Oral History Interview with Tuskeegee Airmen

TOM FUGATE: You guys have probably been interviewed by fifty thousand different people, I’m sure.

INTERVIEWER2: Well, no. I think I was the first one in town.

FUGATE: You’re kidding. As many oral history programs are going on in the state now, you guys have not been recorded by anyone other than Walden’s theater?

That’s right.

FUGATE: I’m surprised. That really does amaze me. That really does amaze me.

INTERVIEWER2: It amazed me when I got into all of it. The project started because I saw a Tony Brown Journal program on television, that fabulous one. I was… remotely in the back of my mind I knew about it, but I didn’t know about it, 1:00which I really attribute a great deficit in my education. I’m sick to say that I didn’t know what I know now. So, I applied for a Humanities Council grant. I got it, but the paperwork on a project like this is overwhelming, because our staff is very small. The accountability part of it. And I knew that it wasn’t something, a single event. Because I wanted to set it up so that we could do what we’re doing now. And the play that developed from it, actually a history lesson, but it’s in dramatic presentation, would be able to grow as we learned more and interviewed more. Then new adventures could be put in the play, based on what we hear. I thought it was very important that the gentlemen that I met, particularly the Kentuckians were all on video tape as well as cassette tape, so that we had a record of their experience, because I think it is tremendously important. So, then I applied to, 2:00I applied to the Mary and Barry Bingham Fund and received a small grant which helps us take the presentation to places that can’t afford to pay for the service. And then it was a very serendipitous little path, I mean labyrinth, and then serendipitous experiences that lead us all together. I met, through the Air Force Museum I met Vivian White, who is a historian, now retired, for the museum, and has done tremendous research on the whole Tuskegee experiment. And then Vivian introduced me to Harold Sawyer, who lives in Columbus. And then I met John Leahr, who lives in Cincinnati. And then I met C. I. Williams, who lives in Dayton. And it was through those contacts that the initial part of the presentation began, 3:00the events in Ramitelli, Italy. And then we had, blessedly, an article in the newspaper and Mr. Calloway saw the article in the newspaper and he called up the theater and said, I’m a Tuskegee Airman and I live in Louisville. Well, it was amazing to me that somehow, I missed all this. But these gentlemen belong to the Los Angeles Chapter of the National Tuskegee, so there wasn’t any way that I would have really known, even thought to have looked in the book in Los Angeles. So then they told me, Mr. Larue, who hasn’t come yet, lived in Louisville as well. So, I’ve contacted him. And then through John Leahr, I found Mr. Walker. Douglas Walker lives in Richmond, Kentucky and he was a pilot at Ramitelli. And I hear from John Leahr 4:00that he’d had an accident, where his plane had malfunctioned. So, he was sent home to recuperate and then maybe was discharged. I have not had a chance to speak with him, but I know how to find him. And you may want to make sure we talk… FUGATE: There are four Tuskegee Airmen that are living in Kentucky now. 5:00Oh, There’s much more than that.

INTERVIEWER2: That’s the four we know about.

In Louisville there’s more than that.

INTERVIEWER2: More than that in Louisville?

FUGATE: Now these people are officers and non-commissioned officers.

CALLOWAY: Right. See Tuskegee Airmen is anyone who served during that period of time and was trained or what have you at Tuskegee or Godman Field.

FUGATE: I want to go ahead and start. If I could get you sort of….Let me have your name and where you’re from, the unit that you served with.

MORRIS WASHINGTON: Yes. My name is Morris Washington and I served with the 477th Tom Group at Godman Field, which is part of Fort Knox, Kentucky.

FUGATE: And your rank?

WASHINGTON: My rank as a Tuskegee Airman, I started off as a flight officer and that was a rank equivalent to….Instead 6:00of it being a commissioned officer, it was an appointment, similar to probably to a Warrant Officer in the Army.

FUGATE: And you sir?

JULIUS CALLOWAY: Okay, I’m Julius W. Calloway and Morris and I, really were in the same class. That’s my class, single engine. He was multi-engine. Then the advanced split up. We both graduated 44J. It was nineteen forty-four. It was November the twentieth, nineteen forty-four in Tuskegee. Pilot training. After finishing Tuskegee, I went through the transition program wanted to be a replacement to the 332nd in Italy. The war started winding down in Italy, in Europe really, the 332nd was largely based in Italy. So, they sent my class, most of us and part of the class ahead of me and some of them behind. Instead of going directly over as replacements, we were sent to Godman field 7:00and formed a fighter squadron, 99th squadron at Godman field, which was part of the group that Morris was in. We shared the same [INAUDIBLE], which was what? Four squadrons of bombers and one squadron of fighters. They moved from Godman to Lockhart. At that time, I got out, same as Morris. I stayed out until nineteen fifty-three. I did join the Reserve and flew with them and did a lot of civilian flying. And then I went back in Service. And then I stayed in Service until nineteen seventy. Flew as an instructor most of the time.

INTERVIEWER2: Retired as a major.

FUGATE: Fantastic. I don’t know, there’s a whole lot of different avenues and ways that we can go off in this thing. I guess basically what I’m interested in, is the Tuskegee Airmen have formed Chapters and you’re members of the California Chapter. Hasn’t there been a movement in Kentucky to try to organize a group here locally to become more involved?

WASHINGTON: Well, they don’t want the Chapters to overlap each other. The Tuskegee Airmen, nationally, is composed of three regions, the western region, the central region and the eastern region. And each region has so many Chapters. 8:00And I think they want about, at least eight or ten members before they form a new Chapter. And there just wasn’t that many around Louisville to start a Chapter.

CALLOWAY: Well, we just never did try to start one here, really. There are more than you think here. There are people here that you don’t realize were down there at Tuskegee. We know most from college, but I’m talking about the others. There’s another guy in here, [INAUDIBLE] Fowler, his picture is in here, too.

INTERVIEWER2: These gentlemen were, in this class were a lot of guys from California. So that’s why they went to the Los Angeles Chapter. But even though you don’t have a Chapter, you can still, you know… CALLOWAY: You can belong to whatever Chapter you want.

INTERVIEWER2: …and be active within the state military.

FUGATE: The reason I was asking was the museum is involved with the State Chapter 9:00of the Pearl Harbor survivors and the World War Two submarines [submarine] veterans. There are all kinds of these sub-divisions of veteran’s organizations across the state and it’s….We’ve attended a number of different activities within….The Tuskegee Airmen just, there’s hasn’t been any mention of them. I knew that the Godman field activities had taken place. And we’ve listened to one program that was done by Lt. Colonel Dryden down in Lexington.

WASHINGTON: Dryden’s from Atlanta, Georgia.

INTERIVEWER1: Yeah, he came up to a program that the Lexington Aviation Roundtable did, and I was able to meet him there.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, they have an Atlanta Chapter.

INTERVIEWER2: Now Colonel, well General, he retired, General Parrish, Noel Parrish was from Versailles, Kentucky. 10:00And he was a white man that was in charge of the original group. And probably the only CO that anybody liked. It’s kind of interesting.

CALLOWAY: He was at Tuskegee, training facility there. His wife still lives there… WASHINGTON: She’s living in Fairfax, Virginia.

CALLOWAY: She attends every one of the conventions. Well, he did too, until he passed away.

FUGATE: One of the things that we’re working on, the Military History Museum in Frankfort has developed a World War Two Commemorative Committee and we’re working on an exhibition that will highlight the state’s role in World War Two. We’re going to open on June sixth, nineteen ninety-four in connection with V-J, uh, D-day. And this program that has been developed is something that we’re hoping that we can pull together into an activity that we can introduce children to 11:00or just the general public at large. This program is one that we would like to bring to Frankfort, where we’ll have the individual present the stage presentation, which I haven’t seen as of yet. And then the opportunity to have actual members there to interact with the audience. We’ll also be doing that with the Pearl Harbor survivors and a couple of other groups, as sort of a build-up to this Kentucky’s role in World War Two. We’ve been involved in the bicentennial celebration and things of that nature up to now. But we’re slowly starting to gear and move toward more of the World War Two activities.

WASHINGTON: Well, not to interrupt. You might want to contact Mrs. Parrish since she is still most active with the Tuskegee Airmen.

FUGATE: Do you have any way that I could get a hold of her?

WASHINGTON: Yes, I was talking to Mrs. Parrish. 12:00[INAUDIBLE] INTERVIEWER2: This is Alvin Larue. Tom Fugate.

FUGATE: Mr. Larue, how are you sir? Nice to see you.

FUGATE: While we’re at this, Mr. Luc, Lara….I’m sorry. I’ve got a cold and my tongue is not working too well today. Could you let us have your name, where you’re from and the Unit you served with while an airman?

ALVIN LARUE: I’m here from Louisville, Kentucky. I served with the 477th Bombardment group near Godman Field. My name is Alvin Larue.

FUGATE: And your rank with the airmen?

LARUE: I was a Flight Officer.

INTERVIEWER2: He was….You were a bombardier?

LARUE: Yes, uh huh.

INTERVIEWER2: And Mr. Washington was a pilot and gunner. Mr. Calloway was a pilot.

FUGATE: So, we have two pilots and a bombardier?

INTERVIEWER2: Yes.

FUGATE: I don’t know, I guess the easiest way to start is, I guess the first and most obvious question is how did you get interested in the Air 13:00Corps? Or flight if you will. Was that something that was considered unusual for that time period? That you as black men would be interested in joining the United States Army Air Corps?

CALLOWAY: Well, I’ll start. For myself, I was interested in aviation from way back when. I started out building model airplanes and all that stuff. As a youngster, I can’t remember, I was a teenager, maybe thirteen, The Louisville Leader, which was a black weekly newspaper. It was along with The Defender way back then. This was in the thirties, I guess. They invited, they had a flying school in Chicago, Coffee School of Aeronautics, a black firm. And they invited the owner and I’m not sure if she was his wife at the time, anyhow. They 14:00came to Louisville here. They flew down in a Piper Cub and they were giving rides. And my next-door neighbor happened to work for The Louisville Leader, and he told me if I came out to this little airport, he’s---see[ing] if he could get me a ride. [LAUGHING] INTERVIEWER2: Where was the airport? At the fairgrounds?

CALLOWAY: It was off of Cane Run Road. It was just a little dirt strip.

FUGATE: Miss Willoughby Brown, I think was her name.

CALLOWAY: Yes, right, right. I got her picture in one of these books, here. She died recently, I think, real recently. But any rate. I didn’t go up with her, but I went up with the Coffee, I remember, Coffee. He’s the one. I went up for about a five-minute ride in this Piper Cub. That was my first time up and my only time up until I went into the Air Force. And then when World War Two came along, I volunteered for the Army Air Corps. And of course it was delayed, waiting and this and that. In the meantime, I got drafted. So, I went up to Fort Benjamin Harrison, Indiana. And most of them there had went [gone] through this pre-induction, whatever they called it then. Most of them were being sent to the Infantry of all things. Well, just by coincidence, I had narrow feet, 15:00and they didn’t have any of those big, old G.I. shoes to fit me, so I got delayed. [LAUGHTER] I got to stay there an extra, actually I think I spent almost a month up there. And during that time, my paperwork, where I had applied for aviation cadet training caught up with me. It came through the mail. And so, then I got sent – and as with all of us, we went down to Biloxi Field, Mississippi for basic training. At least I did, I don’t know about you. Biloxi Field, Mississippi. I never will forget that place… [INAUDIBLE] Kessler Field CALLOWAY: …I’d ever seen in my life. Kessler Field, that Biloxi, Mississippi.

INTERVIEWER2: Did you know about the Tuskegee experiment before, when you did apply?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, we knew that, yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: You knew that it was happening.

CALLOWAY: I knew that they had started it in Tuskegee, Alabama and so forth. That’s why I applied, really. Hoping to get in and learn to be a pilot. And then after we went through the basic training at Kessler Field, where they divided us up. Some ended up going to Bombardier, Navigator and some were pilots, 16:00what have you. We took all kinds of tests, did all kind of stuff. But it was basic training. Worst thing I ever went through in my life. [LAUGHTER] FUGATE: What were some of the experiences there that made it the worst experience in your life?

CALLOWAY: Well, it was a segregated town. And when you crossed the railroad tracks into the black section, there was no lights, no sidewalk, no nothing. You all remember that. The worst place I ever seen. And the base commander, I never will forget that, called us out there – now when you once got accepted to this – we had guys who were First Sergeants. We had four of them in our class. Remember that? And Morris, he’d been in the service for a year or so before. So, all of us wasn’t just brand new in the Service, but everybody had to go through 17:00basic training again to get into pilot training school. So, we had, like I said in my class, I remember about four Master Sergeants. To be a Master Sergeant back then was something else.

INTERVIEWER2: And they had to do basic training again?

CALLOWAY: They had to go through basic training. I remember this CO of the base; I don’t think the Army uses the term Base. What do they use? Kessler Field, Mississippi then. Called us out there and told us if we didn’t act right, talking about you can’t go into town, do this, that and the other – you’ll never get to Tuskegee to fly my airplanes. And that stuck in my mind, fly his airplanes. As if he owned the airplane and if we didn’t abide by his rules, we’d never get there to fly his airplane. I remember that to this day. 18:00I don’t know whether you all remember that incident, but I do. Definitely. And so anyway, from there was sent to Tuskegee Institute. And they had a college training attachment. So, we actually went there. Everything went by classes, you see, everything was in a class. And we actually went to school at Tuskegee Institute, lived on the campus and went to school there. I forget how long it was supposed to last.

LARUE: About six months.

CALLOWAY: Well, anyhow, they cut us down. I think we went two or three months; I can’t remember now. But they took us right on into pilot training. I guess they were running short of replacement pilots, had to take more in. I didn’t spend, myself, I didn’t spend six months at the college training detachment. I spent less than that. Then we went into pilot training, right on the campus again. We had primary. See pilot training is a primary basic event. Primary was conducted right at Tuskegee, actually all the classroom – you lived on the campus, and they had 19:00Morton Field. That’s another field people probably have never heard of. Morton Field, that was a primary training field. You were in the military, just because you were on the campus, wasn’t civilian, you were in the military. And there we went through primary training. They had PT-17’s and PT-19’s. My class flew a 17. And all of our instructors were civilians, black instructors, civilian. Now, they had military there, most of the military were white, but they were over the whole – you know, you always have military over anything even operated by civilians. But all of our instructors were civilian. And these civilian instructors were pilots who had went [gone] through the CPT program, which had started back early to train instructors for these things coming along. A bunch of the colleges, Hampton, Tuskegee, and I forget, Virginia, West Virginia somewhere. I forget all the colleges.

INTERVIEWER2: Howard, I think had one too.

CALLOWAY: About four colleges had training. These guys were our instructors there. And then after, if you successfully went through primary, then you went over to Tuskegee Army Airfield, which was a few miles away. I don’t know exactly. But there it was strictly a military 20:00installation. You went through Basic.

INTERVIEWER2: Mr. Washington had an interesting story.

