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Tuskegee Airmen given congressional medal

The Tuskegee Airmen, black pilots of World War II whose combat contributions languished as historical footnotes until a 1995 movie helped turn them into legends, capped their record of honors March 29 with the Congressional Gold Medal.

The medal was presented to original members of the 99th Pursuit — later Fighter — Squadron during a ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. One medal, of gold, will be housed in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C. Duplicate medals made of bronze will be presented to each of the original airmen, officials said.

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Video: President Bush honors members of the Tuskegee Airmen with the Congressional Gold Medal (Gannett News Service)

Vignettes

Naomi Bell

Norris Connally

Crawford Dowdell

William H. Holloman III

Elmer D. Jones

“I think it was the fulfillment of a lot of young men’s dreams,” said former 2nd Lt. Rudolph Berthoud, 82, of Atlanta. “They went down to Tuskegee as young men and returned as old men. What they did as young men is being validated now.”

As a young navigator himself, Berthoud went to Tuskegee in 1942 to train with the bomber group but never saw action in World War II.

The bill awarding the medal to the airmen was sponsored in the House of Representatives by Rep. Charlie Rangel, D.-N.Y., and in the Senate by Sens. Carl Levin and Debbie Stabenow, both D-Mich., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.

The pilots’ moniker comes from the Tuskegee Institute, the historically black college in Alabama whose school of aeronautics got the Army’s attention when it looked around to set up an all-black aviation program. The U.S. was not even in the war when the Army established the flying program in 1941. But it was by March 1942, when the first group of pilots received their wings.

For decades after the war, the story of the Tuskegee pilots remained largely unknown. That changed when “The Tuskegee Airmen” — an HBO film starring Laurence Fishburne, Andre Braugher and Malcolm Jamal-Warner — premiered in 1995.

Since then, the Tuskegee Airmen’s achievements in fighting Germans during the war, and the racism of fellow Americans during and after it, have been chronicled in numerous books and programs. In 1998, the Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site was established at Moton Field, Tuskegee — where the airmen received their flight training.

More than 1,000 black men earned their wings at Tuskegee during the war, of which 450 deployed and engaged the enemy in combat over North Africa, Sicily and Europe. Sixty-six of the airmen died in combat and another 33 were shot down and captured, according to Congress.

Though some historians have begun to question a long-held belief that the 99th never lost a bomber they were escorting, their record indicates they were aggressive defenders.

The airmen are credited with 261 enemy aircraft destroyed and 148 damaged over 15,553 combat sorties and 1,578 missions.

Levin, when he introduced Senate legislation for the medal two years ago, noted that the Tuskegee Airmen collectively already had received three Presidential Unit Citations, 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses and Legions of Merit, 700 Air Medals and clusters, nine Purple Hearts and the Red Star of Yugoslavia.

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