined
Aug 16, 2006
Messages
721
Location
Texas
Some of you may know these guys already but if you want to be shocked by WWII piloting prowess you ought to do searches on Germans Erich Hartmann (352 kills) and Stuka pilot Hans Ulrich Rudel who destroyed the equivalent of like a couple armored divisions.
 

Jimmy Chitwood

Hall of Famer
Joined
Aug 10, 2005
Messages
8,973
Location
Arkansas
holy crap! wow!
smiley3.gif
smiley32.gif
 

Solomon Kane

Mentor
Joined
Jul 3, 2006
Messages
783
Ah yes. Erich Hartmann--the blonde knight of Germany, and Hans Ulrich Rudel--tank buster supreme! Rudel's war biography "Stuka Pilot" is exciting reading. My favorite incident is when he, when out of ammo, dropped a paper message (weighted with a stone) to a german tank platoon,alerting them so they could ambush a Russian column.

Unfortunately Hartmann died during the war and so was unable to provide a biography.

The military accomplishments of the German Armed forces--fighting against virtually the whole world--are truly astounding.
 
Top