WASHINGTON: Well, I was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey and went to the public schools there, including high school. When the war broke out in nineteen forty-one, Pearl Harbor Day. One of my school buddies, we were raised together as kids, he happened to get drafted. I don’t know why, but they sent him down to Tuskegee. The Tuskegee Experiment hadn’t started then. They were just, in fact, they had a section, the way he told me called “Tent City”. They were all living in portable tents. And he came back home on furlough about six months after he had been drafted. He looked so nice in his uniform and everything. Most of my buddies were being drafted 21:00and the streets started getting lonely. I didn’t have any companions. [LAUGHTER] He told me about this flying program that they were going to start down at Tuskegee. And he told me that it would be a wonderful opportunity and I should try to get in on it. I went to the recruiting office, and I told them that I wanted to enlist to go to Tuskegee, but I also told them that if they weren’t going to send me to Tuskegee, I wasn’t particular about joining at that particular time. And so, they promised me that I would be sent to Tuskegee. Eventually I was shipped to Fort Dix, New Jersey, 22:00and the next thing I know, they were calling my name to board a troop train. Instead of going to Tuskegee, I wound up in a little airfield in Denver, Colorado, called Buckley Field. I was out there for, I think, a little over a year. Then they shipped me up to North Dakota. And I was up at a town called Nignight or Willowsmith. And I can’t remember which one was closer to the Canadian border. I think it was Nignight. 23:00It was right near the Canadian border. I could remember seeing the Northern Lights the whole time I was up there. And so they sent me orders to, somehow or another the way things worked out, the original papers I filled out to go to Tuskegee, they finally got it straightened out somehow. And I got orders to leave North Dakota and go to Kessler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi. It was the first time I had been that far South and like he says, conditions were pretty bad. I think Kessler Field was about nine miles from Biloxi and they had one bus that black soldiers could use to go to town when they got a pass. Usually when this one particular bus pulled up there was always, at least I’d say seventy or eighty guys 24:00trying to get on this bus. And you were taking your life in danger if you stood near the door and tried to be the first one on. [LAUGHING] I mean, instead of facing that danger, this is the honest to God truth, I would walk to town, the whole nine miles. After you got to town, on the other side of the tracks, if you went there the first time, I don’t think you’d go back anymore, because there wasn’t anything there. But anyway, at Kessler Field, that’s where they gave you a lot of psychological, I mean, psychological tests and psycho-motive tests. I remember they had a little thing like a turntable with a little metal spot and they gave you a little metal, like a welder’s rod and this thing would turn around and they would test your coordination. You 25:00went through all those kinds of examinations. And finally, they sent me to Tuskegee. Now, you say Tuskegee, I think almost any Tuskegee Airman will tell you the same thing, you usually arrived there at night or in the early evening. It was usually dark. And there was a little town there called Chehaw and there was a little one room station. I think every cadet that came to Chehaw, I mean came to Tuskegee, came through Chehaw.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, that was a train stop. [LAUGHTER] WASHINGTON: And I don’t know, I think they must have had a telephone or something in this station, because I remember calling the campus 26:00and asking somebody to come out there and get me, because I think Chehaw was about three miles, three or four miles… CALLOWAY: Yeah, walking…[INAUDIBLE] WASHINGTON: …from campus. And they had four emories, these emories were the dormitories we stayed in. They had a first and second floor. After I finished, well, the program was patterned after West Point. We were like Plebes. And we were called Knuckleheads and Dummies, and they had a whole lot of bracing and hazing. Upperclassmen would say, Dummy, what are you? A Pilot or a Bombardier? I’m 27:00a pilot, sir. And I had never been in a plane. They said, what kind of planes do you fly? And I said, well I haven’t flown yet. [LAUGHTER] Well, why did you say you were a pilot? Get down on the little red stool. And this went on continuously, I mean the whole time you were down there. So finally, after advance training, during advanced training, I flew a AT-10, I think it was a Beechcraft, a twin engine, training plane. And when graduation day came, they pinned my wings on. Like I say, it was the proudest day of my life. And I went home with my officer’s uniform on furlough and everything a pilot in the United States Air Force. After about two weeks when I came back to Godman, 28:00to Godman Field, yes. I never will forget the first day I went into the B-25. I got there in the cabin in the right seat, that’s the co-pilot’s seat. And I said, now here I am a pilot, and I wouldn’t even know how to start this thing up. [LAUGHTER] It intimidated me. I mean, I was overwhelmed. I had never seen so many buttons and gauges and switched and everything in all my life.

FUGATE: This is the B-26 Mitchell?

CALLOWAY: 25.

FUGATE: 25 Mitchell Bomber?

WASHINGTON: It was the first plane they used to sink a destroyer at sea. I think that was early mention that a Navy vessel could 29:00be sunk by a….And it was the first plane they used, Jimmy Doolittle to make the first raid on Tokyo. But usually when you graduate from Tuskegee as a….If you’re going to go into the B-25. They used to send you to Mayfa (??) Field, California for transition training. But I think that they knew that the war was winding down and they kind of cut down on the training, because I never got the transition training from a AT-10 into a B-25. But I was lucky because I had a good first pilot. And they still run flight checks on you, but after a period of time, I mean, they blindfold you. 30:00You study the instrument panel and blindfold you have to touch each instrument. Find out where everything is located. You have to do this blindfolded. And by having a good first pilot, that would show you different things, explain different things and teach you, you’d finally learn how to fly. Then you’d go over to the left seat and get your first pilot time in.

LARUE: Who was your first pilot, you know?

WASHINGTON: Fellow by the name of Willie Byrd. He was from Fayetteville, North Carolina. Willie Byrd. He eventually became a dentist in Dayton, Ohio and he passed away about three or four years ago. But he was a wonderful man.

INTERVIEWER2: What lead you to be a Bombardier? 31:00LARUE: I didn’t want to be in Service. I wanted to stay in college, but they drafted me, and I had been taking ROTC Coast Artillery.

INTERVIEWER2: Where were you in college?

LARUE: University of Pittsburgh. So, when they drafted me, I came back here, and I went up here to the Jefferson County Armory. Since I hadn’t had a blood test within ninety days, they sent me back home to get a blood test and said come back the next day. So, I go back, this time except the [INAUDIBLE] guy on your service record said Navy. [INAUDIBLE] I said I’m not going into the Navy. You’re going where we send you. I said, I’ll go to prison, but I will not go in the Navy. He said, why? Because, I said, I think I have enough to offer the military other than being a waiter or carrying somebody’s shoes. So, he got sore. Well, I’m going, you can take me to prison, but I’m not going in the Navy. He called his Captain over. The Captain and I talked. He said, are you refusing to go into the Service? I said, no sir. 32:00I’m refusing to go into the Navy. The captain said, put him in the Army. Well, the Sergeant, he was about to throw that book at me. [LAUGHTER] So, they put me in…Fort Thomas. They'd run me around if, I guess, I don't know if the word, got around on me or something. They kept me up there a few days, then they sent me over to Fort Harrison. Now Fort Harrison, was where all venereal disease cases went. So, I got there, they told me --they said, "how much (??), you're going to 'Clap City.' I said, "for what?" I said, "No I'm not." [laughter] LARUE: Then, they said--you used to hang your travel orders in on the tree (??). So, I'd been home, what was it, that weekend, I come back, my name was to go to Biloxi. I never heard of the word, never seen it. Didn't know what Biloxi was, a school or a town or [laughs]. So, they called a first lieutenant was a medical doctor. He gave me a quick exam (??). "No, I can't see nothing wrong with him send him on to the dressing room (??)." The next morning, I went to the stretcher (??). I don't know why I was there. So, we got on a train. We went down there. We went to all this (??) talking about that. That little disc on it, it's not centered. It's off-centered too, you got to keep up with it, and it takes a day and a half of testing.

LARUE: And so many in my class failed, they call the failures out first. And I said, "well, I didn't expect to pass this thing, no way.” But then they sent me on down to Tuskegee and supposed to stay six months for this ASTP training. In other words, we were not ready for this Air Force training. Now I had just come out of school, I'd been studying physics, 33:00chemistry, and industrial engineering. So, we stayed two weeks and sent us home, the whole class. And so, they said, "you got to take gunnery first." So, they sent us down to Tyndall Field [Tyndall Air Force Base] and so, put us on trucks and we got down to close (??) to the barracks. Haven't got a bag unpacked, "come on out of here." The barracks for white cadets [chuckles]. So, they put us all the trucks and road on, we didn't have no [any] place to go. So finally, they took some enlisted men and put them out of their barracks and put them in tents and put us in there, and so, we was gonna live real[ly] close together. So, we got a committee together, said, "go out and talk to the enlisted men and heal this wound that we didn't make. And so, we did, so we got along so well. Now, at the time, enlisted men were allowed 65 cent a day for food, cadets, was about a dollar a day. We ate with the enlisted men; they took a whole dollar. [laughs] LARUE: We got nothing back. So, when we finished the training, all the white boys got wings. They wouldn't give us any. They said, "it's just a part of your training." But we had got wind of it, and we'd send up to New York to be put in (??), had us a real thick, nice, heavy (??) wings made. So, we got back to the barracks and put them on. And some of the white guys we'd made friends with, "where did y'all get these from?" Well, we laughed, "they didn't want you all to see the type of wings we was getting." [laughter] So then, when we finished training, we had no place to go again. So, they said--kept all of us away, "if you can't--got nothing to do, just go home, just go home for thirty days." Well, the first thing we said, "we don't have no money." "Well, you go back, go to Tuskegee and stay." So, we got--chip here and chip a dime and got everybody back home? So, I get to Dothan, Alabama. They told us to get back, as usual. "Trains full, y'all can't get on." Said, "you can get in the baggage car if you wanna, but you got to have a ticket." Doors open, kind of fall out, steam in there, throwing coal back in your overseas hat. And I had several cars (??) all the way to the back, it's the only seat open was sitting on--.

Unknown: --On the carpet?

LARUE: Yeah, it wasn't a shipment. 34:00[laughs] That's the--we got back home. So, then they told us the amount (??), then we would go to Midland, Texas. So, about eighty of us--or sixty of us went east, and other guys was [were] coming from the west coast. So, we get out there and the train stops, 35:00we got meal tickets, and we go to this restaurant, go get some meal right. So, when you had to go round the back to get them. So we had our quick meeting, order sixty of them. Let's just stay on the train and let them keep. So I don't know those (??), we said we'd go hungry before we quit. [laughter] LARUE: So, we get to Midland, calming down the cadets, and get up with his usual talk. "Hi, "I'm from Pitts--I live around Pennsylvania, and I'm (??)." You know how I say.---The commandant of cadets got up and said, "I'm from Texas. I don't think I need to say anything else." That's all he said [laughs] but we had a good time out there, the food officer, he said, "you won't see us--see me often, because I'll be getting the best bargain I can for your food." And if you had any change left, he'd divide it up and we got it back at the end of the month. But it was a nice experience. And then when we graduated out there, the Bombardier school, we had to take navigation all at the same time. Well, several of the parents of the white fellas was there, but there was no place for the blacks (??) except 36:00at one (??). You remember Brown? He was very fair-complected, his parents came and stayed down there. See, they never knew that they were---. [laughs]. So, when we left there, again when we got through that, no place to go, they assigned us to the base temper (??) like a travelers--right in here. And then after they found out about--I don't know how, finally they found out we could send us to Godman, and then they sent us all here.

CALLOWAY: One--. Listen, one thing I'd like to [get] thrown in there, it's bringing back some of these memories, too. Going down to Keesler Field, Biloxi, Mississippi. See from my [clears throat] it was Fort Benjamin Harrison, whatever it was--the induction center. Well, then, of course, I came home, here to Louisville, and then caught the train out of here to go to Biloxi, Mississippi. And they gave me a ticket, I had a regular first-class train ticket, and I rode from Louisville to Biloxi, Mississippi, with no seat, sitting on my barrack bag, 37:00and a coach piled up with people all over the place, behind the coal cars and--. But that stuck with me, too. I--here I had a ticket that entitled me to ride the Pullman car. Of course, really you know, from here to Biloxi, Mississippi on train a was a long ride.

Unknown: Oh yeah.

CALLOWAY: Well, I need to say I couldn't get in the Pullman, and I had to--couldn't even get a seat. Because the car--the one car, was packed, and I had to sit on my barrack bag and ride all the way down there for, whatever it was, a couple of days’ worth, but I remember that.

LARUE: Well, you know, I'd say today, really, I doubt if the youth, as I know them, today could have went [gone] through what we went through, without blowing up.

FUGATE: Well, you're talking about not only the segregation that you had to go through, Biloxi, Mississippi. But then there's also the--the hazing rites that you had to go through as well, from your peers there at Tuskegee. I'd imagine that's sort of--.

LARUE: Well, that wasn't too bad.

CALLOWAY: No, because when you got to be a upper--or advanced senior classman, you did the same thing to your underclass. So--.

LARUE: Well, see the guys, now they was upperclassmen, they would say--said, "volunteers come and clean up the barracks." Well, I always volunteered, which meant I got in the door first and I could rattle through, and I felt ahead. [laughter] CALLOWAY: But they caught up (??). But if you waited a carry you (??), you know, you never said, "upperclassmen dismiss, dogs stand fast. And they'd come out there and they'd pick out all the dogs they wanted--and the (??), we can clean up, straighten up their clothes. 38:00FUGATE: Yeah.

LARUE: Now, when you got to be an upper class, then you did the same thing.

FUGATE: Oh, no.

CALLOWAY: You had a different color badge you wore, see. Well, see, like they came in a barracks one day and a new class was coming in, we thought this was the new class. We was telling them how to get away from the upper class. These upper classmen were taking their badge off. [laughter] INTERVIEWER2: Learn your secret.

FUGATE: Learned about spies the hard way.

LARUE: And a couple of guys spotted them, see and we was trying to shift this guy named Brown. He just kept on going, we was trying to ease out the door (??). That was a lot of fun, though, really.

CALLOWAY: When we went from Tuskegee, like I say, after primary, went over to Tuskegee Army Airfield. I remember our class was a hot day. Whether you remember this or not. It was a hot summer day, because we finished in November, so we went over there, it must have been June, July, something, I don't remember. At any rate, I remember it was a hot day. When we got off the bus, what it was, took us over there and all the upper classmen met us (??). [laughter] And--and the first thing they did was [they] made us put on gas masks. I don't know 39:00whether it was raincoats or overcoats or something they had to put on and do calisthenics.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh my.

CALLOWAY: And it must have been ninety-some degree, but that was the hazing, see. And you just did it. Because if you did--you know, you couldn't complain, cause then it made it worse. And we got to be upperclassmen.

LARUE: --You remember Archie Harris.

CALLOWAY: Harris, yeah. He was an Olympic, right.

LARUE: He's the Olympic champion--.

CALLOWAY: --Discus--.

LARUE: Discus thrower, All-American football player.

CALLOWAY: Yeah.

LARUE: But he was overweight. They said, "you won't be when you're through." [laughter] They put Archie in that raincoat and gas--.

