"Red Tails": World War II’s Tuskegee Airmen Fly Again in Film and on Stage but Much History is Ignored

In the opening scene of Red Tails, the new film produced by George Lucas about the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II, hundreds of computerized planes emerge on screen in a pitched air battle. The tension-filled battle sequence ends and the action drifts down to the ground, where member of the all-black and very segregated Tuskegee squadrons complain that because of their color the army will not let them fly combat missions. If they could, they tell each other, they would shoot the Nazis out of the sky from one end of Europe to the other.

The plot of the film, an action-packed historical drama that opened last week, flies off from there. Red Tails is a fine movie, but it is a bit simplistic, overly heroic, filled with made-in-Hollywood quotes. It’s (admittedly) yet another updated version of the old wartime action flicks. It’s a film that tells the courageous tale of the black airmen and their two wars—one against the Germans and the other against the racist Army Air Force brass. The film is long on sensational aerial dogfights. Lucas, who gave the world Star Wars (the space battles in the original were based off of aerial combat footage from World War II), is the master of film dogfights. Here, over Italy, American fighter planes zig and zag their way through blue skies, blasting German planes out of the air. The enemy aircraft don’t just fall to earth; they fall with long spirals, smoke billowing from the fuselage and explode in a huge ball of bright orange fire.

The movie is a carnival of special effects but does not devote enough time to the tense human drama that must have existed within the all-black fighter squadrons.

The heavily promoted film (producer Lucas sunk $58 million of his own money into it) has done very well at the box office. In its opening week, it took in $19.2 million, making it the second most successful film of the week. It did well in its second week, too, and seems headed for a quite profitable run.

Red Tails is not a breakthrough film. In 1995, HBO produced The Tuskegee Airmen, starring Lawrence Fishburne, which was a landmark film and taught America all about the squadron of black flyers. There have been plays about the Tuskegee Airmen, too. The latest is Black Angels over Tuskegee, an Off Broadway New York drama that’s been running for over a year. Movies like Red Tails are still good to see, though, for when it comes to World War II there are never too many movies and never too much history.

In the movie, the personal conflict story revolves around two buddies, daredevil Joe Little (‘Lightning’) and his boss, Marty Julian (‘Easy’). Lightening breaks ranks with the squadron (the 99thPursuit Squadron) and flies off on his own missions. He shoots down Nazis in the air and chases Italian women on the ground. Easy keep trying to rein him in. The problem Easy has is his drinking. At the same time that they deal with their woes two black officers, played by Cuba Gooding Jr. and Terrence Howard, lobby for combat flights. The courage of the black airmen not only shoots down the Luftwaffe, but racism in their own air corps.

Director Anthony Hemingway gets fine acting from Gooding, Howard, David Oyelowo as Lightning and Nate Parker as Easy. The dogfights in the air are terrific and the heroism of everybody in the Army Air Force is extolled for two hours.

The problem with the film, that Lucas has admitted and apologized for, is that the story starts way too late, in the summer of 1944, in Italy. Audiences learn who the Tuskegee Airmen are and why they fight (in the 99th and also in the 477th Bombardment Group), and about the racism they endure, but that’s only half the story. What Lucas did not tell was the first part of the history of the Tuskegee Airmen, back home in the U.S., and it’s a far more riveting story than all the dogfights in the skies of Europe put together.

The all-black 99th Pursuit Squadron was founded even before the war began and spots were opened for 460 volunteers, both officers and enlisted men.

The segregation of the unit bothered no one. A national survey taken in 1943 by the Office of War Information showed that 90 percent of American whites approved of segregated military units and so did 18 percent of African Americans. “For the moment and the foreseeable future, the special intermingling of Negroes and whites is not feasible,” said the acting chief of the Army Service Forces. He added that integration of the armed forces in the war would be “detrimental” to the morale of white soldiers.

The day after Pearl Harbor, an army official bluntly told a gathering of black newspaper editors that “the army is not a sociological laboratory.”

