User:Hcberkowitz/Sandbox-NoelParrish

Noel Parrish, son of a Southern white minister, joined the Army horse cavalry in 1930, deep in the Depression. He soon qualified as an enlisted pilot and was commissioned in 1939, as a lieutenant. The 99th Pursuit Squadron, with then-major Parrish, was assigned to Tuskegee Field in Alabama, where the Tuskegee Institute had offered aviation training. As Director of Training, he was committed to demanding the highest standards of performance, which he did not see as related to race. The graduates accrued a distinguished record in the Second World War, and the postwar Tuskegee Airmen Association's highest award is named for him.

The record of the Tuskegee Airmen, During World War II, black officers were not always assigned according to their background and training. The resulting excess of non-rated black officers at Tuskegee without a mission contributed to an overcrowded facility which became detrimental to morale.

The 99th Pursuit Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group were the only black air units that saw combat during WWII. The 99th flew its first combat mission in June 1943, and later participated in the battle of Sicily and the invasion of Italy. The 332nd, comprised of the 100th, the 301st, and the 302nd squadrons, entered combat in January 1944, and was eminently successful in accomplishing its assigned missions of dive-bombing and strafing under the command of then Lt Col B.O. Davis, Jr. Following a change in its mission to strategic bomber escort, the 99th was added to the 332nd in July 1944.

The 477th Bombardment Group was activated in 1943, but never saw combat and was not manned fully until March 1945. Also activated in 1943 was the 553rd Fighter Replacement Training Squadron to provide replacement pilots for the 332nd. Both units began training at Selfridge Field, Michigan, but because of an unhealthy racial atmosphereuin the local area the 477th was moved to Godman Field, Kentucky, then to Freeman Field, Indiana, while the 552rd was moved to Walterboro, S.C., where it was eventually inactivated, its members transferred to form a squadron of the Air Base Group. From it inception, the 477th was plagued with problems. When activated the unit had no established cadre to break-in new pilots and had no navigators/bombardiers to man crews. Within one year the 477th had 38 squadron or unit moves. In June 1945, the 477th was redesignated as the 477th Composite Group.

The 99th Pursuit Squadron, redesignated the 99th Fighter Squadron in May 1942, earned three Distinguished Unit Citations during World War II. It participated in campaigns in Sicily, Anzio, Normandy, the Rhineland, Po Valley and Rome-Arno among others. Perhaps its biggest claim to fame was that its pilots were responsible for destroying five enemy aircraft in less than four minutes, a feat never before accomplished.

The 332nd Fighter Group also earned a Distinguished Unit Citation and approximately 1000 individual awards and decorations. This Group participated in the Rome-Arno, Northern and Southern France Campaigns as well as the Normandy, Rhineland, Romania, and American Theater Campaigns. It first saw combat in February 1944. Its most notable achievement was destruction of a German Navy destroyer by fighter aircraft, again a feat that had never before been accomplished. Moreover, it is reputed to have been the only bomber escort group never to lose a bomber to enemy fighters during the war.

Flying, in succession, the P-40, P-39, P-47, and P-51 fighter aircraft, the Tuskegee Airmen compiled the following illustrious combat record: - 261 Aircraft Destroyed - 148 Aircraft Damaged - 15,533 Sorties - 1,578 Missions - 66 KIA - 95 Distinguished Flying Crosses Awarded - 450 Pilots Sent Overseas.

The 'Tuskegee Experiment' was a tremendous success, and proved that blacks could perform well in both leadership and combat roles. The experience of the AAF during World War II necessitated that the military review its policies on the utilization of black servicemembers. Confrontation, discussion, and coordination with both black and white groups led AAF leaders to the conclusion that active commitment, leadership, and equal opportunity produced a more cost-effective, viable military force. In 1948, President Harry Truman signed an Executive Order on equality of treatment and opportunity in the military, due in no small part to the successes of the Tuskegee Airmen.

After the war, he continued in Air Force assignments, rising to the rank of brigadier general. After retirement, he earned a doctorate and spent a second career in college teaching. He died in 1987.

99th Pursuit Squadron
In 1939, as a captain, he was assigned, as an instructor, to the Colored Pilot Training program. He was reassigned, in March 1941, to Maxwell AFB, as assistant Director of training of the Eastern Flying Training.

From that nucleus, the 99th Pursuit Squadron was formed in March 1941.

On March 19, 1941, the 99th Pursuit Squadron (Pursuit being an early WWII synonym for "Fighter") was activated at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois Over 250 enlisted men were trained at Chanute in aircraft ground support trades. This small number of enlisted men was to become the core of other black squadrons forming at Tuskegee and Maxwell Fields in Alabama -- the famed Tuskegee Airmen.