CALLOWAY: He was [an] underclassman of mine (??).

LARUE: --They brought his weight down. [laughter] INTERVIEWER2: But General Chappie James didn't manage to--he was such a big man, wasn't, he?

CALLOWAY: Yes.

LARUE: Yes, but he made it through, of course, as he got older, he got larger. Almost had to wrap the fighter plane around him [laughter].

WASHINGTON: He was, by the way, Chappie James before I got to Tuskegee, but he was a civilian instructor at Morton Field.

LARUE: Yeah, he was a pilot.

WASHINGTON: He was one of the primary civilian instructors. Then he went on, because he went through that CPT, 40:00then he went on into pilot training, and he ended up at Godman Field as a first lieutenant. At Godman Field-- (??).

LARUE: I don't think he ever got a promotion to a--.

WASHINGTON: --Not until after the war.

INTERVIEWER2: We were talking about the promotion business the night that we were all talking with Mr. Sawyer and Mr. Lair, that somebody had to die before you could get promoted, because--.

CALLOWAY: --Promotions were almost unheard of.

LARUE: We didn't get no further.

WASHINGTON: Another thing, we first got to Tuskegee and went into the (??). Well, one of the first things we had to do was learn our dodo verses. [laughter] and the upperclassmen would come and say, "dummy, do you--do you know your dodo verses?” And you would say, "yes, sir." 41:00He would say, "well, how's the cow?" And you would say, "the cow, she walks, she talks, she's full of chalk and the lactate (??) fluid extracted from the female of the bovine species is (??) prolific to the nth degree, sir." [laughter] and then they would ask, why, had several dodo verses--.

LARUE: --Yeah, you'd have to know them all.

WASHINGTON: That you'd have to learn. And it--it was really--.

FUGATE: What was the selection process, or the application process like to get in--was there a--was there a--. I mean, you didn't just apply--did you simply apply to become a Tuskegee Airmen, or were you shipped thereafter--.

WASHINGTON: It was at that point--at that time, the racial attitude in the country was different from what it is today, 42:00and the War Department--certain ones in the War Department said that blacks didn't have the intelligence to be able to fly a plane.

FUGATE: That's why, when we utilize the term 'the Tuskegee Experiment,' I don't know if that's something that you feel is derogatory, utilizing the term experiment.

WASHINGTON: Well, really, I mean, it was no doubt, we knew that we could fly. [chuckles] but to give you an example, we were in the 44J. Well, we had a classmate that was sent down to Tuskegee from West Point, from the Army Academy at West--Military Academy at West Point. In fact, we had two, Ernest Davis.

WASHINGTON: And Mark Rivers, 43:00and they were plebes for--. Well, I think they were probably third or fourth year--cadets at the academy, but they would---they had a flying training program at West Point, but because of their color, they were sent to Tuskegee to be trained. And they came down there, as--were they officers?

LARUE: Yeah, Ernest Davis.

CALLOWAY: Davis was.

WASHINGTON: Oh, I know what it was. Cadets didn't have a military rank, they were civilians. That's right because, I was in the service. Remember, I've told you--.

LARUE: --Well, when you--(??), you were a cadet.

WASHINGTON: --They had a discharge me when I got to--.

LARUE: The cadet was a separate status.

WASHINGTON: Because people now, when they ask me for my discharge papers, I have to look. Because I've got three or four discharge.

LARUE: Well, my final one is not a discharge, it's a--.

WASHINGTON: --Separation--. 44:00LARUE: --No, it's a certificate of service.

CALLOWAY: Appointment.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, come to think of it, it was something like that.

CALLOWAY: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

LARUE: And I read a part in my ROTC book, it says you don't---it's not a discharge--.

WASHINGTON: Exactly, then you were a--(??).

LARUE: --You're still in the service yet. [laughter] WASHINGTON: Yeah, as a cadet, you were something, that was kind of a--.

LARUE: --A civilian.

WASHINGTON: But as far as the experiment part, personally, I didn't--we didn't--the term 'experimental' didn't really come across to us. You know, that wasn't--we wasn't told that this was an experiment that was made to--that the Army you know, was--figured on failing. They were gonna do everything they could to make it fail. We weren't told that, you see, and so really, now looking back on it, yeah but we proved them otherwise so--.

FUGATE: --Was there a quota system or something of that nature. As far as the--.

WASHINGTON: --I think so--. 45:00FUGATE: --The classes--

LARUE: Well, see, they asked for me, I didn't want to go, but they needed volunteers and navigators at the time. And I guess they looked at your record and seen where you had been studying math and science and so forth. And they offered it to me and said, "how would you like to go into the Air Force?" I said--I'd never seen an airplane before, except in the sky. I'd never been to Bowman Field in my life, couldn't afford to go out there and have the carfare. So, I said, "why?" They said, "well, you could just point us to where we sign (??)." I don't want to be here, no way. That was (??) the easy way out for me.

WASHINGTON: They gave all these tests, see. When we went down to Keesler Field. You took tests like I said, test, test, test. Even before you'd gotten that far, you had to take tests to even be accepted into---initially, into AV. So, all these---what did they call them--seeing eye-tests or something. All these putting a square--a square, square peg in a round hole. All of them, I think you know what a seeing eye, didn't it (??). It was silly things if you ask me.

LARUE: The bell would ring, and you'd pass your test down. You never could finish one, and they'd pass the next one to you. And you'd go do that for day and a half. 46:00WASHINGTON: But if you, if you, you know, pass whatever the middle was on that, then you kept on. You know but a lot of people were washed out now. Everybody that applied didn't make it.

FUGATE: Well, what happened to--.

WASHINGTON: --And the quota, as far as the flying part. There again, I didn't really know myself that there was a quota, but apparently there was a quota for each class. No matter how good you were if the class, number-wise was X number of people who would graduate, then X number graduates. Somehow or another, they’d wash out. Cause my class, we lost about five or six guys, a week before graduation. You know, a week before graduation, the guy's got all the training they'll get.

FUGATE: What happened to those individuals once they washed out?

WASHINGTON: Some went to mechanics (??) or whatever, kind of lost track. --I don't know what happened.

LARUE: We--he went to a tank destroyer. [laughs] WASHINGTON: Who?

LARUE: Takes a-- (??) Mickey (??). Yeah, he 47:00was a tank destroyer.

FUGATE: So, it wasn't automatic? I'm sorry, let's--.

LARUE: Well, it was, I guess you'd say automatic in a way, but we didn't know it.

FUGATE: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't automatic that, if you fail--that, if you, if you were washed out, that you suddenly became a mechanic or.

LARUE: No, they'd just ship you anywhere then.

FUGATE: They'd just ship you anywhere.

LARUE: Anywhere they wanted to, yeah.

CALLOWAY: But see when---they had these bomber pilots and no navigators, the bombardiers would go with them.

FUGATE: --Yeah.

CALLOWAY: So, that's why they was [were] rushing us through fast. They gave us--.

FUGATE: What was--what was life at Tuskegee itself like? I mean, what was it like to be there other than--.

WASHINGTON: Tuskegee was a very rural community. My impression of Tuskegee--at that time, I think Atlantic City, New Jersey had one of the best high schools in the country. Because 48:00when I got to Tuskegee, I found out that--now, the Tuskegee Institute had a good faculty. Most of the teachers, they had masters and PhDs and things, but the subjects they taught-- now, this is not the military, I'm talking about Tuskegee Institute itself. They taught stuff like rotation of crops, conservation of soil, turkey raising, stuff like that. Because I'd say that ninety percent of the students of--Tuskegee came within a radius of ninety miles. You had a few students from Chicago or Detroit or somewhere, but most of those students, now civilian students were right around that area.

INTERVIEWER2: Harold Sawyer graduated--.

WASHINGTON: Agricultural was the--.

INTERVIEWER2: --His degree 49:00was in agriculture, from Tuskegee, you know--.

CALLOWAY: Arthur Carver (??), you know, was one of the finest--.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, and I think it was the philosophy at that time, that was handed down to Booker T. Washington. And--because I think I used to see them dinging bales of cotton and things into the town of Tuskegee, and most of the people around there had on bib overalls, things like that (??). The day I rode the train from Tuskegee to Opelika, I noticed it was the--the train stopped at every--it took me an hour to go a few miles. Because they were all farmers and rural.

LARUE: Yeah, that train did stop at every crossing though.

FUGATE: Well, were you treated any differently by the people that were there? I mean, the residents of the area that--were you in any way--.

WASHINGTON: --It was complete. It was, 50:00I would say, like South Africa. In the town of Tuskegee itself, they had like a bell tower. And they'd--.

CALLOWAY: --A curfew.

WASHINGTON: --When they rang this bell at night, you could hear it all over town. Well, as far as the black was concerned, I mean, that was don't get caught on the street.

LARUE: Well, it goes back to the old cliche, stay in your place and you didn't have no [any] trouble.

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

LARUE: You got to know what your place was.

CALLOWAY: Tuskegee---the Institute has been there while, I don't know how long. So that's a--so right around [Tuskegee] was Greenwood.

LARUE: Greenwood.

CALLOWAY: Greenwood was a college town more or less, but--just over, you know you walk across street and you're into Tuskegee, the town, you see. And the town was just segregated from word go. Typical southern town in those days, they had a theater in town. Now, they had a theater like this long and the screen on that wall, and then down the middle was the wall. The blacks on this side looking at that same screen, the whites on this side 51:00look at that same screen, remember that?

LARUE: We never got out there.

CALLOWAY: I remember going there, that was only thing to go to town for or maybe it had been (??). So, all of our activity was on the campus while we were on the campus, living. And then we went out to the Army airfield well, then, if you got a pass, all they can do is come back to the Tuskegee Institute. Because [there] wasn't nobody going to town, we'd never been to (??).

INTERVIEWER2: You all were part of--of the 477th that was sent to Lackland and was, is that where there was the--it was just at the edge of the integration of the whole armed forces. And how important the Tuskegee group was in--in bring--making that happen. I think that's an incredible story. Was--was one man court martialed?

LARUE: Oh, more than that.

WASHINGTON: No well--.

INTERVIEWER2: --More than that--.

WASHINGTON: I think the incident she's speaking of, at 52:00Godman Field, Kentucky.

FUGATE: Was this [the] field officers’ club?

INTERVIEWER2: Yes.

WASHINGTON: We were sent--we were shipped from Godman Field, Kentucky, up to Seymour, Indiana--.

FUGATE: --Freeman.

WASHINGTON: At Freeman Field.

INTERVIEWER2: Freeman, right.

WASHINGTON: And I went with that group, and Freeman Field is about sixty miles up the road from Louisville. And they had this officers club, and the black officers weren't allowed to come into this club. And there was one fellow named Roger Terry. He--he's president of---president of the Los Angeles chapter now. And he started in the club, and I think the corporal or MP, or something, told him that he couldn't come in, and he says, "well, I'm an officer," and he kind of pushed his way in past this corporal, MP. I don't know the exact story, but the MP, grabbed him, pulled out or something. And I think he probably hit the officer--I mean, hit the MP--I'm not sure of this, but I know that the next day, they sent a statement around. Then they had something to sign. 53:00LARUE: --President of---. I wasn't up there at that time.

WASHINGTON: That you wouldn't try to go into this officers’ club and everybody that didn't sign this statement, I think were court martial. This was Colonel [Robert] Selway.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh, that was that man.

WASHINGTON: Do you remember the number; it was way up there.

FUGATE: Oh, it was one hundred and four. It was--was, it was almost everyone that was there, it was over a hundred.

LARUE: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: --But one of some of them, not all of those.

CALLOWAY: I thought it was about four that was [were] actually court martialed.

INTERVIEWER2: Four.

CALLOWAY: But I may be wrong, but I know Terry was one of them.

FUGATE: Yeah, he--.

CALLOWAY: Elijah Terry, because he's still fighting that.

WASHINGTON Well, I think he--. I think it was on his record. But--.

INTERVIEWER2: --Was he dishonorably discharged then?

WASHINGTON: I think if I--four years ago, I think by executive order, this was all taken off his record. But when something is like that, I mean, it really, he paid a heck of a price for that. But when, when I got out just before 54:00the group moved to Lackland, I was separated from the Air Force because I wanted to go into other things, particularly the civilian flight. But in 1948, General Davis up at Columbus, Ohio, with the city officials. And the people of Columbus as a whole, they accepted--they were very proud of that group up there.

FUGATE: --On his record.

INTERVIEWER2: Yes.

WASHINGTON: And at that time, I think, the Korean War was looming on the horizon, and they needed skilled training. You know, skilled people to really integrate the military. And so, President Truman in 1948, by executive order, he integrated 55:00the military,-the United States Military all over the world. And I think that's what the Tuskegee Airmen is mostly noted for.

LARUE: You know, Godman Field, you're talking about the officers’ club there. The situation was there were two officers’ clubs, one for the trainees and one for the instructors.

FUGATE: There was another one--.

LARUE: --All the instructors [were] white.

FUGATE: And a number two, I think the number one was the white officers club.

LARUE: Well, it was--wasn't white, it was the instructors.

FUGATE: Yeah. That's right.

LARUE: Now, I think the navigation officer was black, but he still had to go over there.

CALLOWAY: You might explain that too. I mean, this occurred before I got Godman, but the time I got to Godman, everything was black. General Davis had came [come] back to take commands. They're talk about before then.

WASHINGTON: Well, see what happened on that---that evening, we start flying everything, everything was white. All the instructors, all the commanding officers. We woke up the next morning, they were all off the base. We don't know what time they left, how they got away, and all black officers were installed---during the night, early morning.

INTERVIEWER2: And that was C.I. Williams 56:00and Charles McGee and.

LARUE: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: I've spoken to them--this Colonel Selway that was involved. He had been at Tuskegee and then ended up--.

LARUE: Robert F. Selway, Jr.

WASHINGTON: I don't know if---.

INTERVIEWER2: --Yes--.

WASHINGTON: --I don't think Tuskegee--.

LARUE: --No, he wasn't, he was at Godman Field.

INTERVIEWER2: Well--he had the most notorious reputation.

FUGATE: I think that incident. I mean when he shipped all that [those] personnel--.

CALLOWAY: He was involved in that up at Freeman, Indiana.

INTERVIEWER2: Yeah.

CALLOWAY: He was the one that, well, probably instigated most of it. After that incident, I don't think he would ever get any more merit promotions. Because well, when the personnel got back to Godman Field, and that's when General Davis took over. See, the war in Europe was winding down, so Davis 57:00and a lot of the pilots who had finished their tour, really, the 332nd came back. Some went to Tuskegee, and some would come [came] out to Godman. My CO was one of those and I was also flight commander. And the squadron I was in actually, the guys would come back from the 332nd .

WASHINGTON: Mr.---sorry or Mr. Leahr went to Tuskegee.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, he was one of the ones down there and then he came up.

FUGATE: They moved--the--the group from outside Detroit to Godman Field, didn't they?

CALLOWAY: Selfridge Field.

