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History This Week, January 11th, 2022.
I'm Sally Helm.
Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey arrives at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.
He hasn't been on this base in 73 years.
Today he wears a burgundy suit coat with an airplane pin on it plus a patch embroidered with yet more planes and the words Tuskegee Airmen.
When he was a younger man, Harvey served as a pilot in the Air Force's 332nd Fighter Group, the first Black airmen in the United States military who fought during World War II and were named for their training ground in Tuskegee, Alabama.
But what really catches the eye about Harvey's outfit today is his black baseball cap.
It says, First Top Gun Winner, 1949.
That is the year that Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey last stepped foot on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
1949.
He was there for the Air Force's first ever weapons meet, when the military's most talented pilots, the best of the best, competed against each other in simulated acts of aerial warfare.
Harvey was on a team of three pilots, the only Black pilots competing.
And they won.
But over the years that followed, the official record of their victory was either lost or neglected, or both.
Lieutenant Colonel Harvey has been lobbying to change that.
And today, he arrives at Nellis Air Force Base to accept a plaque commemorating the Top Gun victory.
Mission accomplished, but almost 73 years.
That's a lifetime for some people.
Today, the Tuskegee Top Gun champions.
Who were these exceptional Black pilots?
And what did it take to rescue their accomplishments from obscurity and bring them into the light?
Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey III is now 99 years old.
But talking to him, I pretty quickly got a sense of what he must have been like growing up.
An ambitious, hard-charging, eldest child.
I was the anchorman on the gymnastics team, captain of the basketball team.
And then in my senior year, I was class president and valedictorian.
You were doing it all.
Well, when I was growing up and up until the time I got married, I was a perfectionist.
And then when you're a perfectionist, marriages don't go together.
But for years, perfectionism kind of worked for him.
He'd set his mind to something and then do it.
That's how it was with becoming a pilot.
Harvey was growing up in a tiny Pennsylvania town.
And around the same time in New York City, a kid named Harry Stewart Jr was also dreaming of flight.
He grew up near what is now LaGuardia Airport.
I used to go over and watch the planes land and take off and I used to fantasize myself as being the pilot at the time.
But, you know, they don't let kids fly planes.
The closest he could get was flying model airplanes with his friends.
They were made out of balsa wood, bamboo paper, and rubber bands.
And we would race them.
We would fly them and see how long we can keep them aloft.
Were you good, Colonel Stewart?
Did you come in first in those balsa wood competitions?
I would say I was in the middle of the pot.
Really?
Yes.
Stewart grew up in a racially mixed neighborhood.
Meanwhile, Harvey was from the only Black family in his Pennsylvania town.
But both men told me their first real experience with racism happened when they joined the military as young people in the early 1940s.
Stewart enters the service in 1943 at age 18 alongside friends from his New York neighborhood, and he leaves home for training.
My parents had warned me of what it would be like training in this house there.
And the day I went into the service, some of the other kids in the neighborhood and I guess four of them were white.
We went down to Pennsylvania Station to catch the train.
And when we got to Washington the conductor came back and he pointed to me and he said that you'll have to go up into the first car.
And I knew what he was aiming at.
And the fellows said, we'll go with you, Harry.
And the conductor said, no, no, no, no.
That's for the colored people up there.
You'll have to stay back here.
Later on in the day, I had a pass to eat in the dining car.
And when I sat down, the conductor pulled a green curtain around me so my My being there wouldn't offend the sight of the other people who were eating in the dining car there.
Do you remember what you felt?
Yes, I felt a twinge of.
I don't know whether you call it disgust or hatred or whatever you would call it, but I let my eye on the prize.
Hold on there.
And my prize was to go ahead and get my wings and to become a pilot.
Hey everyone, this is your producer, Ben.
And, as you probably know, each week on History.
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What's up?
It's Draymond Green.
I'm back for my 14th NBA season and my podcast, The Draymond Green Show, is back too.
