In a record that was unmatched, not one bomber was lost in more than 2,000 bomber escort missions. The Germans feared the black squadrons, dubbing them the Black Birdmen. Sixty-six Tuskegee pilots lost their lives in combat, and 32 were shot down and became prisoners of war.
Despite their stellar war record, black servicemen, who also included bomber pilots, bombardiers, navigators, gunners, radio specialists, mechanics, and ground engineers, continued to face discrimination at every turn.
Joseph P. Gomer, a Tuskegee pilot who flew in Italy as part of the 332nd Fighter Group, recalled those times for his daughter. "We shared the sky with white pilots, but that's all we shared. We never had contact with each other. German prisoners lived better than black servicemen…and the Germans treated us better than the Americans did. Our service is something that never got into history books. It was just ignored."
Bigotry at Home
More than 4,000 German prisoners of war were held in prison camps in 45 states in the United States during World War II. According to many accounts, the food was good and the housing was frequently better than that for black soldiers.
The ranking German officer at one camp was assigned a house, a car, and a driver. POWs at Camp Clinton in Mississippi reported the scores of their sporting events in the local newspaper, said John Ray Skates, emeritus professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi and author of several books on WW II.
"There were numerous occasions when German POWs, especially from the many camps located in the Jim Crow south, were allowed in stores which denied access to black Americans," said Arnold Krammer, a historian at Texas A & M University who has written several books on the prison camps in the U.S. "When buses filled with German POWs went south, the occasional black MP guards had to move to the back of the bus, while the German prisoners remained in the seats of their choice. German POWs, debating with their guards, regularly used the issue of segregation in America to defend their treatment of the Jews. How tragic."
All military bases are surrounded by enclosures. The prisoners of war were for the most part allowed to wander freely around the base, said Broadnax.
Lt. Col. Charles Dryden (U.S. Air Force, retired), and one of the original Tuskegee airmen, writes bitterly of his experience in a memoir titled A-Train; Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman. "German prisoners of war, soldiers of America's enemy, could use all the facilities at the post exchange at Walterboro, South Carolina, and I, an American citizen who had fought the Nazis to defend America, could not. C-o-u-l-d n-o-t. COULD NOT!" [original emphasis].
Black soldiers stationed at Camp Phillips in Salina, Kansas, watched German POWs eat in restaurants they were not allowed to enter. And in April 1945, 101 black soldiers protesting a rigidly segregated system at Freeman Field in Indiana were arrested.
"The men, some of whom had seen combat, were placed under house arrest and kept behind barbed wire fence, while they could see prisoners of war walking around with no restrictions at all," said Broadnax.
"The part about a soldier being accused of murder—that's fiction. But the rest is true. There's a lot that hasn't been told yet. The movie should raise some questions in people's minds."
Tomorrow, another feature to wrap up Black History Month: A report on a new book about William Sheppard, an African American from Virginia who went to the Belgian Congo as a missionary in the 19th century but engaged in adventures so colorful he became known as "Black Livingstone." His eyewitness report of atrocities against the native Congolese also made him an early human-rights activist.
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