FUGATE: And they did that so--because of racist intentions. They were trying to separate you guys from an urban area if I--if I'm right.

INTERVIEWER2: They were having a ride or something, weren't they?

CALLOWAY: See, the 332nd, before they went over, they got shipped around quite a bit too. And it was, I mean, I wasn't in the 332nd, so I don't know--I mean, other than what I've talked to guys that were there. But they were selfish (??) and moved all around.

FUGATE: Well, we moved around.

CALLOWAY: Now, remember, now, see we started out, you're (??), especially 58:00if you read that book.

CALLOWAY: The 99th was just one squadron, the first one to go over. But then they ended up with more pilots to train, it was 992 pilots actually graduated from Tuskegee. And about half of them made up to 330th, went overseas and made up 332nd,seconds, a fighter group, which the 99th, retained part of that there--in that.

FUGATE: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: It was interesting that the men that were over there and Ramitelli, Italy said that--needless to say, they were segregated from American officers. But at Ramitelli, there were--the British officers were all there.

FUGATE: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: And they were all, you know, as a matter of fact, they liked the British flight helmets, the leather helmets, better than--.

CALLOWAY: Yes, there are pictures of some of them in the British helmets, yeah.

INTERVIEWER2: They borrowed it.

FUGATE: I'm gonna stop for a second.

CALLOWAY: I was telling you about the other Louisvillian that was--ended up--that was an aeronautical engineer. His name was (??), he was from Louisville. 59:00FUGATE: See if you can find (??) anything about Darnell.

CALLOWAY: I don't know whatever happened to Darnell. You know, he came back to Louisville--

LARUE: And married Lavinia Deal (??).

CALLOWAY: Well, I never--. (???) LARUE: But see, every time I called during the week, those guys were at work.

CALLOWAY: Oh, yeah.

LARUE: And he was president there for a while.

FUGATE: Oh, is that right?

CALLOWAY: I don't know what happened to Darnell.

FUGATE: I'd like to go back to Tuskegee for a few minutes. We were talking earlier about life at Tuskegee itself, and life in the community there amongst the interaction with the students and the agricultural aspect of the education training there. You were talking about, again, the segregated activities that were going on in the community, but how did the local black population react to these new outsiders coming into their community?

CALLOWAY: I'd say that as far as life [is concerned], they were excellent. Now, firstly, while we went through--while the college training attachment, and while we were living on the campus and going through primary training, I forget how many months, that last[ed], a couple of months or something, I don't know. Going to school at the--all our classes, 60:00everything was right there, except the flying class, we went out to Morton Field, but they were treated excellent. I remember, we were just part of the campus. I remember on Sunday, they marched the college student, they were segregated from the female and the male. They marched the church separate[ly] and set in church separate. But they'd all--they'd March the church, even just one inch in, march in the church. And I remember that girl there--.

FUGATE: Yeah.

CALLOWAY: And the girls didn't mingle with the boys. They all set this way and the boys set this way. And we to get--we set one place and all this. But as far as we were treated, they had a USO on the base. That was our entertainment was going to the USO, on the campus.

INTERVIEWER2: You know, I remember when I was in college in the 50s--early 50s, we had a 7:30 curfew on a Sunday night and on—and all week long, it was freshmen. And then we could stay out until 11:00--11:30 61:00on Friday night and 12 o'clock on Saturday night. That was it [chuckles].

CALLOWAY: But the town of Tuskegee had a curfew. I think it was seven o'clock or nine o'clock--nine o'clock. They had a curfew in town. And so, you didn't, off campus, you didn't, you weren't caught off campus at this curfew. That meant just right across the road, at this Greenwood--the Greenwood.

LARUE: The Greenwood.

FUGATE: Were there any kind of, I don't know how to--how really form this, but were there any--if you got caught after hours, if you got caught off--off campus, or if you got caught running around or something? I mean, was there some kind of reaction or something that the class or the school or the--the upperclassmen would take if they caught you out of your barracks or, you know.

WASHINGTON: Oh, as far as the students, I mean, as far as the cadets at Tuskegee, like I say it was patterned, more or less 62:00after West Point. I mean any infraction of the rules. I mean, they had gigs. Demerits.

LARUE: Demerits.

FUGATE: --So, you walked the field or just like, you know.

WASHINGTON: Absolutely.

FUGATE: Yeah see, that's another aspect we know that you know in pilot training and--and the activities would bond with your training. You're talking about the mental test that you went through, and the psychological testing that was done, but I'm sure there was a typical part of basic training. Which I'm sure you went through earlier, was that same kind of--.

WASHINGTON: --It was very rigorous.

FUGATE: --Rigorous physical training.

WASHINGTON: Very rigid (??), yeah.

LARUE: What was that soldier's name down here, he used to make us run, Sablow (??)--.

WASHINGTON: Savage.

LARUE: Savage, it was Savage. He would make you run till your legs practically fell off.

WASHINGTON: You would, changing classes---.

CALLOWAY: --We ran all over Alabama--. [laughter] WASHINGTON: --Changing classes--

LARUE: --He'd never make you stop running.

WASHINGTON: --We had to do everything on the door (??).

LARUE: But he said this, if you could get down on the ground and run for an hour, they would never know where you are. Through a straight line. So, then, basically--. --Now, he trained us--.

FUGATE: --Part of the survival training, if--.

LARUE: --Yeah---.

FUGATE: --You got shot down, LARUE: It was, it was misery, 63:00but you had to do it.

CALLOWAY: We'd come in from this physical PT we called it, physical training, and have five minutes to take a shower and be dressed. I mean and be in class, you know. Everything was bang, bang, bang. You didn't have time to think too much other than just bang, bang bang.

LARUE: Well, you was in the Embry (??), when that bell went off, for five minutes, you'd blow down the street. Out of bed and dressed [chuckles] WASHINGTON: Psychologically, it was attitude. Like, if you couldn't take that hazing and bracing, so you just blew up, most likely it is to wash out.

CALLOWAY: Wash you out.

FUGATE: I was, I guess the intent was to try to blow you [out].

LARUE: It was.

FUGATE: If you didn't have, if you didn't have enough initiative to be able to restrain yourself in this situation, what's going to happen to you when the Germans are on your tail?

WASHINGTON: And then, at the end of the day, you were tired. You were worn out, and say, eight or nine o'clock, you would hit the books and study for the examination. 64:00Because these instructors were, they were good. I mean, they had a blackboard, and they would have the chalk in one hand and the eraser in the other, and they'd put the problems up there and everything, you could take notes and everything. Then he'd erase it off and go on to something else. Well, I think if you failed, they'd give you a makeup exam. And if you failed the makeup you--.

LARUE: --You were out--.

WASHINGTON: I think, give you one makeup.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, that much (??) Like--.

LARUE: Well, I missed my weather class the first few days. When I walked in the class, I don't know why I missed it, first thing the instructor said, "give me the weather today." I didn't what he was talking about, I had no idea. And I had to go talk to him so he could bring me up to date. You had to tell why the weather is what it is, and why it's going to be what it's going to be. And--. [laughs] INTERVIEWER2: Like a meteorologist.

LARUE: Yeah--because, when you get up there in those conditions.

CALLOWAY: See, all those subjects we had, meteorologies and navigation, you name it, all of that see that--you'll 65:00have to study all of that WASHINGTON: When it comes to teaching, a lot of times the instructor would give you the answers to these problems, and I think you could learn quicker that way and find out the mistakes you were making, instead of just trying to figure out something you know, on your own. And I remember when the upperclassmen would come down from night flying--.

LARUE: --Out of bed--.

WASHINGTON: --After midnight, and in these dormitories see, they had bunk beds, and like I say, you'd be tired, and midnight or two o'clock in the morning, somebody'd snap on the light and get you awake. "Alright, every dummy in here, hit the floor."

CALLOWAY: Yeah, always wake up to the Lord's Prayer.

WASHINGTON: You'd have to come to attention, get some wrinkles 66:00in your chin and--and right there in your shorts and things, they'd say, "alright," this would be in November or December, snow on the ground. "Alright, run around the barracks three times." [laughter] LARUE: They used to come out and give us a bed bug inspection. Which made you ticklish, throw the mattress cover off, put it down over here and look for bed bugs. And you don't take it off till they tell you to take it off. They'll sneak on out the door, and maybe one was---stayed. And anytime, you pulled it thick all up and he's standing right there looking you in the face. [laughs] WASHINGTON: It was a lot--it was a lot of--.

LARUE: --One night, we said, "when they come--we know they're coming at night, nobody wakes up." They couldn't touch you; nobody wake up. So, they bang, and they did everything they could, and big dummy me, I opened one eye to see what was going on. I got that, "don't you close that eye." (??) He said, "now these mattresses belong to the United States Government, go collect the mattresses." [laughs] And I didn't (??) [laughs] but it was fun, 67:00but it's worth it.

CALLOWAY: Like, usually on Saturday morning, when they had Saturday morning white glove inspection. There'd usually be an officer that would come around, but sometimes the upperclassmen would come around.

LARUE: They were worse.

WASHINGTON: See if everything, and some of the guys, they'd hide all up in the ceiling and everything, but they would have you scrubbing the floor with a toothbrush and all those things.

CALLOWAY: The white gloves inspections. Put on a white glove and reach up on top of a light fixture. And you'd better not get no dirt. I mean it was real--everything had to be spotless.

LARUE: Your clothes hanging with one--one sleeve and the other had to all be in line--.

FUGATE: Can you describe what the inside of the barracks looked like, were they--.

LARUE: --Just sort of typical barracks--.

FUGATE: --Typical army barracks with bunks and--.

WASHINGTON: Well, at Tuskegee, they were brick buildings--.

CALLOWAY: Yes, there was about four of us to a room.

LARUE: (??). On 68:00the campus, we had rooms too.

INTERVIEWER2: Like dorm rooms.

LARUE: When you first went over there, it was just open bay barracks.

WASHINGTON Julius, I guess about six or seven years ago, he told me about a flying training program at Tuskegee, maybe you go into that--.

CALLOWAY: You mean the one they have there every summer?

WASHINGTON: Yeah, because I have a grandson that I--.

CALLOWAY: His grandson, he sent him down, too. This is operated by some of the Tuskegee Airmen. Every summer they have this, two weeks, wasn't it?

LARUE: Yes.

CALLOWAY: A flight training for youngsters. I forget what fifteen, sixteen years old, something like that.

INTERVIEWER2: From.

CALLOWAY: And they pay, and they go down and receive training at Morton Field. The field--I said Morton field was a primary, now it is Tuskegee City Airport. That is the airport at Tuskegee, now.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh, I didn't know that. 69:00CALLOWAY: And one of the chief instructors that we had, Chief Anderson, participates in that program, eighty-five, eighty-six years old now. But so, they have--that's something done by Tuskegee Institute, along with the Tuskegee Airmen. some of them go down and start to six years.

INTERVIEWER2: One of the things that was said too, about your---the Airmen--the national organization being so involved in the purpose of education. That--somebody who's interested in aviation or the military and wants to go to Denver, to the academy, to school, but has a problem with one subject. Say, can go out to Denver and---and they offer courses in the summertime to get them ready for appointment for the academy.

CALLOWAY: They have a pre-academy (??). Well, you know about it, as far as your grandson, went through that with the Navy. All the academies now have a pre-academy, summer---.

LARUE: --Prep school--.

INTERVIEWER2: His grandson is at the Naval Academy now.

FUGATE: Well, what I, what 70:00I was going to say is, this program down in Tuskegee. What is the--.

WASHINGTON: Black pilots?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, no.

WASHINGTON: The NAI or something.

CALLOWAY: No, they may be associated with, that's another organization.

WASHINGTON: I mean their--learn to--.

CALLOWAY: The National Association of Black--that's another organization.

WASHINGTON: Well, anyway, my grandson went to Eastern High School, and this was about, I guess, about six years ago. And for what is it, around eight or nine hundred dollars--.

CALLOWAY: --Something like that--.

WASHINGTON: You can go down there to Tuskegee for two weeks, and they teach you how to solo. And so, my daughter got in the car, and we drove down to Tuskegee. Well, it was the first time I'd been down there since 1945, it was at least twenty years. So, when I got near Tuskegee, that kind of thing, 71:00I just couldn't familiarize myself, you know, with the location. So, I stopped, and I said to somebody, I said, "can you tell me how to get the Tuskegee Institute?" And they looked at me and they said, "you mean Tuskegee University?" [laughter] He let me know on no uncertain terms. Because they had built a new school down there, aeronautical, space science, or something---aerospace science, and that gave them university steps. And so, when I got down there that morning, and got on the campus, it's on the historical register now, but I noticed that they hadn't made any changes since I left. And---so, I drove over to Morton Field, and the rain was coming down. It was about 72:0010 or 11 o'clock in the morning. And I’m sitting there in the car with my daughter and my grandson and my other grandson, and nobody wants (??) a rain.

CALLOWAY: Right.

WASHINGTON: And so, my daughter said, "come on, let's turn around and go back home." [laughs] Because everything looked dilapidated. I mean, Morton Field, one of the hangars, the roof was falling in. And so, I said "no," because I was bragging to my daughter, you know, how Tuskegee was this and that and the other. So, I got on the phone, and I called chief Anderson. So, chief said, "well, I'll get in the car, and I'll come over and get you." So, chief came over and got us and took us back to his house, because I remember he had a little dog named Yo-yo. And so chief said, "well, I don't know where they all are, 73:00they're supposed to be here." [chuckles] and so, we stayed in chief's house for about an hour, and then later, chief made a couple phone calls, and that said that they were at this little motel somewhere down the road. And so, we went down there and made the right connections and everything.

WASHINGTON: And so, my daughter was a little leery about leaving her son down there. Because when we departed, I mean, she had tears in her [chuckles] but, anyway, when I went back to getting him. I mean, he had had such a good time, and so, I had a--I mean, I had to go around looking for him, because he wasn't really ready to come back to Louisville. But anyway, what I was going to say, after he finished Eastern, he he 74:00was low in calculus, and so, they sent him up to Newport, Rhode Island. This gets back, and he was up there for ten months, and he brushed up on his calculus and everything. And the commandant up at the Navy Preparatory School--Navy Preparatory School up there, they sent him to Annapolis, so now he's in the class of '94.

FUGATE: Fantastic, so the (??) will continue on it. I think that's fantastic.

WASHINGTON: I hope so.

FUGATE: I was reading through the book "Roaming Eagles," and I came across an incident that described the caterpillar club. Can you explain what that might have been?

CALLOWAY: Well, the caterpillar clubs, anyone that bailed out of an aircraft [laughter]. 75:00Yeah, you automatically come become a member--.

FUGATE: Do you have any remembrances of anyone joining the caterpillar club, or any bailouts that might have taken place during training or--.

CALLOWAY: I mean, later years, see, I stayed in but really (??) [coughs] Well, I'll tell you one thing. I never had any desire to bail out of a plane. I mean, when I was flying that B-25, and the B-25 really wasn't a fast plane. I mean, but I had a window that I could open up. And when that plane is going about 250, miles from an hour, if you stick your arm out there, you've got a broken arm. [laughs] and so even in a--even in a plane like the ET-13 or something, where you can open the cockpit, well, I mean that velocity of the wind, I think 76:00it's a little dangerous bailing out of a plane.

