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IN MEMORY OF MY BROTHER CREW CHIEF Louis Smith  •  1922 – 1998 332nd FIGHTER GROUP  •  ITALY, 1944–1945

Louis  |  What a Crew Chief Did  |  The Tuskegee Airmen  |  Coming Home  |  Louis Reviews the Movie  |  Books and Places

My name is Willie Smith. I am 61 years old and I carried the mail in St. Louis for thirty-three years before I retired. I am putting this page up for my big brother, Louis Smith, who passed in April of last year. He was sixteen years older than me, so for most of my life he was half brother and half father, and all the way hero. When people hear "Tuskegee Airmen" they think of the pilots, and they should. But a pilot doesn't fly without a lot of men on the ground, and Louis was one of them. He was a crew chief. He kept P-47s and then P-51s flying for the 332nd Fighter Group in Italy, the outfit with the red tails. This page is for him, and for all the men who fixed the planes.  LOUIS Louis was born in St. Louis in 1922, the oldest of six. Our daddy worked for a coal and ice company and our mother took in laundry, and we grew up in a little brick flat on the north side with a coal stove in the kitchen. Louis was the boy on the block who could fix anything. By the time he was fourteen he had rebuilt a Model T engine in a neighbor's garage with parts he got from the junkyard, and the neighbor drove that car until 1950. He went into the Army in 1942. He wanted to fly, but there were very few places for a colored man in the Army Air Forces, and none for a colored man without college. They tested him and found out what everybody on our block already knew, that he was a natural mechanic, and they sent him to aircraft mechanic school and then down to Tuskegee, Alabama, where the colored pilots were being trained. From there he went overseas with the 332nd. I was six years old when he left for Italy. I remember my mother putting his letters in a cigar box on top of the icebox, and I remember that every one of them had words cut out of it by the censor, so it looked like lace when you held it up to the window. I still have that box. He came home at the end of 1945. In 1947 he married Irene, a girl from church, and they were married fifty-one years. They had three sons, Arthur and then the twins, Ted and Franklin. For thirty-one years Louis worked on an automobile assembly line here in St. Louis, and for most of those years he was a deacon at Greater Hope Baptist Church, where he also fixed the furnace, the organ bellows, the church van and the pastor's lawn mower, not necessarily in that order. He passed in his sleep, at home, in April 1998. His heart had been failing for a couple of years and the doctors had told us to be ready. He was 75. We buried him at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery with a flag on the casket and a bugler, and his grandson Michael, who is in the Air Force now, folded the flag along with the honor guard. Louis would have pretended that didn't get to him. It got to him.  WHAT A CREW CHIEF DID Every fighter plane in the group had its own crew chief. The plane belonged to the pilot when it was in the air and to the crew chief the rest of the time, and Louis said any pilot who forgot that only forgot it once. He had an assistant crew chief, Marion Oster, a quiet boy from Kansas City, and they worked with the armorers who loaded the guns and the radio men and the sheet-metal men, but the airplane was Louis's responsibility, every bolt of it. This is how Louis told me a mission day went, many times, usually at the kitchen table: BEFORE DAYLIGHT Up in the dark, out to the plane with a flashlight. Walk all the way around it. Check the tires, the oil, the coolant, the fuel. Pull the propeller through by hand to clear the engine, then climb in and start her up and listen. Louis said you could hear a bad spark plug before any gauge told you. THE PILOT The pilot came out after the briefing. Louis helped him up on the wing and into the cockpit and helped him strap in, and told him the airplane was ready. He never said good luck. He said it was bad luck to say it. THE WAIT Then the planes took off, and the ground crews waited. An escort mission could be five or six hours. They worked on other planes, played cards, wrote letters, slept on the ground under the wings. But mostly, Louis said, they waited, and toward the end of the afternoon every man on that field was standing up looking north. COUNTING When the planes came back over the field, everybody counted. Every crew chief was looking for one airplane. Louis said the worst feeling in the world was when the count came up short and you didn't know yet whose it was. THE NIGHT If his plane came home with holes in it, they patched the holes. If the engine was tired, they worked on the engine, out in the open, in the rain if it was raining, by flashlight if they had to, until it was ready to go again in the morning. Then they slept a little and started over. His first pilot was Lieutenant Paul Plemons, from Ohio, who flew a P-47 and then a P-51 with Louis's name stenciled under the cockpit next to his own. In the fall of 1944 Lieutenant Plemons didn't come back. For two weeks they didn't know anything. Then word came that he had bailed out over Austria and been taken prisoner. He spent the rest of the war in a German prison camp and came home in 1945, and he and Louis wrote each other Christmas cards for fifty years. His last one came the December after Louis passed, addressed to Irene. She keeps it on the mantel. His second pilot was Lieutenant Ernest Harvey, a schoolteacher's son from Detroit, and Louis kept him flying until the war was over.  THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN Some facts, for the young people who write to me, and for anybody who doesn't know the story: Before 1941, the Army would not train Black pilots at all. In 1941, under a lot of pressure, it began a program at Tuskegee, Alabama, near Tuskegee Institute, to train them. The first class of pilots got their wings in March 1942. Close to a thousand pilots trained there during the war. Many thousands more men and women, like Louis, were the mechanics, armorers, radio men, clerks, cooks, nurses and everybody else it takes to keep an air force running. All of them are Tuskegee Airmen. One of the first graduates was Benjamin O. Davis Jr., a West Point man whose father was the Army's first Black general. He commanded the 99th Fighter Squadron and then the 332nd Fighter Group. Louis said the men would have followed him anywhere, and some of them did. The 99th went overseas first, to North Africa in 1943. The 332nd, with the 100th, 301st and 302nd Fighter Squadrons, went to Italy at the beginning of 1944. That summer the 99th joined them, and the 332nd had four squadrons. The group flew P-47 Thunderbolts for a while and then P-51 Mustangs, and they painted the tails of their planes bright red. That's where "Red Tails" comes from. From an airfield at Ramitelli, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, they escorted the heavy bombers of the Fifteenth Air Force, the B-17s and B-24s, on long missions to targets in Germany, Austria, Romania and other places. In March 1945 they flew escort all the way to Berlin. They got a name for staying with the bombers instead of going off after German fighters to run up their own scores. The bomber crews, most of whom had never met a Black officer in their lives, were glad to see those red tails out the window. The field at Ramitelli was a farm field with a runway of steel matting laid over it, and tents, and mud whenever it rained. Louis said he spent the whole winter of 1944 wet. He said it was worth it. That's all he said about that winter.  COMING HOME This is the part that's hard to explain to young people. Louis spent two years keeping American airplanes in the air over Europe. When he came home, he came home to the same country he left. The Army he served in was segregated the whole time he was in it, from the day he was sworn in to the troopship that brought him home. In St. Louis there were lunch counters downtown that wouldn't serve him, movie theaters that sat him in the balcony, and neighborhoods where the deeds said a colored family could not buy a house. One of the families that fought that, the Shelleys, lived right here in St. Louis, and in 1948 the Supreme Court ruled in their case that those deeds couldn't be enforced. That same year President Truman ordered the armed forces desegregated. Louis said 1948 was the first year he thought the country might be listening. He was never bitter that I saw. He was proud. He said they had proved something, and everybody who watched them do it knew it, even the ones who wouldn't say so. When his grandson Michael joined the Air Force in 1994, nobody asked Michael whether a Black man could fix an airplane. Louis said that was the point of the whole thing.  LOUIS REVIEWS THE MOVIE In August 1995 HBO showed a movie called The Tuskegee Airmen, with Laurence Fishburne. We don't have cable, but my nephew Arthur does, and he taped it, and the whole family came over to Louis and Irene's to watch it on a Sunday after church. There must have been twenty of us in that living room. Louis watched the whole thing without saying a word, which was not like him. When it was over everybody looked at him. Here is his review, as near as I can remember it: The good: He was glad it got made. He was glad his grandchildren saw it. He said the airplanes looked right, and the red tails were the right red, and the young man playing the lead carried himself like an officer, which he said was the hardest thing to get right. The bad: There wasn't enough mud. And the mechanics were furniture. "All those men on the ground for every one in the air," he said, "and they show us twice, standing by a wing." He said if he'd been in charge of that picture, there would have been a whole scene of a crew chief changing an engine in the rain at two in the morning, and everybody would have walked out of the theater, and it would have been the truest part. His rating: He said it was a good movie and it wasn't what it was like, and both of those things were all right. Then he went out to the garage to look at Franklin's carburetor, and that was the end of the review. If you are the son or daughter or grandchild of a Tuskegee Airman, of any kind, I would be very glad to hear from you. And if your daddy or granddaddy was a crew chief, an armorer, a mechanic or a radio man, please write. I'd like to put their names here next to Louis's, so this page is for all of them. Books and places I recommend >>

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Last updated September 12, 1999