Tuskegee Airmen Research Paper
3/4/12
Tuskegee Airmen
I chose to write my paper on a man named Colonel Charles Edward McGee. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 7, 1919. His mother died when he was only one and he seems to have moved around place to place as a child. He first got interested in planes when he was in college after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He knew that war was inevitable and he wrote down he wanted to be a pilot on his draft card. He was eventually sent over to Indiana for examination, which he passed. On October 27, 1942, he was sworn in and a few weeks later, sent to Tuskegee. He talks about being frustrated flying slow planes that flew at low altitude, and were basically too slow to even catch German planes. In May he was moved to the Fifteenth Air Force. “As the Allies advanced north, the bombers came up from Africa to bases in Italy, but they were getting their tails shot off over targets like Ploesti, so four single-engine fighter …show more content…
There were the candy-striped 31st, the yellow-tailed 52nd, the 'checker-tail clan' of the 325th and the red-tailed 332nd.” (http://www.historynet.com/aviation-history-interview-with-tuskegee-airman-charles-mcgee.htm) He goes on to talk about how the 332nd painted their tails red because as he recalls red paint was readily available. He goes on to talk about moving on to different missions that got more and more serious eventually ending up in Munich. This story relates to the “History of the Tuskegee Airmen” because everything McGee talks about is legitimized in the writing. It talks about how the whole operation was an “experiment” because it was expected to fail. The blacks were fighting both for our country
Tuskegee Airmen
I chose to write my paper on a man named Colonel Charles Edward McGee. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 7, 1919. His mother died when he was only one and he seems to have moved around place to place as a child. He first got interested in planes when he was in college after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He knew that war was inevitable and he wrote down he wanted to be a pilot on his draft card. He was eventually sent over to Indiana for examination, which he passed. On October 27, 1942, he was sworn in and a few weeks later, sent to Tuskegee. He talks about being frustrated flying slow planes that flew at low altitude, and were basically too slow to even catch German planes. In May he was moved to the Fifteenth Air Force. “As the Allies advanced north, the bombers came up from Africa to bases in Italy, but they were getting their tails shot off over targets like Ploesti, so four single-engine fighter …show more content…
There were the candy-striped 31st, the yellow-tailed 52nd, the 'checker-tail clan' of the 325th and the red-tailed 332nd.” (http://www.historynet.com/aviation-history-interview-with-tuskegee-airman-charles-mcgee.htm) He goes on to talk about how the 332nd painted their tails red because as he recalls red paint was readily available. He goes on to talk about moving on to different missions that got more and more serious eventually ending up in Munich. This story relates to the “History of the Tuskegee Airmen” because everything McGee talks about is legitimized in the writing. It talks about how the whole operation was an “experiment” because it was expected to fail. The blacks were fighting both for our country