TOP GUN

States Continental Gunnery Meet, which would later evolve into the USAF William Tell Competition. Other derivatives would include Gunsmoke and Red Flag.

Harvey’s unit, the 332nd Fighter Group selected 1st Lt. Harvey, III, 1st Lt. Harry Stewart, Jr., and Capt. Alva Temple. ey were all Black pilots, including the alternate pilot, 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander.

“We met with Col. Davis (Col. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr.), prior to leaving for the competition,” Harvey said. “We chit-chatted, and his nal remark was, ‘If you don’t win, don’t come back.’ And with those words of encouragement, o we went.” e competition for “Top Gun” would prove formidable in the conventional piston category, ying the North American P-51 Mustang and the North American F-82 Twin Mustang. ese were some of the best pilots and aircraft maintenance teams in the country ying some of the most advanced aircraft in inventory.

It was May of 1949.

“And we’re ying the obsolete P-47 underbolt,” Harvey said “It was big, clumsy — and heavy.” e lineup consisted of two missions of aerial gunnery at 12,000 feet, two missions of aerial gunnery at 20,000 feet, two dive-bombing missions, three skip-bombing missions, and a panelstra ng mission.

“Well, we won the meet,” said Harvey. “Our closest competitor was the P-51 out t… they were only 515,000 points behind us.”

They were the winners, but…

Each year, the Air Force Association publishes an almanac citing overall

“But, each year when that almanac came out, the winner of the 1949 weapons meet was mysteriously listed as ‘unknown,’” Harvey points out. “We didn’t nd out, we, meaning us, the Tuskegee Airmen, didn’t nd out about this magazine until 1995.”

It was only by chance Harvey’s group commander stumbled across an almanac and noticed the winner of the 1949 U.S. Air Force Weapons Meet was “unknown.” e almanac was corrected in April of 1995 to show the 332nd Fighter Group as the o cial winners of the 1949 weapons meet. ough the records were xed, one more mystery would remain.

‘That trophy will never be on display

As winners of the rst Air Force “Top Gun” competition in the piston-engine division, Harvey and his team were brought into a hotel ballroom where the almost 3-foot tall stainless steel victory cup sat on a table. at was in a century later.

In 1999, Zellie Rainey-Orr got involved with the Tuskegee Airmen as the result of a Tuskegee Airman pilot from her Mississippi hometown who died in combat — 1st Lt. Quitman Walker.

Rainey-Orr confesses, until that day, she never knew much about the Tuskegee Airmen.

She was about to get a rst-hand lesson from the men who were there.

“I thought I was just gonna go and put a ower on the grave of Quitman Walker,” she said. “I assumed he was buried here in Indianola, Mississippi and that’s when I would learn that no one knew where he was buried.” rough her quest to help, she would eventually meet Alva Temple, the captain of the 1949 ‘Top Gun’ team at a 2004 event to award Walker’s medals posthumously, at Columbus Air Force

Rainey-Orr reached out to the Walker family in an attempt to help locate the airman’s remains.

Base, Mississippi. It was there that she learned of the missing trophy.

“I just felt a connection,” Rainey-Orr said.

Unable to resist, she began a quest to locate it.

Not knowing what the trophy looked like, and with Temple, at that time, in failing health, she reached out to the family in hopes of nding more details.

Someone in Temple’s family mentioned that there was a newspaper story covering the event, dated May 12, 1949, on a bedroom dresser. at clipping provided Rainey-Orr with enough information to start contacting military bases and museums. Within a week, she received a response from the National Museum of the United States Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.

“ ey said they had the trophy and attached a photo,” she said.

Rainey-Orr called Temple’s family on Sunday, Aug. 29 to share the good news, but was told Temple had passed the day before.

“It was almost like his spirit guided me,” she said. “I didn’t know the story or the impact. I was just looking for a trophy.”

Oddly, while it took Rainey-Orr less than a week to locate a trophy that had been missing for more than 50 years, it would take her much longer to get the U.S. Air Force to agree to bring it out of mothballs.

“I was talking to the historian at the Air Force Museum, the one who sent the photo, and I said I’d love to come see it,” she recalled. “And he (the historian) said, ‘It’s not on display — and it will never be on display.’”

Rainey-Orr was confused.

She thought that this was an important piece of Air Force history, it was the rst nationwide gunnery compe-

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