This season.
I'm breaking down games, reacting to the biggest NBA stories and sitting down with teammates, rivals and culture shapers.
And trust me, I'm not holding back on the court or on the mic.
Two new episodes every week.
New segments, big conversations, real basketball talk for the real hoop heads.
Listen to and follow The Draymond Green Show wherever you get your podcasts.
We're back.
We're better.
Let's get it.
I am Nina Krusheva, the great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the Soviet Union in 1962.
And I'm Max Kennedy, the nephew of U.S.
President John F. Kennedy.
We explore what was a terrifying moment in history.
The story of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
How close the world came to nuclear war.
And what they had to do to pull it back from the brink.
The bomb, Kennedy and Khrushchev.
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
Stuart arrives at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and has another novel experience being surrounded by an all-Black group of peers men who would become fellow members of his fighter group and his friends.
Black men had only recently been allowed in the Army Air Corps at all.
Pilots held the rank of officer and for many years the Army didn't want Black officers in charge of white troops.
But in 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt overrules that backwards view.
He approves a law that allows Black pilots in the Army Air Corps and creates training programs at historically Black colleges.
In 1941, airfields open in and around the all-Black Tuskegee Institute.
That's where Harry Stewart ends up.
There is an idyllic campus.
I remember the trees and the foliage that they had there.
They were just absolutely beautiful and lovely.
I loved the campus.
There's also a bit of hazing by the upperclassmen.
All sorts of jokes and that type of thing designed to tap into your heart.
Stuart has to complete some coursework at Tuskegee.
But soon enough, he is sitting down in the cockpit of a plane.
This young kid just out of high school.
Did I read in an interview you gave that you learned to fly a plane before you learned to drive a car?
That's correct.
Wow.
When I got my wings, I still didn't know how to drive a car.
The plane is not quite as he had pictured it.
I had just imagined what the controls would be like on an airplane from the little model airplanes that I built.
But the controls were just a little bit opposite to what I had been using.
You were using them from the models in your head, those models you were flying in New York.
That's right.
But I soon overcame that.
James Harvey, who had been valedictorian of his class back in Pennsylvania.
He winds up at Tuskegee too.
He'd actually tried to enlist in the military before and had been turned away.
But three months later, the military called him up and drafted him.
They were hurting for people, period.
But the Air Corps still limited the number of Black pilots it let in.
As a retired military officer and historian put it, this whole Tuskegee program was seen as at best an experiment and at worst an unwarranted political intrusion.
Harvey told us, you could feel that in the training, which was notoriously tough.
As far as the white cadets go, all they had to do was demonstrate they could get the aircraft off the ground and back on the ground safely.
That was it.
Everything we did had to be perfect.
Everything.
No exceptions.
So there was a higher bar for the Tuskegee group, for the Black Airmen?
Yes, yes.
It's a rigorous program.
Aspiring pilots have to complete all the physical training of joining any military unit, plus learning navigation and the mechanics of flight.
Here's Lieutenant Colonel Stewart.
When I first got to Tuskegee, I remember the commanding officer gave us a speech and he says I want you to look at the man at your left.
And now I want you to look at the man at your right.
And they will not be there when you graduate.
And that's true.
Only about 40 percent of those who started their training at Tuskegee end up graduating, including both Harvey and Stewart.
In June of 1944, Stuart gets his wings.
A few months later, he's assigned to the 332nd Fighter Group and deployed overseas.
His job is to escort Allied bombers over Central Europe.
Something like 500, 600 bombers and almost a light number of fighters there.
So there were a thousand planes in the sky?
Oh, yes.
It's a sight that very few people have seen.
And you probably know this, when you look up in the sky sometimes and you see the airliners come across and they're leading these white streamers and they're called vapor trails.
Well, can you imagine?
I'd see these streamers, these arches in the sky there and the beautiful white streaks that the engines were leading there, and That's what we call the ballet in the sky.