The supervisor of primary instruction was Captain Noel Parrish, an old cavalry sergeant, who had been commissioned in 1939 as a Colored Pilot Training (CPT) instructor in Chicago, where he had met Coffey and Willa Brown. The school had hoped Johnny Robinson would also to take part, but negotiations fell through. Jim Peck declined to submit to the prejudice in Alabama.

Founding the Tuskegee training organization
Parrish and Anderson began recruiting a staff of civilian instructors, both black and white.However, the celebrated and revered Chief Anderson was given charge of primary flight training. "Good old Chief," Purnell recalled, "affable, a good-mixer, an all-round person. He's the 'Ancient Mariner' of black aviation. He was flying when most of us were in diapers, and he's still flying today."

"Chief Anderson was even then a legend to us," Custis declared. "Without him, some of us, including me, would not have been able to make it." he Air Corps, which had never had a single black member, which was part of an army that possessed exactly two black Regular line officers, was to form a Negro pursuit squadron. Maj. Noel Parrish was named director of training.

The whole project, people said, was a fantasy that had seized Eleanor Roosevelt, who had then foisted it off on the President.

Orders were orders.

Parrish was then thirty-three years old but looked far younger, was witty, polished, and affable, had great finesse and charm, was a great ladies’ man, had written many magazine articles under a nom de plume, and was interested in music and painting. His previous doings indicated no great involvement with or concern about blacks. As a kid, he remembered, he once hiked three miles to see a scorched tree where a black man had been burned to death. He was aware, he said later, that a “weird and worried kind of laughter” issued from people’s mouths when they heard of the project to make blacks into fliers and mechanics, and he had heard from a visiting British air ace that it was better to have a “Messerschmitt on his tail than to try to teach a Negro to fly.” But he had been told to make a pursuit squadron from this separate and segregated little army within an army, and, a professional flier and teacher, he set out to do so.

Trainer
On July 19, 1941, inaugural exercises at the Booker T. Washington monument at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute marked the beginning of the world’s first military flight training for blacks. The candidates for officer-flier positions, America’s black press said, were the cream of the country’s colored youth. There were twelve of them, one being Capt. Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., who got out of the United States Military Academy in 1936, the first black graduate there in forty-seven years, and who during his time at West Point had been “silenced,” no one speaking to or looking at him save in the performance of official duties.

Opening classes began at the institute, with flying lessons to follow at Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF) some ten miles away, its having been built, government press releases pointed out, by Negro contractors and with Negro skilled and unskilled labor forming the work force. From the first there were problems. Locals objected to black MPs challenging white people and going about with weapons when they patrolled in town. The commanding officer supported the MPs but soon was relieved. His replacement, an old-line Army colonel, stood fast for Whites Only and Colored Only drinking fountains and bathrooms on the base and issued orders forbidding any whites to enter the post theater or canteen, where they might sit next to or eat with blacks. Black newspapers protested. The old-line colonel was kicked upstairs. His replacement was the director of training.

Parrish was no crusader and no philanthropist. What mattered in creating fliers, he said, was cold professional judgment of individual capacities and techniques taught with a stern thoroughness as impersonal as the universal laws of physics and aerodynamics. Negroes might or might not use inborn rhythm to fly, he said, and might or might not have better night vision than whites, or who knew what mysterious abilities. If such proved to be the case, these capabilities would be used for the benefit of the military’s air arm. As for letting the downtrodden slip by in the name of benevolence, that would get them killed. Men would perform to the highest standards expected of whites, or he’d wash them out of his outfit. Before 1940, African Americans were barred from flying for the U.S. military. Civil rights organizations and the black press exerted pressure that resulted in the formation of an all African-American pursuit squadron based in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1941. They became known as the Tuskegee Airmen.

By ROGER VOZAR Staff Writer February 11, 1999 http://www.sunnews.com/news/1999/0211/wtuskeegee.htm Sun Newspapers

There is no such thing as black history, according to Eugene Guyton, who shared in making history as part of the World War II Tuskegee Airmen.

"Tuskegee Airmen" refers to all who were involved in the so-called "Tuskegee Experiment," the Army Air Corps program to train African Americans to fly and maintain combat aircraft. The Tuskegee Airmen included pilots, navigators, bombardiers, maintenance and support staff, instructors, and all the personnel who kept the planes in the air.

The military selected Tuskegee Institute to train pilots because of its commitment to aeronautical training. Tuskegee had the facilities, and engineering and technical instructors, as well as a climate for year round flying. The first Civilian Pilot Training Program students completed their instruction in May 1940. The Tuskegee program was then expanded and became the center for African-American aviation during World War II.