FUGATE: Well, that's you know, just--.

WASHINGTON: Down at Tuskegee one night, I was flying around, I had generator trouble or something, and all the lights went out in the plane, and I could talk to the control tower, but I couldn't tell how much gas I had left in the plane or anything. But I wasn't thinking about bailing out. The only thing that would get me out of that plane is if it caught on fire. It's one thing about a plane, when you up there in the air and you look down, as long as you can feel something to hold you up [laughs].

CALLOWAY: You better believe it [laughter] WASHINGTON: You're gonna stay with it.

CALLOWAY: Well one of our, I don't whether you remember, you remember a guy--from Chicago, Irving?

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

CALLOWAY: He got killed at Tuskegee. He was in the--we flew the front seat, I think it was a T6, if I remember right. And our instructor was in the rear. And 77:00he was up on a flight--instruction flight with this instructor at--this is Tuskegee Army Airfield. And the instructor did a loop, and as he came back around, coming down, the instructor for--somehow or another, fell out of the airplane. I don't know how this happened, with the seatbelt, or maybe he didn't have it fastened, I don't know. Well, he fell out and of course, he pulled the ripcord, came down with the parachute. But Irving, and this guy had been flying, he was one of those out of Chicago that had been through some that flying (??). Well, he must have thought the instructor still had the airplane and thought the instructor was going to pull out the last minute, and the plane went on in. You remember that?

WASHINGTON: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: Yes.

CALLOWAY: That was a sad experience, of course.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh, absolutely.

WASHINGTON: It was a lot of fun, especially after the war was winding down. Because I could go to General Davis at Godman Field and ask him for ROM, I mean, 78:00that's 'Remain Overnight.' And you could take the plane and fly different places, and I would call up my mother in Atlantic City and tell her that I was flying up to McGuire Air Force Base today. I'd call up nine o'clock in the morning and ask her to--I would tell her if she would meet me up there, we could spend for the most --better part of the day together. And so, she said, "yes." So, my older brother would put her in the car, and they'd drive up to Fort Dix from Atlantic City, which I think is about ninety miles, probably at that time, about two hours’ drive. And I'd say ninety miles, two hours, but it was about that.

So anyway, I would get up there maybe around noon, and we'd both get there probably at the same time 79:00and spend the afternoon in the guest house or somewhere, on the campus. And one thing that I enjoyed that night, when I got ready to file a flight plan to come back. To look to Godman Field, you know, at that time, why, WHAS was a 50,000-watt clear channel station.

FUGATE: Coming on in.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, and so--.

FUGATE: I didn't mean anything (??) WASHINGTON: --I would take off from McGuire Air Force Base, and the B25 had three or four radios in it, and we had one radio, a radio conference, And I would tune--as soon as I took off and got out of traffic pattern, I'd tune in to WHS. And I mean, it came out--.

FUGATE: --Right on cue--.

WASHINGTON: --Loud and clear, and the needle would point right 80:00to the tower, and the tower was right there Sixth and Broadway, behind the Federal Building. And a group would be in front of there (??), and I would just sit up there with my earphones on, and all I had to do is keep the nose of the plane lined up with the needle on this radio compass. I don't know what my crowd caused, [laughter] but it would bring me right into six and Broadway. By that time, you could see the Ohio River. It would take you back down (??) LARUE: A little incident happened up there once we--we went into Fort Dix. And so, you know, a truck comes up out, you know, follow me if you're not--don't belong there, so they went to park us. This little a white WAC [Women’s Army Corps] jumped out, "where's the pilot?" We were all thinking, "what was that?" She's looking for a white person. When she discovered what, she jumped in her Jeep and left us [laughter]. So, then a male captain came out, he had a delay. They were just supposed to tell us where we could stay and what to eat (??) you know. When she said, "where 81:00is he, he's not over there, where--." [laughs] You know, Bubba Jackson was the pilot, and she looked at him, but he didn't count. [laughs] INTERVIEWER2: One of the things the men who were over at [in] Italy had mentioned was the absence of replacement pilots, that they had to fly more missions than they really, you know, thought was safe.

CALLOWAY: I think that's one of the reasons why my class was pulled out of the college training detachment early and sent right on into have pilot training because they were [clears throat] at that time [clears throat], they--you know, there was a need for pilots.

INTERVIEWER2: But yet they--they had the quota system that kept them from training enough.

FUGATE: Well, can you describe the graduation ceremonies. You've gone through all this now. You--you've endured all the training; you've endured all the hazing from your classmates. The day's finally here for your wings, and--.

CALLOWAY: I don't remember any--see in the later years 82:00in the Air Force, I know we--we had changed too. We always had made a big to do on the graduations. I don't remember any big ceremony, so to speak, my mother and dad came down, when I graduated. And I remember the adjutant of the--at Tuskegee was a (??), who was an ex-schoolteacher here at Central High School. He was teaching one--he was in the military, and he swore us in.

WASHINGTON: You know, the swearing-in ceremony.

LARUE: Why would that be important (??).

CALLOWAY: But I mean it was just a quick ceremony. I don't remember anything, compared to what we used to have in later years before (??). It was a real proud moment when you get your wings pinned on there. And that's what you've worked all those months for.

LARUE: Graduation exercises.

INTERVIEWER2: He's got a program.

LARUE: That's when I graduated from bombardier school.

FUGATE: Oh, okay.

INTERVIEWER2: Graduation (??).

LARUE: I don't know what they did, but the chaplains and then the band. They would have administering [administer] the oath of office, 83:00and the colonels spoke. And the chaplain gave an address. Awarding of commissions, awarding of wings, awarding a trophy to the outstanding cadet and the Air Force and then the National Anthem and the Benediction. That's typically the way it was.

INTERVIEWER2: Dislike (??) graduations--.

LARUE: That was Midland, Texas. But see, you get up that morning and you've had to take all your enlisted corps, over to turn them in. But since you wasn't an officer, we weren't allowed in the streets. You had to stay in the barracks, till time to go to the chapel. Then you come out, everybody wants that dollar. [chuckles] They stay there lined up waiting to get that first salute.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, but a short period of time, you were a civilian again.

LARUE: Yeah. But--.

CALLOWAY: --But they didn't give him the papers.

LARUE: Cadet was--.

WASHINGTON: --A commission--.

CALLOWAY: --They wouldn't give you your papers.

WASHINGTON: Then, a short period of time, I don't know, it seemed like it was a little period in there where you were, nothing. [chuckles] LARUE: Well, let's see, my papers for discharge was November the fourth.

WASHINGTON: Oh, yeah.

LARUE: November the third. And the department was on November the 84:00fourth, but if they didn't give you this till after you was [were] back in. [chuckles] WASHINGTON: Well, I remember, in the advanced training I went to--I remember.

LARUE: That one day.

WASHINGTON: How did you buy your officer's uniform, your pants, and your blouse and--.

CALLOWAY: I don't know we already did, we had to order them.

LARUE: We had to order them.

CALLOWAY: Every time because the guys that got washed out that week before had already had their uniform. My classmate--my roommate was one of them.

LARUE: Well, here's my receipt when I bought mine, but he told us, if we didn't graduate, we didn't have to buy them, because they were paid for.

WASHIGNTON: It seemed like I bought mine in Cincinnati.

CALLOWAY: I don't remember (??).

LARUE: Well, they were cheap little blouses, only 52 dollars and fifty cents.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh, my.

LARUE: And we bought, I bought the best. But the man told us, “Do not buy them to fit you, because you're not gonna be the size you are. Because you're not gonna be cleaning and running like you were." [laughter] FUGATE: Do you still have the uniform?

LARUE: I don't have nothing [anything]. I got rid of all of it.

INTERVIEWER2: Well, the flight suit that Phil wears when he does the program, 85:00it's really hard to find. We finally found one that was from the Korean War, we think, at the Swan Street Antique Market, here in Louisville. And Mr. Sawyer said that most people wore their--their flights suit, you know, just to--because it was comfortable and just wore it out.

LARUE: I was never issued a flight suit.

WASHINGTON: Well, two years, I think, two years ago, they had the Tuskegee airmen's convention in Detroit, and I got the opportunity to go out to the Tuskegee Airmen's Museum in Detroit, and they have some uniforms on display out there.

INTERVIEWER2: Well, they're difficult to find. They--there's a new Army museum in Findlay, Ohio, do you know about that? When a military museum's starting in Findlay, Ohio, and the gentleman there had a whole uniform and came down and 86:00Mr. Sawyer's still real slim. He tried it on, just to show the guy how, you know, but the difference was the zippers in the--in the World War Two---were replace by buttons.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, pink and the green, remember that?

LARUE: Yeah, I don't think I ever wore it.

CALLOWAY: The pants were pink, and the blouse was green, and we had battle jackets. I remember I got me a battle jacket too.

LARUE: That wasn't issued, thought?

CALLOWAY: No, it wasn't issued.

LARUE: That was--Eisenhower started that.

CALLOWAY: Well, my uniform, in later years, when I got this here, I still--hiking my flying suit on. I could probably get in it. I got a flying suit with all--all the stuff all over it.

LARUE: You got the blue though?

CALLOWAY: Huh?

LARUE: You got the bus driver, with the blue?

CALLOWAY: No, no--.

LARUE: You still got the green in the thing (??).

CALLOWAY: This was a--it's kind of a greenish--.

BEGINNING OF TAPE1, TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, SIDE B LARUE: …That’s what you’re talking about. That came after I got out.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, last couple of days. I never did wear them.

WASHINGTON: …flying suits.

LARUE: But I had the blue, we had the blue. Yeah, we had the other blue. I’m talking about flying suits.

CALLOWAY: We never did get no flying suits. 87:00WASHINGTON: Let me ask you this, during World War Two, all the military planes were propeller driven. We didn’t use any jets in World War Two. But he came out of the military as a jet instructor. Were those flying suits, did they have heat controls and pressure controls and anything else?

CALLOWAY: No, we wore G-suits. But what you’re talking about, the altitude, we went straight to fifty thousand feet. But above fifty you had to wear a pressure suit. But we had G-suits, which was just like a pair of pants, and you plug it in and they would inflate to keep the blood from draining from your head all the way down. And that’s what caused… INTERVIEWER2: Because of the speed?

CALLOWAY: Altitude. But that was, you put that on over the flying suit.

LARUE: They had electric suits back there in World War Two, we never did get one though. You plug it in… CALLOWAY: They had, what they’d call it, a survival suit. 88:00I went through survival training in water, and I forget what they call that thing. But there was a thermal thing that would keep you from freezing to death.

INTERVIEWER2: Well, I’m sure that those early planes that I saw at Dayton were pretty breezy. And flying in the winter in one of those planes had to be a pretty chilly event.

CALLOWAY: Well, we had some pretty heavy flying, especially on those B-25’s. [LAUGHTER] Had on those big heavy jackets. In the fighters you couldn’t wear too much, you know.

LARUE: We had the jackets. And of course, to fly a smaller cockpits you had [INAUDIBLE] more than you would in a B-25.

WASHINGTON: On the B-25, I remember, we had certain instruments that were classified, and they had self-detonators on them, where if the plane should be in danger of crashing or anything, 89:00a lot of those things would self-destruct. Then they had one instrument… CALLOWAY: It was a classified instrument.

WASHINGTON: …friendly, what was it?

CALLOWAY: I don’t know.

WASHINGTON: … friendly, foe or friend. It could tell… LARUE: IFF WASHINGTON: IFF LARUE: How to navigate, friend or foe.

WASHINGTON: …friend or foe.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, that was one of them.

WASHINGTON: And then we had just gotten into radar training. On the front of the B-25, right in front of the windshield we had like, it was like a tuning fork, round radar antenna. But I didn’t get too much training in that, it was just starting.

INTERVIEWER2: You left at the end of, after Viet Nam, when the television was so full of the air campaign in the Persian Gulf War, were you observing airplanes that were much more advanced than the ones even that you flew? Or were they the same?

CALLOWAY: Oh yeah, they had some…By 90:00the way, the general in that, General Horner, who commanded the Air Force, he and I were in the same squadron at Mulhouse, flying 105’s, instructors. I ran across him and we reminisced over the old days. He’s a three star. I don’t know whether he’s got four or not. But old Horner, nobody ever thought he’d come join, because he was wild. He was an instructor, a 105 instructor. They’ve got new airplanes now. One they’re still flying, that’s the F-111. That’s still flying. I was in the first squadron flying those.

FUGATE: You were talking about the secret material that was on the B-25. Were Norton bomb sights, you guys work with those?

WASHINGTON: Yes, the Norton Bomb sights.

LARUE: That’s what I was trained on.

FUGATE: Okay. Can you describe how you utilized that Bomb sight and was the bomb sight on every plane or just on one plane?

LARUE: Well, it just depends. All of our planes we had a bombing. But what it did, 91:00it had two little, like indices, and you set them up with the timing of the speed of the plane so that when you got to your target [INAUDIBLE] because the bomb would come out. After you hit your IP, your initial point, you start in on your bombing run, the bombadier took over control of the plane all together. He locked into his bomb sight, and every time you made a move on your bomb sight your plane would turn. The pilot would just sit there until you hollered bombs away. And then – that’s the way they worked.

FUGATE: The reason that I ask is because we have a Norton Bomb Sight in the collection. And I’ve talked to an individual who was in Europe with another one of the – I think it was on the B-17. And he says that they only had one Bomb Sight on the lead plane and everyone else… LARUE: Yeah, that’s what you say. You’re just going to do a little mass bombing. They only carried one. As a matter of fact, sometimes it used to be that the guy that was going to carry the Bomb Sight had to get a 45 to kick it out, kick the hit port out.

FUGATE: What about overseas 92:00duty? Did you have overseas duty at all?

CALLOWAY: Yes. I spent a tour in Morocco. It was French Morocco then. I was in a fighter squadron there, flying F-86’s. It was on a SAC base, a Strategic Air Command base. They’d rotate over six-month tours in the, what was that, P-47, SAC plane. They’d come over there and rotate. We were there for PCF. We flew Alert. In other words, we were one of the [INAUDIBLE] I remember one thing that was interesting that happened. Every day if you – see we had flights. So, you’d work twenty-four and then off, whatever. But anyway, if you were on, every day at three o’clock, whatever flight was on duty, they’d have a scramble. You were on five minutes alert. So, from the time that whistle and bell went off, you had five minutes to be airborne in that F-86. Every day at three o’clock, we’d get a scramble, and everybody knew what it was. 93:00We had shot guns. We were really ready, raise some hell. And we’d go out over the ocean North from Casablanca and intercept this Constellation, Air France, coming down from Europe at three thousand feet over the ocean. [LAUGHING] Everybody knew what it was, but back in those days, the communications, the aircraft would be ahead of the communications. So, he wouldn’t have clearance when he was coming in. So, they would scramble.

