Courtesy of Booker Chambers, DSCR Public Affairs

“I will try to devote the time that I have this morning to talk to you about a group of men who had to fight for the right to fight for their country,” Air Force Chief Master Sgt. (Ret) Grant Williams, Sr. told a rapt audience at Defense Supply Center Richmond.

Williams served during World War II as one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, who comprised the nation’s first African-American fighter squadrons. His audience in the Frank B. Lotts Conference Center included a mix of Aviation Academy students and other DSCR employees who came by Oct. 2 just to hear Williams speak.

“I recognize that a lot of you have no real concept of what America was like at the time the Tuskegee Airmen came on the scene. I hope if you don’t know about the situation, you will be enlightened by some of the things I have to say,” Williams said.

Although most attendees were not around during World War II, many had seen the 1995 movie “The Tuskegee Airmen,” starring Laurence Fishburne and Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Williams was drafted into the service in 1942 and sent to Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama for basic training. Following graduation, he was assigned to the 96th Maintenance Group, a unit organized to support the Tuskegee Airmen. His role resonated well with the DSCR employees, who support America’s modern airborne warriors as part of the Aviation Demand and Supply Chain.

“People of color had fought in all of the wars we have had since the Revolutionary War days, but they had never been allowed to serve in a position of responsibility,” Williams said. “It took a lot of pressure from the news media, labor unions, a law suit filed by a Howard Institute student that was backed by the [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People], and other things that encouraged America to change its attitude and allow people of color to fly.”

Williams said that some of America’s elected officials and appointed military leaders were responsible for policies that had prohibited African-Americans from serving as military pilots.

“They used as an excuse an Army War College study that was conducted in 1925, way back when I was five years old,” Williams said. “America did everything it could to prevent colored people, as they were called at that time, from becoming flyers.

“This Army War College study concluded, among other things, that colored people were lazy, that their brain was smaller than that of a white man, that they didn’t have the courage to fight, and that they would run in the face of danger. However, there were some people who thought otherwise and finally agreed to make some changes.”

Those changes led to the establishment of the Civilian Pilot Training Program in 1939. Eventually, Williams said, America allowed the program in six predominately black schools, including Hampton University, Howard University and Tuskegee University. Tuskegee was one of the main schools with pilot trainers that gave flight instruction.

“The program actually started at Schnook Field in Illinois,” Williams explained. “Some 278 black men went up there for that training. There were six officers in non-flying cadet status who were trained for the nucleus of the 99th Pursuit Squadron. Not too long after its formation, the 99th, along with all of the other pursuit squadrons, were switched over to fighter squadrons.”

Those six officers were trained in the fields of armament, maintenance, engineering, and weather in order to run the operational portion of a fighter squadron, Williams said. “The men did an excellent job in that training, even though most Americans thought it would take months,” Williams explained. “Once again, our men prevailed.”

Williams also talked about Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who was one of the first pilots to enter training at the Tuskegee Institute in 1941. Davis’ father was the Army’s first black general, and Davis was a West Point graduate.

To give his listeners a better idea of social conditions for blacks in the military at the time, Williams related the experiences Davis faced while at West Point. As the only black man enrolled there, he had no roommate because nobody wanted to room with him; and though could eat meals with his class during the week, on the weekends there was a different procedure.

“He had to stop at each table and ask for permission to be seated,” Williams said. “He was consistently refused. They did everything they could to make him quit, but he was not a quitter. He was a man of courage and strength. That is why he became the leader of the Tuskegee Airmen … that and the fact that he was the only military officer available for the job,” Williams said.

Of Davis’ class of 13 pilots at Tuskegee, only five graduated on March 7, 1942. That was the beginning of the 99th Squadron, with training continuing at Tuskegee from early 1942 until April 1943.

“During that training at Tuskegee, the base commander didn’t do anything to encourage the men to fly,” Williams said. “In fact, he was unhappy because he was assigned to that post.”

Once trained, the 99th served at Tuskegee because few people accepted the notion of them going overseas. Many Americans still believed that black men couldn’t fly they wouldn’t be an asset in wartime. “They did everything they could to discourage them,” Williams said.

Williams explained how a visit from first lady Eleanor Roosevelt changed everything.

“Mrs. Roosevelt was wondering why these men weren’t sent overseas. America was losing fighters by the dozens,” Williams said. During her visit to Tuskegee, the first lady met with pilots and even took a flight with C.F. Charles Alfred Anderson, the chief base training instructor. “Mrs. Roosevelt went back to Washington and talked with her husband, and it wasn’t very long before they shipped the 99th Squadron out. In fact, all of us who were stationed at Tuskegee at that time, including the 99th Fighter Squadron and the other three squadrons left Tuskegee at the same time, thinking we were going to another base for additional training.”

Servicemen at the time were not given advanced notice of deployment details in order to ensure operational security. To the airmen’s surprise, Tuskegee squadrons were deployed to both Europe and Africa, into the middle of World War II.

“Since they only had white fighter pilots escorting the bombers, and we were losing 25 bombers a day, it was time for the Tuskegee Airmen to get involved,” Williams said. When the Tuskegee Airmen began performing bomber escort duty, Col. Davis told his men that losing 25 bombers a day was unacceptable.

“In flying over 200 escorting missions, our records indicate that we never lost a bomber to enemy fighters. This group of men did some things that nobody else before, or since, can claim. And we’re very proud to have been a part of an organization with that type of record,” Williams said.

For their actions, the Tuskegee Airmen received 744 Air Medals, 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses, 14 Bronze Stars, 47 Purple Hearts, three Soldier’s Medals, three Presidential Unit Citations, one Silver Star, one Legion of Merit and one Star of Yugoslavia.

During a question and answer period, a DSCR employee asked if the Tuskegee Airmen were supported sufficiently with replacement parts to keep their planes flying.

“We had some people working who were very, very good at doing things what needed to be done, by hook or by crook – for example, the first aircraft the 99th had were the old P-40s that were used years before,” Williams said. His squadron flew Curtiss P-40 fighter aircraft, first manufactured in 1939, until they were assigned the newer Bell P-39 Airacobras in 1944. “They were hand-me-downs; often times the parts weren’t available and our guys had a way of dealing with what they had … they were very ingenious.”

Another employee asked, “How many of these brave Americans are still with us?”

After a pause and shrug, he answered with a smile:  “I’ll just say I’m glad to be one of them!”