The Tuskegee Airmen overcame segregation and prejudice to become one of the most highly respected fighter groups of World War II. They proved conclusively that African Americans could fly and maintain sophisticated combat aircraft. The Tuskegee Airmen's achievements, together with the men and women who supported them, paved the way for full integration of the U.S. military.

Mediator
General Noel Parrish, seated next to a youthful Lena Horne, stated in his memoirs that he often mediated between the Army officials, whites near Tuskegee who felt that the airmen were uppity, and the aviation trainees themselves. The third president of Tuskegee Institute, Dr. Frederick Douglass Patterson, wrote to Parrish on September 14, 1944: "In my opinion, all who have had anything to do with the development and direction of the Tuskegee Army Air Field and the Army flying training program for Negroes in this area have just cause to be proud. . . . The development had to take place in a period of emergency and interracial confusion."

Historians generally give credit to Colonel Noel Parrish, Commander of Tuskegee Field from 1942 to 1946, for having improved morale by reducing the amount of segregation and overcrowding and improving relations with both blacks and whites in the town of Tuskegee. The record of the Airmen became a major driver for President Harry S Truman's decision, in 1948, to desegregate the U.S. military,

In media and monuments
"Eighteen-year-old Topeka High School senior John Freeman believes that the Tuskegee Airmen, America's first black military pilots, helped lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement. He believes it so much that he developed a one-man presentation that earned the top prize at a recent National History Day competition, and brought tears to the eyes of a Tuskegee Airman who currently resides in Topeka. Freeman recreated his winning 10-minute presentation, "The Red- Tailed Angels," at a meeting of the Topeka branch of the NAACP. He received a standing ovation at its conclusion. "It was tremendous," said Leo Taylor, third vice president of the Topeka NAACP. "This is a story that needs to be told. It has a great deal of significance."

Using historical pictures, props and different vocal inflections, Freeman told the story of the Tuskegee Airmen through the eyes of Noel Parrish, their white commander, and also through Frank Connelly, a white bomber pilot who was escorted home by the airmen during World War II. During his nearly year-long research for his presentation, Freeman interviewed 10 of the Airmen, along with the widow of commander Noel Parrish, and three escorted bomber crewmen.

The airmen were known as the "Red-Tailed Angels" during the period when they flew bomber escort in World War II because they painted the tails of their P-51 Mustangs red.

Freeman pointed to pictures of Jackie Robinson, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, and accompanied by the song "We Shall Overcome," said that the airmen had paved the way for their accomplishments.

Sitting in the front row during the performance was Merrill Ross, 81, a Tuskegee Airman and retired school principal, who lives in Topeka.

"It brought tears to my eyes," Ross said. "He's quite a young man. He's done a fine job."

Freeman, who is white, said that he chose to research and present the story of the Tuskegee Airmen because of his intense interest in civil rights.

Freeman gave credit to head of school Dr. Michael Roberts, of Topeka Collegiate School, for advice and mentoring; his coach, history teacher Laura Strauss, of TCS; and to the NAACP for its invitation.

Freeman won first place in the senior individual category of the National History Day competition in College Park, Maryland, on June 14. He also won the top prize, a four-year scholarship to Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. His parents are Glenn and Mary Freeman, of Topeka.

Other reading
Lieutenant Colonel, U. S. Air Force (Retired) One of the original members of the famed 99th Fighter Squadron trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field. Discusses his Tuskegee experience and his combat training in North Africa. Recalls incidents of racism during World War II, particularly the effort of "Negro" pilots to integrate the Officers' Club at Selfridge Air Force Base, Michigan. Comments on the leadership skills of Noel Parrish, the commander of Tuskegee Army Air Field, and Benjamin O. Davis Jr. who commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron and later the 332nd Fighter Group. Discusses military career up to his retirement in the early 1960s and his civilian career. Interviewer: Elinor D. Sinnette Date: March 17, 1982 Format: Transcript, 156 pages; tape not available Tape length: Restrictions: Standard Brigadier General, U. S. Air Force Career officer. Third of four commanders of Tuskegee Army Air Field. Describes his early life, education, military career prior to Tuskegee and experiences that influenced his racial attitude. Comments on the quality of the flight cadets, the content of the training program, the controversially high "wash-out" rate, and the combat successes of program graduates. Discusses his personal opposition to the Army Air Force's segregation policies and recalls his frustrated attempts to alleviate them. Details problems he encountered with the Black Press, the local government and superiors and other base commanders. Interviewer: Woodrow W. Crockett Date: May 1982 Format: Transcript, 128 pages; tape not available Tape length: Restrictions: Standard
 * oral history, DRYDEN, Charles W. (1920- )   BMOH 11 http://www.founders.howard.edu/moorland-spingarn/ORAL.htm
 * oral history, PARRISH, Noel F. (1909–1987)   BMOH 20