African Americans In World War II: Tuskegee Airmen

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During the Second World War, over 1.2 million African Americans served in the military. The United States Armed Forces was segregated until 1948. However, World War II paved the foundation to integrate African Americans in the military. Before World War Two, less than four thousand African Americans served in the military. During the war, the draft was segregated and more often than not, they would choose the white draft board before the black one. The NAACP was pressuring Roosevelt to draft African Americans, and he did according to the population percentage African Americans made up.

In the beginning of the war, most African Americans were in non-combat units. They have put in supply jobs such as being cooks or maintenance, transportation. Their work was vital to the front lines because without ammunition or weapons being shipped to a battlefield there would be no fight period. The Red Ball Express was a supply line where they carried millions of tons of supplies to the Army divisions going through France. In the later years of the war however due to troop losses, they put African Americans in frontline jobs more often.

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During the Invasion of Normandy otherwise known as D-Day, the First Infantry Division included 1,700 African American troops. Those troops served in the 327th Quartermaster unit and the 320th Anti Aircraft Barrage Balloon Battalion which protected troops on the ground from aerial attack. They formed an all-black tank unit, the 761st Tank Battalion who fought with the famous General Patton. That tank unit spent around 200 days in combat and they captured 30 towns in Belgium, Germany, and France. They also established many other infantry units in the Pacific War such as the 93rd Infantry Division and 24th Infantry regiment who fought in battles later in the war 1944-45 in places such as Iwo Jima.

In 1940, there were less than 100 licensed African American pilots. So, as an experiment, the Army Air Corp, the precursor to the US Air Force, created the “Tuskegee Experiment.” The soon to be called “Tuskegee Airmen” were trained at Tuskegee, Alabama. They flew in the 332nd Fighter Group and they flew support missions such as escorting bombers and protecting them from enemy fighters trying to intercept the bombers. Between May 1943 and June 1945, they flew more than 15,000 sorties, flying over Italy in 1943, and Germany later on in the war. The Tuskegee Airmen went by the name of “Red Tails” because they would paint the tails of their P-51 fighter planes red for identification purposes. There was 932 Tuskegee Airmen, however only 355 would serve active duty as pilots, 66 Tuskegee Airmen died in combat. Bomber crews often requested to be escorted by them because of the extraordinary job they did compare to other fighter escort units.

The Second World War broke the boundary between segregation in the military because this was the last conflict were troops had to fight in separate units. Some of the most famous heroic actions performed by African Americans during the war would be from Doris Miller, a cook aboard the USS West Virginia in Pearl Harbor, he escorted his captain who had been wounded off the ship, then continued to man a gun emplacement, he was awarded the Navy Cross. Even though they were not allowed to fight with whites, they still served their country with honor. Stephen Ambrose said “The world’s greatest democracy fought the world’s greatest racist with a segregated army. World War II planted the seeds for the post war civil rights movement.

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