Ballet in the sky.
That sounds beautiful.
It is beautiful.
It almost sounds peaceful.
And that's how there was a general outfit.
It was describing what flying combat was like.
And it's sheer boredom with moments of actually terror.
So that's what it was.
During one attack, a plane in Stuart's group is shot down.
The pilot is killed on the spot.
Another man parachutes to Earth, only to be snagged and hanged on a lamppost.
On Stuart's wall today there's a depiction of one of the many German fighter jets that tried to down his plane.
That's an enemy plane that's on my tail.
He's trying to shoot me down.
Unfortunately or fortunately, I guess you would say he lost control of the plane and flew into the ground and he was killed.
It just as well could have been me.
The war ends in 1945 and both Stuart and Harvey remain in the Air Corps, which becomes the Air Force in 1947.
The Cold War is now brewing.
So, although there's not active combat happening, the Air Force wants to keep its pilots sharp.
And a notice goes out.
In January of 49, the chief of staff of the Air Force sent a directive out to all the fighter groups in the United States that they were to have this intramural weapons competition between each fighter group on each base, competitions finding out who the best pilots were in the various groups that were flying at the time.
And they were to select their three highest scorers to represent their group in the first ever Top Gun Weapons Meet to be held by the United States Air Force in May of 49.
Lessons learned in tactical weapons.
Competition will pay huge dividends for all of us, should the need arise to engage another aggressor, says the program of events.
Only the best of the best pilots are chosen to compete.
They took the most recent scores that we had on our training flights and that's how I happened to get picked at the time.
That's how you happened to get picked, because you were really good.
You had the eyes.
We didn't know what was going on until the names were mentioned.
And then when the names were mentioned, okay, we're the members, let's go.
Then First Lieutenant James Harvey and First Lieutenant Harry Stewart end up on the same three-man team.
They're joined by a captain, Alva Temple.
They also have an alternate, First Lieutenant Halbert Alexander, in case someone has to drop out.
Then from there, we were headed to Las Vegas Air Force Base to enter a 10-day competition.
Before we left, we met with our commanding officer and he said, if you don't win, don't come back.
Soon after arriving in Las Vegas.
Harvey says he got the sense that some of the officers running the event weren't thrilled that the black pilots and their support crews would be competing.
Like when a member of the Tuskegee team met with the rules committee to talk about the details of the contest.
They didn't want to hear anything he had to say.
Nothing.
Told them to keep quiet.
Well, that ticked him off.
We asked him how his meeting went and he told us that ticked us off.
So the only thing for us to do now is to go out and win this thing.
Easier said than done.
Remember, everyone in this competition has been selected because they are at the very top of their units.
Over 10 days.
They'll tackle five events, a mix of dropping bombs, shooting targets and firing rockets, all from the air.
10 days of serious flying.
Some of the most strenuous and dangerous events that have ever been designed for a military competition are about to unfold.
In one case, tragically.
And the Tuskegee team from the 332nd Fighter Group, they're the underdogs.
We were sort of ignored by the rest of the pilots out there.
When I say ignored, I don't think they looked at us as being any kind of competition for them.
Those other pilots have no idea what's coming.
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On a May day in the Nevada desert, the 1949 U.S.
Air Force Weapons Meet begins.
The first event is aerial gunnery.
You have this multi-engine aircraft who towed this target.
Facing you, you just fired into it.
To try to hit a target, essentially, from the air.
It was like an aiming test.
That's right.
Now, how can they tell whose bullets go to the target?
We'll take three colors, red, green, and blue.
They would dip the bullets into that color wax.
So that when the bullet hits the target, it leaves a trace of the color there.
Each pilot had a different color bullet.
Then on the ground we had three different people, each one assigned a color to count the bullet holes in the target.
How'd you do in that first event?
Better than the other squad.
Captain Temple, the captain of the Tuskegee team, gets the highest score of any competitor.
