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Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen
The Tuskegee Airmen are legendary. These African-American military aviators in the US Armed Forces earned high marks for their patriotism, their combat records and their elite standards. Their contributions are now a vital part of African-American history, and an important factor in America’s success during World War II. Yet many black pilots who served in the 332nd Fighter Group overseas never returned from their missions, nor were they honored by the US government for their sacrifices for decades.
With the passing of Lt. Colonel George Hardy, the last surviving Tuskegee combat pilot, and with plaques commemorating black service members removed from American cemeteries in Europe, the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen must be preserved.
National Public Radio investigative journalist and the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, Cheryl W. Thompson in her book Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen explores the stories of the 27 Tuskegee Airmen who went missing in combat, the lives they lived, the reasons their planes went down, why the remains of all but two were never found, and the impact their disappearances had on their families and communities.
The following is an excerpt from Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen.
Bell P-39Q Airacobra
First Lieutenant John H. Prowell Jr. didn’t like flying the Bell P-39Q Airacobra airplane. He said they were riddled with problems, like engine trouble and the inability to get up to speed in the middle of a war. As a test pilot, he didn’t always know what type of aircraft he was going to get, but he knew the difference between them. Prowell was so concerned with the safety of the plane that in one letter to his mother he told her not to worry about him fighting the enemy in the skies—unless he was doing so in a P-39. “He told her there was something wrong with them and they had engine problems,” his oldest daughter, Virginia Prowell Farris, told me. “He was afraid he was going to die in that plane.”
On May 24, 1944, her father’s fears were realized. While returning from a routine convoy patrol in Montecorvino, Italy, he and his plane disappeared. The military said that engine failure was the likely culprit. Of the twenty-seven Tuskegee Airmen from the 332nd Fighter Group who went missing in action while on missions and patrols in Europe and haven’t been found, I determined through records that at least ten of them—37 percent—died when their airplanes went down because of engine or mechanical issues. In eleven others, the military said it didn’t know what caused the planes to drop from the sky. Pilots were flying P-39s in two of those “unknown” incidents.
Bad airplanes for Tuskegee Airmen
“There was a lot of mechanical failure,” Daniel L. Haulman told me. Haulman is a historian and Tuskegee Airmen expert who spent years working at the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama. He described the P-39 as very small and a “pretty good plane,” but only for attacking ground targets. While it had a cannon and ammunition in the front, it had limited range and couldn’t stay with the bombers very long. When you’re escorting bombers, speed and range matter. Its maximum speed was 376 miles per hour and its range was 525 miles.
The P-39, though, was popular with the Soviets, partly because the engine was behind the pilots and kept them warm, but also because it had a good reputation for performing well at lower altitudes. The Soviet air battles often happened at low altitudes, so the United States was happy to sell or lease them more than 4,700 of the airplanes. The P-39 wasn’t known among the men in the U.S. Army Air Force as top notch and the military knew it wasn’t as sharp as some of the other planes.
Josh Frank, with the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, whose job is to find missing military folks, described the P-39as loud with a hot engine behind the pilot’s seat. “It was just a bad plane.” Farris believed they intentionally equipped the young, inexperienced Black pilots, like her dad, with less than stellar aircraft because the men weren’t wanted as pilots in World War II, to begin with.
The “widowmaker”
Having faulty planes that could likely crash would eliminate one of the War Department’s biggest headache: the colored cadet pilot–training program. “I actually believe that they gave those planes to the Black pilots because they knew they (planes) weren’t any good,” Farris, told me.
“That’s one more Black guy out of the way.” Farris recalled a conversation she had with a mechanic decades after her father went missing. The two met at a museum opening in Tuskegee, and she asked him about the P-39s that he worked on for the 332nd Fighter Group. He told her they were hard to fix, but that the Black mechanics did the best they could to keep them flying. Farris has always blamed the military for her father’s death.
“They didn’t issue him the best plane,” she told me. “If they had …he might be living today.”
What she didn’t know was that there were White military officials in Washington who actually echoed her beliefs about purposely wanting to sabotage the Black aviators during the Second World War. When they were trying to figure out what to do with the American-made Martin B-26s, a twin-engine bomber plane that was unpopular and controversial because it had a high fatality rate, some at the War Department had a suggestion: send the accident-prone aircraft to Tuskegee. Crashed planes. Dead Negro pilots. Problem solved, they believed. The B-26 aircraft was so inferior that it became known as the “widowmaker.”
Disapproval of the program
“There would be so many casualties that it would discourage the program, and they would be rid of the program,” Brigadier General Noel F. Parrish said in a U.S. Air Force interview in 1974, where he recounted his experiences with the Tuskegee Airmen and how they were treated by the military brass back in Washington, DC. To his credit, Parrish, the training director at the Tuskegee Army Flying School in 1941, before taking over the Tuskegee Army Air Field, pushed back against the War Department’s establishment. He told officials in no uncertain terms that he was not going to knowingly give these men defective aircraft.
Of course, they didn’t—or didn’t want to—understand Parrish’s way of thinking. Some pilots were going to fly those planes, they told him, so why not the Black ones? “Well, because you just can’t condemn a whole group like that, whoever they are,” Parrish said he told them. “You will have to work out some other solution because this would have many repercussions.” Eventually, the officials agreed to work something else out, though they remained steadfast in their disapproval of this experimental program to train Blacks to fly in their military.
Passing off bad airplanes to the Black pilots
They had a mandate to train these cadets and give them the bare essentials, but they didn’t care if this experiment worked or not. Haulman, who is White, offered up a theory on why they would intentionally try and pass off the bad airplanes to the newly trained Black pilots: “There was racism involved at the time, and they wanted to save the better planes for the White pilots.”
And they often did, without hesitation, issue those shiny, new top-of-the-line airplanes to the White pilots, though Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. fought hard to get his men the newest and best planes.
Forgotten Souls: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen is available to order here.
Photo credit: Clay Kraby / U.S. Air Force
