This movie takes place in a time when segregation still exists and the Tuskegee Airmen is the first unit of the air force that is made up of African Americans (the 99th regiment).
It opens as a few black men are boarding a train on their way to Tuskegee, Alabama. They are kicked to the back of the train in the middle of the night at stop that has a "Whites Only" sign posted. They were forced to give their seats for German POW's none-the-less.
The first night in the barracks you learn that even though the men have come from all walks of life--studying everything from art to literature to science--they are all there for one purpose: to fly in the war. Unfortunately for many, that would never happen. One man crashed with his instructor and died. Another made a stupid choice while flying and instead of being dismissed, he hopped into a plane about to take off and ended up crashing and dying, instead of going home to his family. By this time there is only about 20--if that--men left of the many that started out in training.
While out flying one day, one of the planes has engine trouble and is forced to land. The two of them--the one with engine trouble and an escort--land on an old country road by which there are blacks working. It's a proud moment for the workers when they realize that the pilots are also African American.
The remaining bunch pass out of the training but six months later are still and the Tuskegee camp. Eleanor Roosevelt comes to see how things are going and, thanks to her, the black pilots find themselves transferred to Northern Africa. Unfortunately, they are treated no better there than they were at Tuskegee. One example of this being when a briefing was moved up and their captain was not told. They were rudely told that they had to watch the board outside like everyone else but as they walked in, you could clearly see that the time was still 0600. It was not changed to 0530 until after the meeting was over and done with.
The first missions they were assigned were only destroying missions, the very first being to cut off German supply lines by bombing a train. However, their missions changed when the white bomber planes were not being escorted properly and were losing many of them. The 99th regiment was reassigned to Italy along with a few other black regiments and were joined into the 332nd.
On the first mission of this kind, two of the leads end up saving the lives of two white pilots they were not escorting when they heard their distress over the radio and turned around. One of the whites was so thankful that he wanted to find out how they were. When the two discovered that the men who saved them were black, one refused to believe it. He thought since they were black that they were not capable of such things and, if it was them, then it was plain luck.
In the end it turns out all right--for one at least. By the end of the movie only one of the characters you started out seeing is still alive: Hannibal Lee. At the very end he is promoted to captain. Also, the one that refused to believe blacks could have saved his life, requested to have the 332nd regiment be their escorts on the Berlin mission.
I really enjoyed watching this movie. It was really sad because people kept dying but that's a reality of war. I thought it was really cool how no one thought these black men were worth anything but it was the blacks that never lost a bomber throughout the war.
Comments