The black press complained loudly. The editor of The Crisis said that the training was “by no means the answer to the demand of colored people for full integration into all branches of the (military).”

The Army’s biggest mistake in its Tuskegee experiment, never mentioned in the movie, was to place a quota on black airmen. They could never represent more than 10 percent of the total flyers because African Americans only represented 10 percent of the U.S. population. The efforts recruit and train African Americans were slow, too. The Army at first wanted the African American flyers to train for three years before getting overseas assignments; the war forced the end of that. Army recruiters took their time signing up volunteers for the 99th Squadron and Tuskegee training. One man, Ted Lawson,  pleaded to gain entry to the program but he did not receive an answer to his letter for five months and then spent several more months waiting to be enrolled—and Lawson was already a pilot.

Red Tails ignores the “Double V” battle, victory over Germany and victory over Jim Crow. Black leaders frequently criticized segregated units and racism against black soldiers. “Is this a white man’s war?” said Adam Clayton Powell.

At home, the power of the black press and black political leadership grew. The mainstream press published numerous articles deploring the segregation of the armed forces and the country. Protestors pointed out various ‘white only’ air raid shelters, one located in the nation’s capital. None of that changed the army’s view of African Americans in the service.

Training in the South presented racial problems, too. The training center at Tuskegee, Alabama, was the target of racism and on April 1, 1942, a race riot nearly broke out when a black MP insisted that a white Tuskegee police officer turn over an African American flyer to him. Several local police, state troopers and a dozen civilians beat up the MP. The flyers at Tuskegee prepared themselves for an armed onslaught of locals, but that never came. In 1944, black officers ate in the ‘white only’ section of the Tuskegee cafeteria, almost inciting another racial incident.

The Tuskegee Airmen, the 1995 HBO film, did a much better job of showcasing the bigotry the flyers faced when they joined the squadron. There was confrontational drama with white officers and biting barracks discussions about racism in the service and lynchings in the United States. The training period in the film lasted more than half the movie. There were no scenes of racial problems in town, or the stand offs between white and black flyers at the base, but racism was underscored in many scenes and the HBO drama painted a more honest historical picture of the U.S. in the 1940s (the HBO film also mentioned some congressional opposition to black flyers). The HBO film also had much better character descriptions than Red Tails. The difficulty with Red Tails is that because the film starts in 1944, you don’t get to know about the bitter experiences in training that made these men the way they were.

The HBO film also reminded viewers that a large percentage of the black airmen went to training from college and that later, after the war, many went on to stellar professional careers.

The historical legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen was impressive. By the end of the war, they had flown 1,578 missions and destroyed nearly three hundred enemy planes. The 450 pilots collectively won fourteen Bronze stars, a Silver Star and 744 Air Medals. Sixty-six were killed in action.            

The history of blacks in the military in general is ignored in Red Tails, too. Lucas and director Hemingway had many, many opportunities throughout Red Tails to tell audience the long and impressive history of black soldiers in all of America’s wars, and the racism they endured, but they didn’t. More than 5,000 African Americans fought for George Washington’s army in the American Revolution. Over 180,000 blacks fought for the Union in the Civil War. Black units fought gallantly in the Spanish American War, the Indian wars and World War I. Blacks in the military in World War II were nothing new.

The Tuskegee Airmen were overlooked by history for a long time, but in the 1990s they were recognized. After the HBO movie, the black flyers were honored all over the country. There have been documentaries and television special produced about the black flyers. Red Tails and Black Angels Over Tuskegee are not new, but two more well done historical tales about the Airmen.

Despite its historical lapses, Red Tails help to tell the long history of racial divides in American armed forces and the heroic struggles of black soldiers, and flyers, to fight for their country. The story of African Americans in the military, from the battles of the Revolution to the war in Afghanistan today, is a sturdy part of military history in general and needs to be told—as often as possible.