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America’s Black Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen

Khalid Elhassan April 4, 2025 16 min

Tuskegee Airmen. Sheppard Air Force Base

6. The “Red Tails“

Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. in 1944 next to his P-51C ‘By Request’, which he flew with the 99th Pursuit Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group. K-Pics

The 332^nd earned an impressive combat record escorting heavy bombers, whose crews referred to the black flyers as “Red Tails” or “Red Tail Angels” because of the distinctive red paint used on their fighters’ tails. They earned another nickname from the Germans: “Schwarze Vogelmenschen“, or “Black Birdmen”. The Tuskegee Airmen’s most famous mission, in which they went up against Luftwaffe Me 262 fighter jets, came on March 24^th, 1945. That day, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis led 43 Mustangs of the 332^nd Fighter Group as bomber escorts for Fifteenth Air Force B-17s that flew a 1600 mile round trip to raid a tank factory in Berlin. The Germans put up stiff resistance, and sent up clouds of Fw 190s, Me 163 Komet rocket fighters, plus 25 Me 262 jet fighters. Tuskegee Airmen Roscoe Brown, Charles Brantley, and Earl Lane, all managed to shoot down Luftwaffe jets over Berlin that day.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.