FUGATE: What time period was that?

CALLOWAY: This was in fifty-four.

WASHINGTON: Was that the 86 they nicknamed it the Shooting Star?

CALLOWAY: No, that was the… LARUE: F-80.

CALLOWAY: F-80 was the Shooting Star. 86 was the one they made famous more in Korea. But then I also spent two years in Thailand as an advisor to the Thai Air Force. And this was at the early stage of the Viet Nam War. I spent actually two years there.

LARUE: Here, it says here, all graduates have received Norton Bomb Sight training.

FUGATE: So, everyone received training, it wasn’t specialized…? 94:00LARUE: No, everyone in this class had the same training. We had a thing; we could make money off of the trainer. You set up on, oh, you sit up maybe as high as the ceiling and it has a bomb site on it. And it has a bug on the bottom here and when you drop the bomb this pencil would come down and hit this little target on the floor. And that was more fun. That was like a [INAUDIBLE] bombardier. And sometimes this thing on the floor, they could put it in motion, and you had to hit it while it’s in motion.

WASHINGTON: And then during World War Two, nowadays, we have computers, APPLE, IBM, and everything. But back in those days… LARUE: E6B WASHINGTON: …we relied on the E6B. [LAUGHTER] LARUE: Circle and a slide rule, that’s all it was.

WASHINGTON: We did all our navigation and everything on the E6B.

FUGATE: Colonel Davis, later General Davis 95:00set a number of firsts, if you will, in the United States Army Air Corps and the United States Air Force. One of those firsts was when he took command at Godman Field and just a number of things. Could you describe any experiences you might have had with him? Or just any remembrances that you have?

CALLOWAY: One thing that I remember in particular. Like I say, I was in the 99th Fighter Squadron at Godman Field. We flew in P-47’s, weren’t flying B-25’s. Our CO was Colonel Campbell, who had been one of the original 99th fighter pilots [INAUDIBLE]. Toppins was one, he shot down the first jet. But anyway, we had these guys as flight commanders. What was the guy’s name? I can’t forget. He just got an award, because he just put in, I forget how many years, of government 96:00service FAA, through the military and everything else. He finally retired after all these years, and they had quite a ceremony up in Washington. But I remember every Saturday we had – you see, this was Army Air Corps, so a lot of that old Army stuff we did. Every Saturday you passed in review, where the whole group got out, dressed class A and marched in front of your CO, who was General Davis. Colonel Davis then. Well, this one time, my squadron, 99th, marching, passing in review. Somebody in the squadron was out of step. I don’t know who, somebody. So, General Davis made our squadron, and of course it really teed off Colonel Campbell. Campbell was a Major then. The 99th Squadron that next Saturday we better not make any mistakes like that. So, every evening after work that week, because every week we did this, but during the week 97:00we had to get out and march and practice, our whole squadron for a week. So that next Saturday nobody would not be out of step. [LAUGHTER] LARUE: One thing about those reviews, what made me always – his father would come down sometimes, but he was always late. And we’d have to stand out there in that hot sun and wait for his plane to land to look at us for about three minutes. [LAUGHTER] Wearing that old raincoat. But General Davis was strict.

WASHINGTON: What I remember about General Davis, training is a wonderful thing, because before I went into the Service, being in Atlantic City, New Jersey – the military came over and took over Atlantic City, New Jersey. All the hotels and everything. You could see them on the streets marching up and down, going to different places. And the enlisted men would be in formation coming down the street. 98:00But when you saw an officers’ formation coming down the street, you could tell the difference. And so, when General Davis came down to Tuskegee, I mean he stood out by being a West Point graduate. I mean, you could tell him… INTERVIEWER2: Oh, ramrod straight.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, ramrod straight, I remember that. But I didn’t know him very well, because at the mess hall, the officer’s mess at Godman Field…..I mean subordinates. I was a mere flight officer, Second Lieutenant and fraternization and everything. He was at one table with his staff, and I mean, a little Second Lieutenant, I mean, couldn’t get near. [LAUGHING] FUGATE: It was like trying to get to God.

WASHINGTON: You’d have to be at least a Major or Colonel or something to sit at that table.

LARUE: When he came down, he had never flown on a bomber. I think Chappie took him up the first time. 99:00CALLOWAY: Yeah, Chappie was his pilot.

LARUE: Yeah, he wanted to….He was ready, he wanted to pull up the wheels and Chappie smacked his hand. [LAUGHTER] He [INAUDIBLE] that plane. And he wasn’t ready to pull them up yet.

FUGATE: If I remember right, Godman Field had a relatively short runway, didn’t it? Wasn’t that…? Describe take-offs and landings and Godman Field.

CALLOWAY: Over 31W that’s what you had to land in. [LAUGHTER] WASHINGTON: I never had any trouble. Tuskegee had a mountain. I had more trouble – they had, not a mountain, but a…you remember at one end… LARUE: It’s so long ago, it’s hard to remember.

WASHINGTON: …it was a high elevation. You had to clear it in a relatively short time.

LARUE: Yeah. I know, see the B-25 took off in a shorter distance than we did in a P-27 Fighter. And I remember at Godman. I’d take off – back in those days you didn’t compute your take off distance like later. Later years, you know, we’d spend hours just planning a flight. You had to know temperatures, wind, everything, knew exactly where….Go, no go, 100:00speed and all that kind of stuff. You had all kinds of calculations. Back in those days you didn’t. But what we did in the P-47, you get on the end of the runway, and you run up and go all the way, just before you get to the other end, you pull back and lift up. [LAUGHING] WASHINGTON: Like you say, it was the railroad tracks, because I remember one B-25 must have had engine trouble and when he aborted the take-off, it hit the tracks and it burned, burst into flames. And I remember the heat was so terrific you couldn’t get near it. And I heard the guys in there screaming and everything and I never will forget it in all my life. It was a terrible thing. But one thing that I can remember clearly about taking off at Godman Field and coming in for a landing, I could always look down and see that gold depository. [LAUGHING] That was always there. 101:00LARUE: You know a funny thing, they used to have a red light on the highway, so cars had to stop when you come in.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, that’s right.

LARUE: You were so close to hitting them cars.

FUGATE: You’d come in so low that they were afraid you were going to hit the cars?

LARUE: On 31W they had a red light for cars to stop, up and down the highway.

INTERVIEWER2: You know, I vaguely remember that. [LAUGHTER] CALLOWAY: Yeah, it’s all coming back. Something else I remember about when I first – see I was at Walterboro, South Carolina, flying P-40’s RTU. Replacement Training Unit they called it. And from there, instead of going to Italy we were sent to Dallas(?). But what happened, a whole bunch of us, I forget how many it was, mostly my class. Some of the guys that were in the class ahead of me, they’d go. They put us on a train, a coach, to bring us up to Godman. And this coach, I’d never seen nothing like it before and I hope never to. It had wooden seats and lanterns. When it got dark, they came around and lit the lantern. [LAUGHTER] And we, I mean it seemed like it took forever to get from Walterboro, South Carolina to Kentucky. 102:00And then we got in here to the Union Station late at night. By the time they got us out to Godman Field, and we got a place to sleep it was about midnight. Be on the flight line six o’clock the next morning. And at six o’clock the next morning we showed up on the flight line and in about an hour’s time we were in the P-47, each one of us, taking off in an airplane that we’d never even seen before. And that was our check out. It was just bang, bang, bang, like that.

LARUE: Well, you know the irony of that is that, even though we were there in the bomber and later when I was working in Engineering, I had to go to Godman Field to get a longer flight angle for the helicopters and things. I had to work on not chopping trees on the way down. I think it was on the East side.

INTERVIEWER2: I had to turn on the heat. It’s getting very chilly in here. [NOISY] CALLOWAY: [INAUDIBLE] I think Godman wasn’t made for the type of plane we had. But we had the best safety record in the First Air Force.

FUGATE: I know 103:00I’ve read a lot that the airmen were proud of the fact that they never lost a bomber while overseas to enemy aircraft. But there were losses of aircraft, I’m sure. Can you remember any other losses of aircraft that you were talking about. You talked about the crash there at Godman’s Field.

WASHINGTON: [INAUDIBLE] LARUE: Oh, you’re talking….That’s strictly overseas though.

WASHINGTON: You mean out at Godman Field?

LARUE: We lost a guy in our squadron out there. They had a mid-air collision.

INTERVIEWER2: Oh, my goodness.

LARUE: A guy named, let’s see is it Moore? [INAUDIBLE] formation and a mid-air collision.

WASHINGTON: I remember [INAUDIBLE] a B-25 one Sunday morning. He flew over that bridge, the second, what is that the Memorial Bridge? Not the Kennedy Bridge, it wasn’t built then.

INTERVIEWER2: It was the [INAUDIBLE] WASHINGTON: He flew underneath the bridge 104:00and hit the water.

LARUE: The plane looked like somebody had taken a can opener and gone down the bottom of it.

INTERVIEWER2: A. D. Porter was telling that story one day.

CALLOWAY: We flew under the bridge once, crazy.

LARUE: So, we did a lot of flying in those days. We had accidents.

CALLOWAY: What was the guy’s name that went down, he went down to Tuskegee in a B-25, and he needed some gas, you know. I think it was Tuskegee didn’t have the fuel he needed, so they went somewhere else and they crashed. I remember the navigator’s name was Jefferson. He just went for the ride. Little short fella, I can’t think of his name.

WASHINGTON: Have you ever heard this story? Right after World War Two, did you know a B-25 flew through the Empire State Building and… LARUE: Yeah, crashed into it, yes sir.

WASHINGTON: …came out on the other side. It cut the elevator cords in one of the elevators. The operator…. 105:00FUGATE: It was in the upper echelons of the building in the air.

LARUE: They say if you do that, your plane will mash it, turn it up and…but it won’t go up, just move along.

FUGATE: I think that’s why they have a….The Sears Tower in Chicago, they’ve got a strobe light on top of that building.

INTERVIEWER2: You want to call? [BUZZER NOISE] It’s upstairs. I’ll take you up. [TAPE GOES OFF AND ON] CALLOWAY: …they gave us some pretty old aircraft. I got two hundred hours in the P-49.

FUGATE: That’s one question I have is how did the aircraft get to the guys that went overseas? I mean they sent them to a de-embarkation area, but the planes didn’t go with them.

LARUE: No, in those days they didn’t clear them. The outfits didn’t clear them. They, the 332nd, they went on a ship. And then the planes were….They had ferry commands. And those planes were either flown or shipped. I imagine the fighters were probably shipped over and they assembled 106:00them overseas.

FUGATE: And I heard when they got the planes, they were brand new planes.

LARUE: Yeah, remember they went through a bunch of different aircraft, too. The 332nd – of course everybody flew the P-40 at one time or another. But then the 332nd they flew P-39’s at one time. They flew the P-47 and then they ended up flying the P-51. So, they changed the aircraft quite a bit. Well, each time it was moving up. Of course, the 51 is what they used in long range escort all the way to [INAUDIBLE].

WASHINGTON: I remember just before the war ended, in the B-25, General MacArthur had accepted our group to go to Okinawa. We were supposed to go to Okinawa. And we trained to see how much efficiency we could get out of each tank of gas. 107:00LARUE: Long range.

WASHINGTON: Long range efficiency, because we were going to fly from here to the west coast of Hawaii and on over to Okinawa to train.

LARUE: [INAUDIBLE] WASHINGTON: But all of our equipment, they were loading our equipment getting it all together on these freight trains out at Fort Knox. But after they dropped the bomb, everything came to an end real fast. The B-25, they had several models. I flew mostly the B-25J. But I think the H model had a twenty-millimeter cannon… LARUE: I went for a ride in one of those.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, twenty-millimeter cannon.

WASHINGTON: …The kind I flew, the bombardier was up in the glass nose with the Norton Bomb Sight. But they made one that had a twenty-millimeter cannon up there.

FUGATE: Was it a single cannon or four?

WASHINGTON: It was a single cannon, because… LARUE: I think it was more than twenty millimeters.

WASHINGTON: Well, they had thirty, thirty, 108:00they had those package guns on the side that was [a] thirty caliber. And then they had the fifty caliber guns up front.

LARUE: While I was at Walterboro, some of the B-25’s would come down there for gunnery and that’s how I got a ride one day.

WASHINGTON: But I remember when that cannon went off, the recoil – CALLOWAY: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: …would slow the plane down.

FUGATE: I think it was a seventy-five-millimeter cannon, wasn’t it? At one point, I think, they put like a French seventy-five-millimeter field gun inside a B-25.

WASHINGTON: I remember, one interesting thing I remember was down at Tuskegee as a cadet, training, the night flying or celestial navigation. They would put you in this room and they had these charts, like today is what? 109:00February the twenty-fourth? But you see the sky looks different every night. You would open this chart to February the twenty-fourth and it would show you what the heavens looked like. And you could look up there and see all the stars and everything. And you would have a sexton and you would take an azimuth on a star, and you could get a fix through celestial navigation. Through latitude and longitude, you could find a location anywhere in the world. But that would be on a clear night. [LAUGHTER] But the heavens, if you turned to February the twenty-fifth, the sky would look different.

LARUE: I didn’t get to celestial.

WASHINGTON: Now in the B-25 they had a glass [INAUDIBLE] where 110:00the sexton was and everything where you could use the celestial navigation. [TAPE GOES OFF AND ON] WASHINGTON: …I’d fly down around Atlanta, and they’d have light lines… LARUE: Yeah, back in those days.

WASHINGTON: …every twenty miles, of course.

CALLOWAY: Every airway, you had a light line. You could follow the lights. Each light would blink in a code.

WASHINGTON: But the hardest, the hardest thing I ever tried to do in training down at Tuskegee was blind flying, instrument flying. They would have four quadrants and you would have to… LARUE: [INAUDIBLE] range.

WASHINGTON: …use the fade out method. And you’d have to bracket the beam and come in on the beam.

LARUE: That was the hardest thing to do.

FUGATE: Flying on the beam, yeah, I’ve heard about that. 111:00WASHINGTON: See if you’re going away from the tower, you would fade out. And if you continued in… CALLOWAY: I flew the P-33, that was back when they had those ALAs then. [INAUDIBLE] I used to sit up there for hours listening to [INAUDIBLE] WASHINGTON: One of those planes…[INAUDIBLE] they pulled that curtain around where you couldn’t see out of the plane. You’d have instruction maybe.

LARUE: Yeah, we used to make instrument take-offs.

WASHINGTON: And a lot of times….I can see why they put you through so much training at Kessler Field now, because remember when you had those lines for depth perception and everything?

LARUE: Those trainers? Yeah.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, you’d pull those two strings. Well, anyway, during advanced training down there 112:00at Tuskegee, some nights I would come in, you know, practicing the night flying. I would come in for a landing and I would think that I was about two or three feet above the runway, and I would be as high as this ceiling.

CALLOWAY: I never will forget… WASHINGTON: And when the plane stalled, you could hear the wind. Shhh. And that plane would hit the runway [SMACKS HANDS] and bounce you.

