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[[missing text]]ookie,
This was in our local newspaper.  Was it in yours?  More later.  
Love, Jake.

'The Good War' is an account of the lives of ordinary Americans at home and abroad during World War II, as told to author Studs Terkel. In the fourth part of this series, Lowell Steward, one of the Tuskegee Airmen, tells what the war was like for the black soldier.

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[[caption]]VISIONS OF 'THE GOOD WAR'[[/caption]]

Lonely Eagles
BY STUDS TERKEL

LOWELL STEWARD

'BLACK AIRMEN in World War Two destroyed or damaged 409 enemy aircraft, including the last four victories of the Army Air Corps in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations. They flew 15,553 sorties, and 1,578 missions.  200 of these missions were heavy bomber escorts deep into the Rhineland, during which time not one of the heavies was lost to enemy [[missing text]]

[[missing text]] to the Air Force. Ten months later I was finally called. That's when they decided what they could do with me. I was sent to Tuskegee, an all-segregated base, deep in the heart of Alabama.


The summer of '42 is when I went through the training phase, graduated. I had various brushes with Alabama bigotry, such as my wife trying to buy a hat. They'd tell her, "If you put it on, you have bought it." You couldn't try on anything. You had to eat in separate quarters, of course. And live in separate places.

Ran into it again when I went overseas. I could understand the white American soldiers' antagonism to black soldiers who dated white girls. Then one day I was assigned temporary duty in North Africa. The white soldiers there were antagonistic to [[missing text]]

[[missing text]] popular things in my mind. They were fighting fascism and letting racism run rampant.

I think the reason the 332nd was trained at Tuskegee was it was down South. As one of the officers in charge put it, if it doesn't work out, it'll be down South and nobody'll see 'em fail anyway. The whole idea was that blacks could not fly an airplane. We'll give 'em a chance. If they succeed, I guess it won't hurt anything.  If they fail, we'll hush it and nobody will know about it.

It was a tremendous success, beyond their wildest dreams.  So they established quotas. They were gettin' so many volunteers for the Air Force, qualified young men, that they had to limit the size of classes. They had so many pilots graduating, in spite of Washington washing pilots out of flying school for [[missing text]]

Transcription Notes:
---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-05-28 20:00:04