written by Todd DePastino
In May, Tuskegee Airman Harry Stewart joined us on Greatest Generation Live. Harry grew up during Jim Crow, served in a segregated military, and has lived to be one of the most decorated US combat pilots.
Having him talk with us about his service was like having history come alive before our very eyes.
Harry Stewart flew 43 missions in a North American Aviation P-51 Mustang with the 332nd Fighter Group, the so-called “Red Tails.”
Like all Black servicemembers in World War II, Harry fought two wars: one against the enemy, the other against the racism that barred all but a few African Americans from elite units like the Red Tails.
Legend has it that Harry cooed at airplanes from his crib in his home near Langley Field, Virginia. As a teenager growing up in Queens, New York, he would hang out at North Beach Airport (today’s LaGuardia) and dream of taking flight.
Eighteen years old in 1943, Harry volunteered for the Army Air Corps, passed his aviation cadet exam, and, after Basic Training at Keesler Army Airfield in Mississippi, started pilot training at the segregated Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama.
One moment he’ll never forget is crossing into the South from New York on a train. The conductor directed him to the “colored car” apart from white passengers.
After receiving his commission and completing training, Harry joined the 15th Air Force in Italy at Ramitelli Air Field and began flying bomber escort missions in Central Europe.
Harry Stewart still beams at the thought of flying the P-51, an aircraft so responsive “it was like you had melded into one machine.”
The most memorable of his 43 missions was April 1, 1945, Easter Sunday.
The mission was to marshalling yards in St. Pölten, Austria.
Just as General Jimmy Doolittle had released Eighth Air Force fighters to chase down targets of opportunity after escorting bombers to their destination, so too did the Fifteenth Air Force give Harry’s unit permission to strike river barges, transportation lines, and any enemy aircraft they might encounter.
It was late in the war, but there were still plenty of German Focke-Wulf Fw-190s swarming.
Harry managed to get behind two of them undetected and downed them both.
Then, a third Fw-190 did the same to Harry. “I thought I had had it,” says Harry, of the moment he saw the enemy tracer bullets whiz by his cockpit. “He had me dead to rights. I panicked and dove to the ground.”
Harry pulled his P-51 into tight turns on a 2,000 foot dive in a furious effort to shake the German fighter. Harry’s aerial acrobatics, made of desperation, lured the enemy pilot into shadowing Harry’s maneuvers.
Coming out of a turn, the Fw-190 lost control and slammed into the ground. Harry got credit for the kill, though he didn’t shoot it down.
When Harry landed, he learned that three of the seven planes in his unit had been shot down that day. One of his friends, fellow pilot Walter Manning, had successfully bailed out of his P-51.
An Austrian police officer rescued Manning from the clutch of a mob and placed him in a Luftwaffe Air Base cell.
A pack of Nazi Werwolf guerillas, incited by the SS, broke seized Manning, beat him mercilessly and and lynched him from a lamppost.
After the German surrender, Harry and the other Tuskegee Airmen prepared to ship to the Pacific to support the final invasion of Japan. Japan’s capitulation in August spared Harry from that fate.
Harry Stewart remained on active duty for five more eventful years.
On March 25, 1948, while flying in a severe thunderstorm over rural Kentucky, Harry’s P-47 Thunderbolt sputtered to a stop at 20,000 feet. Harry slid open the fighter’s canopy, unbuckled his seat belt, and angled the plane so he could fall out the cockpit without being struck by the aircraft.
But the plane’s slipstream slammed him into the tail section. Harry snapped his left leg in two above the ankle.
He managed to unfurl his parachute in the driving rain and land safely in a pine tree, his body dangling just above the ground. His left leg was bleeding profusely where the bone had broken. Harry cut himself out of his harness, crawled to a rock shelter, and fashioned a tourniquet from his pilot’s scarf.
He had landed in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, a coal patch later made famous by its native daughter, country music legend Loretta Lynn.
Loretta’s family and neighbors found Harry on the mountain and carried him back to their house on a horse. They gave him a shot of moonshine, cooked his clothes in an outdoor cauldron, and nursed his leg as best they could. Then, they took him to a general store, from where he was driven in a pickup truck to the nearest town. The next day, Air Force representatives showed up to retrieve Harry, leaving local residents with the mystery of this Black airman who had fallen from the sky.
The legend would later build that Harry had stolen a B-52 (which didn’t exist in 1948) and been shot down by US fighters in pursuit.
Harry became the stuff of genuine legend the following year, when the Air Force held the Fighter Gunnery Meet outside Las Vegas—the first “Top Gun” competition. Fighter groups from around the country sent pilots to compete.
Harry was of three Black pilots representing the 332nd Fighter Group in the piston fighter class, shooting, strafing and bombing targets at altitudes up to 20,000 feet.
Harry’s Tuskegee Airmen group won the competition. It was the last triumph of the Red Tails, which were soon disbanded to comply with the new Executive Order desegregating the Armed Forces.
Racial discrimination in the civilian world, however, was still legal and common. When Harry left active duty in 1950 and applied for pilot jobs at Pan Am and TWA, the airlines turned him down because of his race.
So Harry returned to New York, took night classes at New York University’s College of Engineering, and went on to become Vice President of ANR Pipeline Company in Detroit.
Today, only a handful of the 16,000 air crew members, air traffic controllers, meteorologists, radio technicians, and others trained at the Tuskegee Institute remain alive. We’re honored and grateful to have spent time with one of them.