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America’s Black Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen

Khalid Elhassan April 4, 2025 16 min

2. The Tuskegee Airmen’s Last Hurrah

The reverse of Alabama’s ‘America the Beautiful’ quarter depicts a Tuskegee Airman. US Mint

The 332^nd Fighter Group was deactivated in 1949 as part of the US Air Force’s plan to achieve racial integration. As a last hurrah, shortly before deactivation, Tuskegee Airmen of the 332^nd Fighter Group won first place in the US Annual Gunnery Meet – a competition that included shooting aerial targets, strafing ground targets, and dropping bombs. As to the African American airmen’s commander, Benjamin O. Davis Jr. had personally led 67 missions during WWII. He earned a Silver Star for strafing targets in Austria, and a Distinguished Flying Cross for a bomber escort mission to Munich in June, 1944.

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.