At the end of the first two shooting events, their group is in second place.
Next up is dive bombing plunging toward a target on the ground, dropping a bomb and then quickly pulling up without crashing.
It's not too easy.
No one did very well in dive bombing.
In fact, it's a really dangerous event when not executed perfectly.
During the competition, a member of the Tuskegee maintenance crew asks to fly along with one of the other team's pilots.
But that pilot?
He didn't start pulling out soon enough.
And he hit the ground and killed both of them.
Lieutenant Colonel Stewart had seen men die in combat before, but these deaths shook him.
That I don't like to remember.
It soured everything for that period.
Still, the Air Force decides that the competition must go on.
With the meet more than half over.
The Tuskegee Airmen are still in second place, almost 20 points behind the leading team.
But they have a strategy for the next event skip bombing, which requires you to drop a bomb so that it bounces and propels through a vertical target.
You come in very low to the ground and you release your bombs.
I won't give our secret as to why we had 100%, but I won't tell you how we got there.
You won't tell me even now?
You may go out and win a contest.
Colonel Harvey, I'm not close to winning a skip bombing contest.
I promise you that.
I'll tell you how I did it.
When the target goes under the nose of the aircraft, you punch the bomb off.
Captain Temple is up first.
He hits his targets.
Six for six.
Then goes Stewart.
Six for six.
I was number three.
So the two people before you had both had a perfect score, six for six.
Right.
Then I had one.
Harvey hits all six of his targets perfectly, too.
That's when we had the perfect score.
That's when we pulled ahead.
By the time they start the final event, Rocket firing.
The Tuskegee Airmen have taken the lead.
And in rocketry?
Temple had a good score.
Stuart and I missed by one rocket.
Still a good score.
Five out of six.
It's a good score.
We still won the event, though.
Finally, on May 12th, almost two weeks after they'd arrived in Las Vegas, it's time to tally the scores.
And the winners of the Propeller Plane Division, with over a 20-point lead, are the Tuskegee Airmen.
We win the weapons meet, first ever weapons meet.
They said we couldn't fly.
We didn't have the ability to fly aircraft or operate heavy machinery.
We were inferior to the white man.
We were nothing.
We proved them wrong at every turn.
But the euphoria didn't last that long.
Lieutenant Colonel Harvey says he recalls a distinct feeling around the awards.
The wrong group won the meet.
They didn't plan on that.
When it came time for their team to be photographed with the trophy.
Lieutenant Colonel Harvey remembers being ushered into a hotel room.
They quickly set up this table, put the trophy on it, had us stand behind it, took our pictures.
Okay.
It was so hastily set up.
And if you look between the base of the trophy and Colonel Temple on the right, you can see a lot of stuff in there.
You can see A1 sauce bottle, salt and pepper shakers, sheet music stands.
That's how quickly they set this thing up.
They were anxious for us to get out of there.
Lieutenant Colonel Stewart still holds on to that photo.
That's the...
Wow, you're showing me a picture of the trophy itself.
That's the trophy, yes.
That's the trophy itself.
But that is the last these men see of the trophy for decades.
It gets shipped off to the Smithsonian for storage.
And it's pretty much the last they hear of their win, too.
We won in May of 1949.
Once a year, the Air Force Association puts out an almanac.
When the almanac came out, the winner of the 49 weapons meet was listed as unknown.
Unknown.
We asked Tobias Nagel, editor-in-chief of Air and Space Forces magazine, about it.
He told us that the magazine quote never intentionally sought to hide the accomplishments of the remarkable Tuskegee Airmen.
He did confirm that the victory was omitted from some issues of the almanac, but added that as the editors uncovered historical facts in subsequent years, the records of those early competitions were published correctly.
After the contest, Lieutenant Colonel Harvey stays in the military.
He becomes the first Black combat pilot to fight in the Korean War.