CALLOWAY: And the lights. They’d have lights shining on the runway. At the top of the beam of the lights, you’d think it was the runway. I was in one of the T-6. Boy, I just lucked out that night, too. I come in on that light beam and then I realized and eased it on down. [LAUGHTER] WASHINGTON: You had to go forward or try to… FUGATE: Well aircraft, you got a lot of experience with more modern aircraft flying, just basic, seat of your pants flying. Was it easier at that time period or was it easier during Viet Nam with the more modern equipment?

CALLOWAY: Well, see, remember….Hmm….It’s 113:00kind of hard, because you’re thinking of the time frame. Back then it was most difficult with the equipment you had. Like you talk about the navigational aids, video compass and the radio [INAUDIBLE] and those were difficult methods of navigating compared to the later. Like I flew…In the F-111, we had an inertial navigational system, which was a computer, but it was a navigational system. We could sit right here and put in lat. and long [latitude and longitude] for, say New York City or across the world somewhere. And time this up with it by the time it ended. It would take about ten or fifteen minutes to bring everything up to speed. And then you could get a heading, true air speed, ground speed, time, everything to that point. And we’d update our radar.

FUGATE: In just a matter of seconds, where it would take on the B-… CALLOWAY: Yeah. So, things were, the overall flying is more complicated that a way now, but you’ve got equipment that is so much better. 114:00You got to be trained whatever you….You just can’t compare this day and age with what, because aviation has advanced so far.

FUGATE: I’ve heard a lot of people say that the older aircraft were not sophisticated to the point where you could pretty much fly them by the seat of your pants, and you could get away with a lot of things that you can’t get away with in a modern jet aircraft.

CALLOWAY: I think that has more to do with speed than anything else. Back then we didn’t have automatic pilot. See now just about everything, even the fighters you have automatic….105 we had automatic pilot. That was the first one I flew with automatic pilot in eighty-six, I did. You know what automatic pilot does. So, everything’s changed so much now. But then also the speed, you don’t have the time to make mistakes and get away with it. But then you have all those aids that aid you, so that you’re not about to make the mistakes that you would back in the old days, flying more or less by the seat of your pants.

WASHINGTON: I never will forget 115:00the first time I’d ever been in a plane. Got down there to Tuskegee and they put me into a Piper Cub, just for an orientation ride. But the Piper Cub had doors on it, it was enclosed. Guy took me up and it was a nice ride. So, when I went into primary training and they put me into this Steerman, this PT-17. It was a plane, you know, two wings, biplane all open and everything. And when that instructor pushed that throttle forward, the sound scared me to death. And I held on so tight.

INTERVIEWER2: Just white knuckle, huh? [LAUGHTER] WASHINGTON: It scared me to death. And you had on these flying helmets like Snoopy.

LARUE: Yeah, with goggles on them.

WASHINGTON: And they had some go sport tubes I think they called them, where the instructor could talk back to you. 116:00CALLOWAY: Yeah. He could talk to you, you couldn’t talk to him.

INTERVIEWER2: You couldn’t yell help. [LAUGHTER] CALLOWAY: I went up in a Steerman here, last year. A friend of mine out at Bowman had one. He told me, said why don’t you come on up. You want to go up? I said, I haven’t been in one of those things since way back when….So he told me go on and get in there and do it. I flew the thing for about fifteen minutes, a Steerman.

WASHINGTON: But it was good, like when you, it was good training. They had a narrow landing field. [INAUDIBLE] So a lot of times when you’d fly upside down, you could feel that gas spray out.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, yeah.

WASHINGTON: Because the gas gauge, I think… CALLOWAY: Gas tank was up high.

WASHINGTON: …up high, gravity fed. And then in the PT-13, you know, a lot of times when I’d fly that thing upside down, the keys and money out of your pockets would fall into the canopy.

INTERVIEWER2: Then you’d turn back over, and it would fall back down on you.

WASHINGTON: And then after you landed, 117:00you know, you’d have to look down on the floor and get all this stuff.

FUGATE: I’m going to… END OF TAPE ONE, TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, SIDE B BEGINNING OF TAPE TWO, TUSKEGEE AIRMEN, SIDE A CALLOWAY: …do we have a videotape of that thing?

INTERVIEWER2: We’ll have…Mr. Calloway’s brother has a high-tech video and he is working with the videos that we’ve got of interviews to create a thirty minute piece that.

TOM FUGATE: Oh, I think it’s going….I think it will be a program that will absolutely astound people if we can get all of these activities put together, as well as the exhibition there at the old Capitol. It will be a fantastic way to recognize the airmen as Kentuckians, their contribution to the war effort.

INTERVIEWER2: Do you 118:00all ever get things from other museums on loan?

FUGATE: Uh huh.

INTERVIEWER2: Well, it might be that for a small amount of time, some of the memorabilia from the Detroit Museum or Dayton, might be able to… FUGATE: We interact with the museum at Wright Patterson all the time. In fact, I just….In fact, we just donated like a hundred twenty-five thousand dollars’ worth of twenty-millimeter aircraft cannons to them. They have a number of their planes that they didn’t have armament for, and I’ve got a building full of armament that I don’t have planes for, so we married the two collections together. So, they’ve told us that any assistance that we want, that they’ll be more than happy to….

INTERVIEWER2: I’ll be in touch. Tell [INAUDIBLE] I said hi. Thank you, Tom.

FUGATE: Thank you. One of the last things I….And we’ll try to shut me up 119:00and get us all home here before the snow starts coming down tonight. Is we’ve talked a lot about pilots and a lot about flying, but can you describe life as a bombardier? I mean, what was it like up there in the nose of that B-25 coming in, watching the ground come up at you?

LARUE: Well, [INAUDIBLE] just like anything else. Now a couple of times, Jackson come up there, he said he couldn’t stay up there, because it looked like he was falling out of the plane. [LAUGHTER] The co-pilot would come up just to see what it was like. And they said there wasn’t a place to sit, out on that nose cone, but two boxes of ammunition. That was our seat.

FUGATE: So, the two boxes of ammunition were the seat? Did you basically have a plexiglass canopy that you look out the front of?

LARUE: Uh huh.

WASHINGTON: You had to crawl through a little tunnel.

LARUE: Through a tunnel, in a B-25. A 17 it wasn’t that bad.

FUGATE: You also have experience in B-17’s?

LARUE: I was a gunner in a B-17.

FUGATE: What were some of the basic differences between the 17 and the 25?

LARUE: Well, the 17 has four engines, it’s just larger.

WASHINGTON: The 17 120:00was a heavy bomber. The B-25 was lighter.

LARUE: Get up a lot higher. It would get up, oh, we’d fly at thirty thousand feet then. That was high then.

WASHINGTON: I remember one day flying down to Tuskegee. We’d left Godman Field and go to Tuskegee. And we had a fifteen thousand feet cloud formation and some of these 25’s have a super charger on it. And we couldn’t get over the fifteen thousand feet cloud formation.

LARUE: We very seldom got over ten thousand.

FUGATE: Ten thousand feet, that’s not very high.

LARUE: Well, see, that’s the bad thing about it, see. That C-47 didn’t work that well down there.

WASHINGTON: No, we were out… LARUE: But that was our guard. They sent us a high altitude guard…..[LAUGHING] [INAUDIBLE] The C-47 didn’t work well until you got up ten or fifteen thousand to super charge it. We couldn’t get up there.

CALLOWAY: Even the P-40.

LARUE: So, they couldn’t protect us, but that’s what they gave us.

WASHINGTON: I think the 121:00SOP on that B-25, standard operating procedure, I think it was redlined at two hundred and fifty miles an hour. [BUZZER SOUNDS] LARUE: We couldn’t keep the 47 …..[LAUGHING] CALLOWAY: Yeah, that was pretty slow.

LARUE: We used to cruise at one ninety.

FUGATE: Well, as part of the training, I guess, in advanced, was there any kind of, any aircraft evasion techniques that you were taught?

CALLOWAY: Well, my training was fighters, so I can’t speak for that.

LARUE: Well, basically, see, the fighters were supposed to protect us. We’d just go on our mission.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, we protected them.

LARUE: But see they were so far above us in the type of plane he had guarding us and they were so much faster. They had to slow down and wait for us and look down on us. [LAUGHING] CALLOWAY: But we had all the fighter tactics in that day. Air Combat, well that term came out in later years. ACL LARUE: What you call that evasive action when you go in towards…? Weave and bob…?

WASHINGTON: Yeah, I remember. But the B-25 122:00was a tactical ship, and we did a lot of practice skip bombing and stuff like that.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, you all did the low altitude.

LARUE: Yeah, the bomb sight couldn’t work on that, too fast. The bomb sight couldn’t keep up with you.

WASHINGTON: But getting back to what you were speaking of….never having lost a bomber. About two years ago, I was talking to the president of the Chapter that I belong to, the Los Angeles Chapter. A fellow named; we called him “Rusty” Burns.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, Rusty, yeah, I knew Rusty.

WASHINGTON: Well, anyway, I asked him how--was his picture coming along of the Red Tails. He told me….Because I told a lot of my friends that they were going to make this picture about the Red Tails and show how they flew all this bomber 123:00escort and everything. So, my friends, when are they going to make this picture? When are they going to make this picture? So, about a year ago, I asked Rusty Burns about this, because he lives in California, and he is the president of the Los Angeles Chapter.

CALLOWAY: Past president.

WASHINGTON: So, he told me, so he told me that George Lucas and he’s the man that made, I think, Stars Wars and something like that. And he told me that he has his own studios out there in Lucasville, California. And he said that George Lucas had eight hundred thousand dollars tied up in the Red Tails, but the Red Tails are on the back burner. But he told me that he was sure 124:00that George Lucas wasn’t going to let eight hundred thousand dollars go down the tubes. But with this animation now that they have, where they can incorporate human beings in the animation. That’s where the money is, now. I guess, it’s kind of had some disputes came up where they were going to film it, the Red Tails, the locations, whether it was going to be Africa or in the states or elsewhere. But I think eventually this picture will be made. Right now, at some of the convention, they usually have a sign at an easel in the lobby and it says Tuskegee Airmen Convention, you know, second floor or something. Well, we have a lot….quite often some guy will walk in and he’s there on business, 125:00you know what I mean? And he’ll see the sign and he’ll come upstairs, and he’ll say, you know, I used to fly a B-24 during World War Two and I remember those Red Tails and that’s why I stopped by, because you guys may have saved my life. [LAUGHING] You know what I mean? But that’s how they could tell the Tuskegee Airmen by the Red Tails.

CALLOWAY: Each fighter group had, about three of them had their tails painted a different color. That’s part of our identification.

FUGATE: That’s what my question was going be. I know that something that I read said that the Army was trying to save money by not painting the planes. They left them with bare metal and that the airmen then painted the tips of the tails or painted the tail sections red. Can you explain why that was done?

LARUE: That was identification purposes. Friend or foe.

CALLOWAY: And each fighter group had a different color and it just so happened that the 332nd were the Red Tail. That’s why you had the term “red tail” group. 126:00But the other groups had….And it helped the bomber crews identify, know who was up there. And plus, I guess none of the German aircraft were painting the tails. See up there it identified things, because my gunner, all you’d see… LARUE: …You don’t see a painted tail, you start shooting.

CALLOWAY: A lot of our own planes were shot down by our own people. [LAUGHTER] So identification was a prime example. And that was part of it, so it wasn’t just some theme somebody made up, that we’d paint the tail. That was all part of the identify….Identify the….Not only knowing what outfit they was but knowing that they were friends.

LARUE: I know two or three times they were practicing bombing runs and some outfit, fighter group, we never knew who they really were, would join up with us up near the target, so called target. And they wouldn’t come straight in for this purpose. They would come in and turn the plane away and let us get a good look at the side and let us see what type of aircraft it is. Because you could identify it better from the….See if you come straight in, they’re liable to….Might start shooting. [LAUGHING] 501 Knight looks like anything else if he comes in at high speed. 127:00CALLOWAY: That was part of our training. We spent hours. You know, they’d flash, the slide, flash a picture of a plane or a ship, all of that, too. The ships and all that stuff. And just for a split second and then you were supposed to identify it. That was all part of it. Remember all that training we used to do?

LARUE: Yeah, they’d flash, and you had to tell what type of plane it was, what type of armament was on it, just like that, be ready to fire right back, immediately as soon as you see the flash of that plane. See, those German planes when they turned up, they told us not to shoot. They had so much armament on the bottom of them. That ME-110, Faulkner 190. You are wasting your bullets if you shoot at them when he turns away. That’s what they want you to do. So, until he levels off, don’t shoot at him. You got to keep it all computed in your mind.

FUGATE: Well, can you remember what the other colors were, than the Red Tails?

CALLOWAY: Somebody had checkered.

FUGATE: Black and white checkers, I guess?

WASHINGTON: The spinners too, and the props.

CALLOWAY: Now, the P-40, see that had nothing to do really with the 99th, 128:00but over in Burma, you know, they had that shark. That old P-40, you know, [INAUDIBLE] FUGATE: Right.

CALLOWAY: That’s where it got that. I don’t think that the 99th in North Africa. They didn’t….I don’t think they were painted.

WASHINGTON: Did you fly a P-40?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, I flew one.

WASHINGTON: I remember I used to stand out on the runways at Tuskegee and watch those P-40 pilots. And especially on a cold morning, when they started that thing up, those exhaust stacks would catch on flames. A guy would stand back there with a fire extinguisher.

CALLOWAY: We got twenty hours in the P-40 after graduating at Tuskegee. I mean in Tuskegee, we graduated, we went down to England Field. And I remember because the field that we flew out of there down there, was the same one that [INAUDIBLE] Mitchell had practiced with the B-25 for the short take-off for the raid on Tokyo. That was the same airfield. They had it marked off on the runway. We 129:00flew T-6 gunnery down there. See, we hadn’t flown any gunnery. We had T-6’s with a thirty caliber machine guns in them. And we practiced ground gunnery. And then we came back to Tuskegee and flew the P-40 for twenty hours and then after that we were sent to Walterboro where we flew P-40. And down there in the summer….The P-40 was a liquid cooled engine. And these were some of the old P-40’s we flew.

WASHINGTON: What was it? The twelve-cylinder engine?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, a nice (??) engine we had. But they were liquid cooled and on a hot day, you start up and before….You didn’t waste any time. You made all your checks on the run. You didn’t pull out to the end of the runway and run through all your checks. You made everything on the run and hope you’d get airborne before the thing started detonating. And on take-off a lot of times….I remember on a flight before one time, my wingman [LAUGHING] I looked up and he was falling behind. I said, so long buddy. His plane was detonating. He couldn’t make it off. He went on off the end of the runway.

LARUE: Well, you know something talking about fire extinguishers…[INAUDIBLE] …when you start them up. 130:00Guy standing out there just holding, just in case.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, but on those T-4’s, I’d see flames shooting all out of those exhaust stacks. I think each cylinder had a separate exhaust.

