Cooperative Living June 2020 - 14

CoverFeature | by Steven Johnson, Staff Writer
The Tuskegee
Airman
Baugh fought two fronts:
the Nazis and segregation
ame came late
in life to Howard
L. Baugh Sr. It
took half-a-century
after World War II
ended before Baugh
and his fellow fighter
pilots in the Tuskegee
Airmen became wellknown,
thanks to
an HBO movie.
F
Fame came late. But Baugh was
ahead of his time. With the airmen, he
helped to establish a new level of air
dominance in the European theater
with successes that laid the foundation
for desegregation of the military
in 1948.
" It just goes to show that ordinary
people given the proper training and
opportunity can do extraordinary
things, " Baugh said in a 2008 interview,
a few months before he died at 88.
A native of Petersburg, Va., Baugh
signed up for the Army Air Corps,
now the U.S. Air Force, after graduating
from Virginia State College in 1941. He
trained at Tuskegee, a historically black
university in Alabama that churned out
996 pilots between 1940 and 1946,
deploying 355 of them to war.
" Before 1941, there were no African
Americans in the Army Air Corps,
and that's the way they wanted it, "
Baugh said. " They didn't think we had
what it took to operate a machine as
complicated as an aircraft. "
The heroic African American
squadron proved otherwise. Known
for the distinctive red tails on their
fighters, they provided support for
all-white bomber crews, and never
lost an assignment. " They had no idea
their red escorts were black, " Baugh
said of the bomber pilots. " We escorted
bombers on over 200 missions and
never lost one we escorted. "
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co-opliving.com
Baugh served in North Africa,
Sicily and Italy, flying 136 combat
missions and shooting down a German
fighter plane over Italy with the 99th
Pursuit Squadron in 1944.
" It was scary, " he said. " It all
depended on what we were doing as
to how scary it was, but it was really
scary when we were getting shot at. "
For his 16 months in combat, Baugh
was awarded the Distinguished Flying
Cross and Air Medal with three Oak
Leaf Clusters, among a bevy of medals.
He retired as a lieutenant colonel in
1967 and worked for Kodak for many
years. A bronze statue of Baugh is on
Howard Baugh Sr., a former fighter
pilot, prays in Omaha, Neb., at the
2004 memorial service and opening
ceremony for the Tuskegee Airmen.
display at the Black History Museum
& Cultural Center of Virginia.
Baugh's sons, Richard and Howard
Jr., keep the flames burning by
addressing civic and school groups
on the role of the Tuskegee Airmen
with a callout to their dad, as at a
recent presentation at the Virginia
War Memorial.
" I accompanied him one time to do
a talk like this and somebody asked
him, 'What do you think your greatest
accomplishment was?' " Howard Jr. says.
" And he said, 'My three sons.' " ■
For more on Baugh, visit hbc-tai.org.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE HBC-TAI
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
http://www.hbc-tai.org http://www.co-opliving.com
Cooperative Living June 2020

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