Lieutenant Colonel Stewart leaves the Air Force in 1950 and tries to get a job as a commercial airline pilot.
And I would summarize this list.
Warren said, you know, right out, you know, that yes, it's because of your color there.
The other one never gave me any response.
I was somewhere in this mystery at the reception desk.
Years pass.
In 1986, a film called Top Gun is the highest-grossing movie in the U.S.
It tells the story of a naval contest with officers competing to win a weapons meet.
But few remember that first Air Force competition in Nevada, including Stewart himself.
I had forgotten about the trophy and the competition.
Until in 2004.
A woman named Zellie Rainey Orr is researching a Tuskegee airman from her town in Ohio.
And she meets Captain Alva Temple, the captain who had teamed up with Harvey and Stewart at the weapons meet all those years before.
Ora decides to track down the missing trophy.
All it took were a few phone calls to find out it was in storage at the National Museum of the U.S.
Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
Some people thought there was some kind of skullduggery or something like that.
But I don't think so.
I just think it was mishandling.
The Air Force Historical Research Agency directed us to former agency historian Dr Daniel Hallman, who told us that he believes the Air Force did not hide the trophy in a racist attempt to hide the achievement of the Tuskegee pilots.
The trophy acknowledged four winning teams from 1949 and 1950, and only one of those was black.
The Air Force and its museum told us.
The museum can only display about 10 of its collection at any given time.
So, while the trophy was on display for an exhibit in the 80s, it was then stored until it went on permanent display in 2005.
Now, the story didn't end there.
The story ended January 2022.
Finally got recognition, and it's at Nellis Air Force Base.
The 332nd Fighter Group or the Tuskegee Airmen won the first ever Top Gun Weapons Meet.
It's finally put in place.
How did that feel?
It felt good.
Finally.
Finally.
Finally.
Yes.
It took decades for the accomplishment to be recognized.
And over those decades, in the military itself, there was progress.
Stewart recalls.
Shortly after their win in 1949, the Air Force implemented President Truman's order to desegregate the armed forces.
The base that we were on was disbanded and all of the personnel was sent to the four corners of the earth.
And there was true integration.
The move was a long time coming.
Black Americans in the military had more than proven themselves over and over for centuries.
And yet... There was always the brunt that you had to take of this prejudice that was going on.
You couldn't really get an equal footing or any respect or dignity.
One of the most powerful refutations of that broken system was given by the Tuskegee Airmen in 1949 in the skies above the Nevada desert.
To win the Top Gun contest, and this means the best of the best, it was like an indication.
We proved them wrong again.
They're always proving them wrong.
Just because a person is a different color doesn't mean anything.
I don't know where they get this stuff from, but anyway, we proved them wrong.
Thanks for listening to History This Week.
For more moments throughout history that are also worth watching.
Check your local TV listings to find out what's on the History Channel today.
If you want to get in touch, please shoot us an email at our email address, historythisweek at history.com, or you can leave us a voicemail, 212-351-0410.
Thanks to our guests.
Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey III, and Lieutenant Colonel Harry Stewart Jr.
Lieutenant Colonel Stewart is the co-author of a book Soaring to Glory, a Tuskegee Airmen's firsthand account of World War II.
Thanks also to Zelie Rainey Orr, author of Heroes in War, Heroes at Home.
A tribute to the first Air Force Top Guns.
And to Daniel Hallman, retired historian at the Air Force Historical Research Agency.
Dr. Hallman's new book, Misconceptions About the Tuskegee Airmen, will be out in February 2023.
This episode was produced by Julia Press.
It was story edited by Jim O'Grady and sound designed by Dan Rosato.
History This Week is also produced by Corinne Wallace and me, Sally Helm.
Our associate producer is Emma Fredericks.
Our senior producer is Ben Dickstein.
Our supervising producer is McKamey Lynn, and our executive producer is Jesse Katz.
Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review History This Week wherever you get your podcasts.
And we'll see you next week.
