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14 l A Tribute to the Heroes of World War II
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Tuskeegee Airman on the fight to serve
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orld War II brought out extraordinary feats of valor, service and sacrifice of everyday Americans. But during this time, many servicemen and women found themselves fighting for freedom abroad while at home, they were denied the basic freedoms and dignities they had defended. Tuskegee Airman and Stockbridge resident Val Archer served in the U.S. Army at a time when the country was a very different place. In those days, even German prisoners of war were given more basic dignities in some ways than black Americans serving in the military. “They could go to certain places on bases where we were training that we could not,” said Archer. “[Prisoners of war] could go to the Base Exchange and the base theater, and there were seating arrangements where they could sit where they wanted to, and we were either stuck in the balcony, if there were a balcony, or some segregated area at the movies.” Life in the 1940s was restricted for black Americans, especially in the more prestigious career fields and activities. And with a war ongoing and the boom of technology that came with it, there were few fields more prestigious than aviation.
A resilient and patriotic group, now known as the Tuskegee Airmen, had a small chance at the opportunity of the wild blue yonder thanks to an experiment by the U.S. government to train blacks to become pilots. In 1944, Archer was a 15-year-old high school dropout who had just lost his mother and was looking for a path into adulthood. Archer grew up in Chicago hearing and watching the glistening airframes of DC-3 airplanes flying overhead. He soaked in newsreels of American flyers in acts of heroism in World War II, read comic books of men soaring through the air and fell in love with airplanes. That childhood fanaticism, along with a country-wide patriotic duty to protect his home and a lack of finding anyone who was willing to hire a young black man led him to try and enlist in the service. First, Archer tried the Navy and Marines but they wouldn’t accept a 15-year-old boy. Then one day, he and his buddy were downtown and decided to stop into the Army recruiter. The Army accepted and processed them right there. The next day — after some numerical changes to his birth certificate — Archer became a member of the United States Army. He was assigned to a combat engineer outfit called the aviation engineering squad-
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Stockbridge resident Val Archer joined the Army and was assigned to the group known as the Tuskegee Airmen at the end of World War II.
ron doing mostly construction and demolition jobs. Following that, he was assigned to the Army Air Corps in the all-black unit, the 332 fighter group. The group originally started out Rantoul, Ill., as an experiment. When it was approved to become the 99th fighter group, they were assigned to Tuskegee, Ala. Since the Army was still segregated, the 99th fighter group had to have its own air base separate from whites and was moved to Tuskegee, because the Tuskegee Institute was one of six black campuses of the civilian pilot training program. From 1941 to 1946, the Tuskegee Army Air Field trained about 994 pilots and 15,000 ground personnel, of which around 119 pilots and 211
ground personnel are still alive. Many people at the time, from civilians to academic experts to generals and politicians, assumed blacks were incapable of the skills, knowledge and courage needed for aviation and expected the group to fail. Another common reaction, said Archer, when a black person tried to do something considered out of the ordinary such as enlisting in the service, was an attitude of “Who do you think you are?” But that didn’t deter Archer and his fellow servicemen, even if people sometimes asked why they were fighting for a country that excluded them from so many things.
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