Tuskegee Airmen address 386th AEW members

Published April 27, 2009
By Staff Sgt. Thomas J. Doscher
386th Air Expeditionary Wing Public Affairs

SOUTHWEST ASIA -- Four members of the famed Tuskegee Airmen visited with members of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing during a multi-base visit April 25.

Phillip Broome, retired Lt. Col. Alexander Jefferson, retired Lt. Col. James Warren and retired Maj. George Boyd, shook hands, signed autographs, posed for photos with Rock Airmen and spoke to a packed group at the Rock Theater.

"I am just honored by being in your presence," Colonel Warren said to the assembled Airmen. "You great bunch of Americans, you volunteers, doing a job for your country."

Colonel Warren, a former member of the 477th Bombardment Group where he was a B-25 bombadier/navigator, said he felt an immediate kinship with the 386th Airmen.

"You're away from home," he told them. "You're in a combat zone. I know what it's like to be away from home, but you're doing it and you're doing it in great spirits."

As the only enlisted member on the panel, Mr. Broome, a former P-40 maintainer, had a special message for the crew chiefs and maintainers in the audience.

"Don't let the officers think they own that plane," he told them. "You own it. You just let them fly it."

Mr. Broome went on to talk about the discrimination he endured while attending training at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., in 1942. He went on to serve on Tinian and Saipan in the Pacific, became a D.C. police officer and a member of the United States Secret Service.

Colonel Jefferson, a P-51 driver and repatriated prisoner of war, told the story of how he was shot down and captured by German forces three days before the invasion of Normandy, France. Part of a mission to destroy German radar stations on the French coast in anticipation of the invasion, Colonel Jefferson's Mustang was hit by ground fire, and the Detroit native was forced to bail out.

"No one saw me get out," he said. "When they got back, they thought I had bought the farm. My parents got a KIA notice."

Colonel Jefferson survived the low-altitude bail out and was captured and sent to a German prison camp where he was interrogated. He was later transferred to Stalag VII, 20 miles north of the Dachau concentration camp. When he was liberated from the camp in April of 1945, one of this friends said there was something he had to see before he left.

"He said, 'there's this place where they got dead stacked up like cordwood,'" he said, speaking of Dachau. "When we got there, the ovens were still warm. It's man's inhumanity to man."

While the cruelty of war doesn't change, it's just one of many things that remain the same.

Major Boyd, a veteran not only of World War II, but the Korean Conflict and the Vietnam War as well, told the group how things had changed since he first entered the service in 1945 and how some things remained the same.

"War is hell," he said. "You still have a job to do, and the enemy is still trying to kill you. That's not going to change. What does change is the dates on the calendar, the technology and the faces."

Major Boyd said he brought messages from the people back home, things they wanted the Airmen to know.

"They want to thank you for your service, and they appreciate it," he told them. "The people back home realize you are the leaders of today and the leaders of tomorrow."