FORGOTTEN SOULS

Stories of men and families who made the ultimate sacrifice for an often hostile homeland.

Tuskegee Army Flying School in Alabama, established in January 1941 to train Black pilots for the military nearly a year before the attack on Pearl Harbor, was considered an experiment that some in the starkly segregated military never expected or hoped would succeed. Racists at the Department of War were skeptical that Black people even had the right stuff to fly an airplane. When First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on a whim in an April 1941 visit to the school hopped into a two-seater for an hour-long flight over Tuskegee with a Black flight instructor, her security detail had a fit. (Upon landing, Roosevelt turned to her pilot and said, “Well, you can fly all right.”) Hundreds of ambitious young Black men signed up for the program. The best flew missions accompanying Allied bombers in Europe, often out of Ramitelli, Italy. Twenty-seven of these men never returned home, lost under mysterious circumstances. Thompson, a veteran investigative journalist for the Washington Post and NPR whose father was Tuskegee trained, suggests that many of these incidents were due to faulty single-engine fighter planes that were already old when the Tuskegee pilots were assigned to fly them. One family member told Thompson she believed the military “intentionally equipped the young, inexperienced Black pilots, like her dad, with less than stellar aircraft because the men weren’t wanted as pilots in World War II, to begin with.” Interviews with survivors, many now in their 90s, reveal intense feelings of pride and sorrow over the lives lost, and lingering anger over the shoddy treatment their loved ones faced in the U.S. and abroad.

Poignant, bittersweet lives of unsung and overlooked American heroes.