CALLOWAY: Oh yeah. Noisy. [LAUGHING] LARUE: But it could turn though, couldn’t it?

CALLOWAY: Yeah, the P-40 in its day was pretty good until it was replaced by.

FUGATE: What about the Mustang, was that…?

LARUE: I never got to fly the Mustang. That was the top.

FUGATE: What about….I know it was popular to paint logos or names or symbols on the aircraft at that time period. The Mitchells that you flew, were they named?

WASHINGTON: The ones overseas, I think, some of the pilots….I never saw any in the States. At Godman Field all of them just had numbers.

LARUE: Well, see, we didn’t have, the crew didn’t have its own plane. 131:00CALLOWAY: Yeah, that’s the difference.

LARUE: Every day you might be flying a different plane.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, so you couldn’t paint them. But once you got overseas and more or less flew the same airplane every day, then they….That’s where all the names and stuff… LARUE: If I get in a plane and check the bomb sight, the first thing [INAUDIBLE] call them right away and come take it out. Bring me another bomb site because it wasn’t any good.

FUGATE: How were the crews put together? When you got to whatever field, after your training was over and you got to Godman or you got to wherever, when you were on the bombers….I know on the single engine you didn’t have this problem. How were the crews put together?

CALLOWAY: Well, when we got to Godman Field, [INAUDIBLE] were already there. They just stick, you need a Bombardier, navigator, you need two gunners, that’s your crew.

WASHINGTON: I always had the same radio operator.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, after we got together, we stayed that way. But when we arrived, see, the pilots had been flying without navigators, so they just assigned me to this crew, and we introduced ourselves to each other and got along swell. 132:00I was oldest man on the crew at the time. No, I wasn’t. Captain Fielding, he was the co-pilot. We called him Pops because he was the oldest man. Bubba Jackson, he’s living in Mexico now.

LARUE: Jackson, Jackson, little, short, stubby guy?

CALLOWAY: He was a dentist in Chicago.

WASHINGTON: Yeah, I remember. He lives in Mexico.

CALLOWAY: …bought a house down there. I never could get him in Chicago, because his name wasn’t in the directory, and I was always there on the weekend and the dental office was closed. But they just put us together. I don’t think, I ever heard someone say they couldn’t work together. I don’t think I ever heard of a group. Oh, someone would fuss at somebody, but they didn’t mean that. Old, little, short Fletcher. You remember Fletcher?

LARUE: That’s who, Fletcher. I remember him.

CALLOWAY: Henry Fletcher.

LARUE: Yeah, I remember him. I [INAUDIBLE] in my entire life. Little Fletcher.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, he was a weird one. [LAUGHING] WASHINGTON: Was he the one that used to smoke the cigar?

CALLOWAY: I believe he did, little, short fellow.

WASHINGTON: I can remember, I’d be flying formation… LARUE: He was one of the upper classmen when we went to pilot training. He was one of those that gave us hell, along with old, Whitehead.

CALLOWAY: He gave me….[INAUDIBLE] as cadets.

WASHINGTON: Did he fly…?

LARUE: Yeah, that’s what I meant, as cadets, 133:00old… WASHINGTON: Did he fly, B-25’s?

LARUE: Yeah.

WASHINGTON: I remember in formation; I’d be flying me a tight formation. I’d look over there and I’d see this guy with this cigar…[LAUGHTER] CALLOWAY: Yeah. See he was already a First Lieutenant when I came home on leave. And I went in the Dairy Bar at Twenty-Third and Chestnut. Oh, he jumped up. What are you doing here in town? Got your travel? Yes sir. [LAUGHING] He thought he was back in cadet school.

WASHINGTON: There were a lot of tricks you could do, I thought. A lot of times I’d fly some place and if you wanted to stay overnight. You would go and fill out your flight plan and say that you were going to take off at eight o’clock. Well, about quarter to eight I was taxing out to the runway. You let your rpm’s drop. 134:00Say, I think on that B-25, you had to keep your rpms at least nine hundred rpms. Well, if you let it drop down below that, you’d float… LARUE: Float up, yeah.

WASHINGTON: And then when you’d get in flight position, and you go to check your mags. And you come back and say I have a drop in mags, you know. And so, wasn’t there anybody there at that time of night in the hangar.

LARUE: So, you could stay all night.

WASHINGTON: So, you could stay overnight. [LAUGHING] LARUE: Well, you know, one time, one time they let every squadron take one plane home for the weekend. And this guy named Harrison, he had some trouble somewhere and his wife was in the plane. And they tried to burn him, but he said he was doing like Colonel Davis. Because he used to take her shopping – to Detroit, wherever she wanted to go. [LAUGHING] CALLOWAY: See these flights, you had to get so much navi….Especially in the B-25’s. Their whole training was navigation, you know. They didn’t just go up and fly all over like we fighters. 135:00FUGATE: Had to keep up your proficiency.

CALLOWAY: Yeah. So, all this cross-country navigational stuff, you log it as training. It was all a part of your training, even though you said, well, I’d like to go home this weekend. Well, that was a training flight, even though it was for… FUGATE: Well, when you went on one of those….You’re mentioning the trip earlier to go home to visit your mother. Did you take a full crew with you in a B-25?

LARUE: Oh yes. Take the whole crew, same crew.

FUGATE: Were those opportunities available to you in the fighter aircraft as well?

CALLOWAY: Not too much, no. At Godman Field I took the P-47….The P-40 never got to go anywhere. It was all local gunnery. But at Godman Field one time I flew, two of us flew a P-40 down to, I mean a P-47 aircraft, down to Tuskegee. A guy named Dickerson and I, flew down. And we got ready to leave, we stayed overnight there and the next day we got ready to leave, my mags wouldn’t check out. I got out there on the runway and the thing backfired and missing. I said, Dickerson I got to go back in and work on it. So 136:00long. Because he took off and came on back. But that was one flight and then another time I went to Detroit. Three of us flew up to Detroit. One of the guys, the flight commander, he was from Detroit. And another guy, Greer, was from Detroit. And I, somehow or another I got on it too. So, we took three [INAUDIBLE] and went up there. But we didn’t get too much long range navigational, because that wasn’t our mission, so to speak.

LARUE: [INAUDIBLE] Fort – or Fort Dix.

CALLOWAY: Oh, in later years, he did a whole lot of….In the jets now, it was everything.

LARUE: We called in and said the weather was marginal and we weren’t coming back. We wanted to get up to New York and look around. So, Captain Shrake, he flew up and put M.P.’s on the plane. We went back out to get ready to come back. They wouldn’t let us near the plane. He wanted to see why we stayed up there. So we came back. He came out there, he brought his special mechanics and crew, said there wasn’t nothing wrong with the plane. We figured we were in trouble. He said, I tell you what I’m going to do. You take our plane back 137:00and we’re going to stay here and get it fixed. But in the meantime,….No, first he ordered us back. And we got right near the end of the runway, said it was running rough. Turned cherry red. Crash crew was out. Now he’s in hot water. We told him the engine’s not right; the weather was marginal and he done ordered us to come back. So, we got it back on the ground. And he said, I tell you what, you all take our plane and go on back. This Major said, no, no, said, these men brought the plane up here, let them bring it back. [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] Something was wrong with it. We were lucky on that one. I said, Shrake, he was, he tricked me one time. I was on leave, but I didn’t come back to Godman, I came back to somewhere else. And I didn’t have no room or nothing and they had me on the bulletin board to do something. And they court martialed me. I didn’t know….You know, old Captain Durham, 138:00he wasn’t nothing but a….And I mean, I didn’t even know where the headquarters was or nothing. It was at night when I got back. [LAUGHING] They had me scheduled for something. That’s the way he’d get you. They would put it on you.

WASHINGTON: Sometime when I look back, you know, I can’t remember how I really managed, because one time, I believe I rode the train every day for two weeks. When I was out in Denver. They sent me up to North Dakota. And then when I got up to North Dakota, they gave me orders to report back to Denver. And then when I got back Denver, I got other orders to report back to North Dakota. It had to do with being assigned and attached to an outfit. I was in the Air Force, but I was attached to some quartermaster outfit or something. I don’t know. 139:00I remember, I can’t remember having much money. All I had was these special orders. [LAUGHTER] And how I got from here to there and places like being in Sinkhole and different places, I don’t know how I managed. And on some of those trains, you know, you could get hungry on the train.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, and you couldn’t go to the diner.

WASHINGTON: Because you couldn’t….As a Black, you couldn’t go into the dining room. And you would have to stop a Pullman porter or something and ask them to bring you a sandwich or something. I’ve actually gotten hungry on some of those trains.

CALLOWAY: That’s like we did, like there was one in Texas. We couldn’t get nothing to eat on the train. There was sixty of us. So, they stopped….We were going to be there for about a half an hour or so someplace, so we went over to this little restaurant, and they told us to come around the back to get it. So, we ordered sixty dinners and had to go in back to get them.

WASHINGTON: I’ll say one thing about the Pullman porters and things, they did the best they could to see that, 140:00you know, the black soldiers were taken care of. Because they knew they didn’t have anything to eat. They would bring them sandwiches and coffee and stuff like that. But I will say this though, in my experience, the Red Cross on a troop train or something….Whenever it stopped at a station, the Red Cross was always out there, some civilian organization would give you apples, candy or oranges or something.

FUGATE: Those ladies’ aide societies were all over the place.

WASHINGTON: The grey ladies.

CALLOWAY: I’ll tell you a little comical incident. First time I went to town in Panama City, Florida. I don’t know nothing about the town. See first thing they told us we could not ride public transportation to town. Anytime we wanted to go to town, just call the motor pool. [INAUDIBLE] They would take care of you. And this wasn’t sixty, it was about fifty, all of us had passes, individuals. So, they sent this old bus out there with a trailer, 141:00had seats on the side and you sit down. This old M.P. come out there and said, who’s in charge of this wreck? Well, you know, they called us wrecks all the time anyway, so. Well, everybody said, well I need to be in charge, I got my own pass. Get out here. Get on down the steps. So, we all went out there. He said, who said that? That’s what he did first. And when everybody said, I said it. He said, I want you to come on out here. We said, no way is he going out there by himself, so we all went out there. And picked a boy named Creech, Creech you’re in charge. So we wouldn’t all be flapping. And he lines up. This guy runs in there and gets this machine gun. What are you all doing out here? Creech says, sir, I don’t know how many bullets you got. What are you going to do when the last one is gone? Now he’s looking cherry. He’s shaking and he’s trembling. [LAUGHING] He runs back. The Post Commander comes out, Provost Marshall comes out. We’re still standing in a line, not doing a thing, parade rest. And so, he ordered us back to the Base, took all our passes. And that’s when they sent us home 142:00for thirty days. But the first time I went into town on my own, I got in a cab. I don’t know where to go. I said, just take me where the guys hang out. He said, what you mean. You want to go to Shinetown or Wood Flat? I said, well take me to Shine. [LAUGHING] I didn’t know one place from another. So, I got there, and you couldn’t get a decent drink. So, I said okay. I called me a cab, told him to take me downtown to a nice liquor store. And I was clean. I had the money. I told him to wait for me. Now, I went in the side door, didn’t go in the front door even. So, I walked in, the guy looked up said, what do you want? Very nasty. I said, sir, I’d like to have a bottle of that scotch. Handed it to me, I paid for it, got in the cab, went back. Guys said, where did you get that? No, no, no. You give me the money, I’ll go. After a couple times in there, oh my buddy’s in there. In the door, come out the door. I didn’t want [INAUDIBLE]. You just had to learn how to get around them.

FUGATE: That’s what surprising to me and a lot of people, I think, of my generation, 143:00is that we think of those segregist [segregationist] attitudes as being part of the past, but unfortunately that past is not all that far in the distance.

CALLOWAY: Let me tell you, that’s not just in the South. I went in a bus station, restaurant across from a bus station in Cincinnati. I ordered a drink. Guy [INAUDIBLE] I went in Pittsburgh asked for a drink, the guy said you’ve had enough already. I was drunk..! I hadn’t had a drink all day!

FUGATE: I was a kid, just a small kid in Chicago during the sixties and I can remember horrible rioting and things of that nature. But you just don’t….You think about that as ancient history.

CALLOWAY: No, it’s not ancient. Uh uh.

FUGATE: It’s just mind boggling to me. The first time I went to….I went to the Smithsonian Institution, and they had an exhibit on, I don’t know, minorities in the military or something. They were dealing with the Japanese American soldiers and part of this exhibit also 144:00dealt with other minorities. The first time I saw these doors they had set up with Whites and Blacks above them. You look at this and you think, or at least I thought, this is ridiculous. What do you do? And I was sort of standing there myself, sort of torn of which door do I walk through? I can’t imagine what it would have been like to have lived through that time period.

LARUE: Well, I can say one good thing about….See we trained usually with the white group too. But we were never together, but we were together through the same class more or less. But the cadets….We got along good with the cadets. [SOME CONVERSATION ASIDE ABOUT A RESTROOM] The individuals we got along swell with. It was the military institution that kept us apart.

CALLOWAY: Yeah, it was the individual basis, everybody got along.

LARUE: I’ve had guys come over from Fort Knox, say can we fly with you? I said, yeah, we can put you on the books as an observer.

FUGATE: I remember reading something at one point about 145:00blacks who were being shipped from, I don’t know, from Chicago or someplace, to go into basic training at Fort Knox. And them being required to pull down the shades on the train car.

CALLOWAY: I read about that somewhere, too. Yeah, that happened in some outfits. [BUZZER GOES OFF] Yeah, I remember that, when you pass through the town.

FUGATE: Yeah, they were afraid snipers, or something would… LARUE: Well, you know when I used to come home from school on the train – when I leave Cincinnati, if I got on the L&N I had to get in the segregated car. But I would always change my ticket to B&O.

CALLOWAY: So, you wouldn’t, yeah.

LARUE: Yeah. I might have to wait half an hour, but I’d rather do that. Look, I’m going to have to get.

CALLOWAY: I’m going to have to go, too.

LARUE: I’ve got to go to Shelbyville. I’ve got to go a couple places. But if anytime we can help you with anything…. [TAPE GOES OFF AND ON] LARUE: …your wife and your mother’s picture down. And then they would make you talk about the girl’s picture on your wall. So, I would take this girl in Pittsburgh named Shirley Washington 146:00and she had a boyfriend in Service named Jimmy something. So, they came in and one guy said, whose picture is that you got up there. And one guy said, wait until I tell Jimmy. This guy….I thought it was the boyfriend Jimmy he was going to tell. But it was another guy that just happened to know her. And I said, oh, I know I’m in it now. An upper classman and I’ve got a picture of his girlfriend on my wall. [LAUGHING] But it wasn’t the right guy, Jimmy Jordan. It wasn’t the same Jimmy. Roy Chapell. He went to Kentucky State, he was down there with us.

CALLOWAY: What’s his name?

LARUE: Roy Chapell. And he said, wait until I show that picture to Jimmy. And he’s an upper classman, that near scared me to death. [LAUGHING] END OF INTERVIEW