Quentin P. Smith
1919 – January 15, 2013
Class: 45-A-TE
Graduation Date: 3/11/1945
Unit: 477th Bombardier Group
Service # 0841274
They flew 1,578 missions in the European and Mediterranean theaters of operations and 15,533 sorties.
They destroyed 111 enemy aircraft in aerial combat and another 150 on the ground.
Ninety-five of their number were awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Fifteen percent of them were KIA and seven percent POW.
Yet for many in the military establishment, their blood wasn’t good enough to be shed for God and country.
On a Tuesday in 2010, a Tuskegee Airman, Dr. Quentin Smith of Gary—then 92—told his story to the Chesterton-Porter Rotary Club.
“You would hear it said,” Smith recalled. “Black men can’t lead. Black men can’t fight. Black men can’t fly complicated planes.”
This, despite the fact that black men served honorably in the Revolutionary War, dislodged the French from New Orleans with Gen. Andrew Jackson, served both as freed men and slaves with both the Union and the Confederacy, and skirmished their way West against the Indians as the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments and 24th and 25th Infantry Regiments.
It was a curiosity of history, however, Smith said, which led to the black man’s marginalization in the military on the eve of World War II. An officer corps overwhelmingly born and bred in the South—the post-Reconstruction South—wore its racism on its sleeves as proudly as it did the ribbons on its breast. So, the black men who did serve did so as stevedores, gravediggers, and cooks.
Then the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor. Going into the election year of 1942, his country at war in the Pacific and preparing to invade North Africa, FDR cut a deal with Black America, Smith said: he would integrate the military if 20 percent of black voters cast their ballots for him.
They did, he didn’t. Couldn’t.
So separate and altogether unequal units were established, among them what became known as the Tuskegee Airmen, for the Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama where they received their training. Thirteen men were in the first cadet class. Five of them graduated after the nine-month course, in March 1942. Eventually 992 graduated and of those 450 served overseas.
Smith, after hearing from his brother about the general unpleasantness of crawling through mud with an M-1 Garand under machine gun fire, opted instead to learn to fly at a private black school in Chicago. Almost washed out, in fact, until he received tutelage from Willa Brown, the country’s preeminent black aviatrix.
Smith got pretty good, real good in fact, and went to Tuskegee not as a cadet but as a cadet instructor.
But Smith never made it overseas. He’s a big man, rangy, too large to fit in the cockpit of the P-51 Mustang or any of the other fighter craft in service in the ETO. So, he learned to fly the B-25 Mitchell medium bomber, only took a month to make the switch.
But it took five more months for the U.S. Army Air Force to train black men to serve as navigators and bombardiers, Smith said. Because—of course—white navigators and bombardiers couldn’t be expected to serve under a black pilot.
Finally, with a compete complement, Smith and his crew were shipped to Godman Field at Fort Knox, Ky. But the field there was too small safely to operate the B-25, so they were re-assigned to Freeman Field in Seymour, Ind.
And there bad things happened to the Tuskegee Airmen.
“As soon as we got there, we went to the Officers Club,” Smith said. “And the officers on base said, ‘Hold it. You can’t go in.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, you know. You don’t know the Army regulations. Any officer can go in any club in the United States or its possessions.’ He said, ‘Well, I place you under arrested quarters,’ which means go back. So this 10 went back. Then 10 more came. Then 10 more came. Well, we had 546 black officers of all stripes in this group.”
Things got way out of hand. A colonel assembles the black officers in a hangar and they boo him off the stage. The colonel runs to the general and he orders a court-martial board, where 1st Lt. Quentin Smith is duly informed that failure to obey the direct order of a commanding officer is punishable up to and including death. “I said, ‘I’m just 190 miles from home. And here I am in this mess.’”
In the end 101 of the 546 black officers of the Tuskegee Airmen—Smith included—refused to comply with their commanding officer’s direct order and were placed in the stockade at Fort Knox. Next likely stop: 20 years at Leavenworth.
It blew over, eventually, when Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP intervened. “It got too big for the colonel. It got too big for the general. It went to President Truman. President Truman said, ‘Turn them loose.’”
Smith left the U.S. Army Air Force with an honorable discharge. But it wasn’t until 1995, he said, that his official military personnel record was expunged of the derogatory reference to the Freeman Field incident.
Overseas, the Tuskegee Airmen had their own problems, Smith said. Call it a reverse Catch-22. A pilot with five kills to his name is considered an ace. But every time a Tuskegee Airman made it to four kills he was returned to the States. One day a Tuskegee Airman with three kills had two in the same sortie.
What to do, what to do.
The Army Air Force solved this problem by crediting one-half of one of those kills to the Airman’s wingman and promptly sending him home.
Of the 450 Tuskegee pilots who served in combat, 66 were killed in action. One-hundred-and-twenty-five of them were honored by the French with the Criox de guerre, comparable to the U.S. Congressional Medal of Honor; eight received the Purple Heart, 14 the Bronze Star, and one the Silver Star; and 744 were presented with the Air Medal and Clusters.
The Tuskegee Airmen provided air cover on bombing missions and cut a savage swath in ground attacks on Hitler’s Germany, destroying or otherwise damaging 136 aircraft in aerial combat, 273 on the ground, 40 barges and boats, 619 box cars, 23 factories, 126 locomotives, and nine radar installations.
After leaving the Air Force, Smith earned his master’s degree in English. He took on various roles in schools. He taught English at Roosevelt High School, served as a guidance counselor, and then went on to become a high school principal at West Side High School in Indiana. Later in his life he was made the director of secondary education for Gary, Indiana. He sat on several aviation and education boards, and was a member of the Chicago Chapter of Tuskegee Airmen, an organization of black pilots. Smith also created the Gary Emerson High School for Visual and Performing Arts.
After his passing, an airport bridge at the Gary/Chicago International Airport was named in his honor. Smith was a former president of the Gary Airport Authority.
Sources:
Chestertontribute.com
Nwi.com
Wikipedia.com
