Nazi Pilots Laughed At The “Red Tails” — Until Tuskegee Aces Shot Down 112-ZZ

It still sits there.

Hangar B at the Smithsonian’s Udvarhazi Center, Chantelli, Virginia.

A Messormid ME262 Ver Numa50491.

Tactical marking yellow 7.

The fastest combat aircraft on Earth in the spring of 1945.

Its last pilot was Oberfeld Vebble Hines \Arnold.

42 kills on the Eastern Front.

an ace who believed in the racial science he’d been taught since he was a boy in a Hitler youth uniform.

On March 24th, 1945, Arnold flew that jet into the sky over Berlin, expecting to slaughter American bombers.

He came back, but three of his squadron mates did [music] not.

And the men who killed them had red tails, brown skin, and a doctrine Arnold’s own air force could no longer [music] match.

The aircraft in Chantelli is a trophy, though the placard doesn’t use that word.

The placer talks about engineering.

It talks about the Junker’s Yumo O4B turbo jets, [music] the 540 mph top speed, the four 30 mm MK 108 cannons in the nose, the R4M rockets that could gut a B7 from 1,000 yd out.

It talks [music] about how advanced the airplane was.

What the placard does not say is who beat [music] it.

In March of 1945, the Luftwaffa’s elite jetwing, Yagushvatter 7, stationed at Brandenburgg Bree, 30 mi west of the Reichdog, believed it was the last firewall left around [music] the Third Reich.

JG7 flew the Me262.

The pilots who flew it were handpicked, most of them veterans of the Eastern Front.

They had been briefed on Allied fighter groups.

They had color plates.

They had range estimates.

They had above everything a doctrine inherited from their political leadership and their own war college tradition.

That the American long-range escort fighter was a nuisance, [music] not a lethal threat, and that the pilots flying it came from a nation that would never trust its most critical weapons to men it considered subhuman.

The 332nd Fighter Group was stationed at Ramatelli Airfield on Italy’s Adriatic coast.

It flew P-51D Mustangs [music] with tails painted crimson.

Every pilot in the group was African-Amean.

Every one of them had a college degree or better because the Army Air Forces required that of black pilots, even as it let white pilots enter [music] flight training straight out of high school.

The 332 commander, Colonel [music] Benjamin O.

Davis Jr.

West Point class of 1936 had spent 4 years at the academy without a single cadet speaking to him socially.

He had learned patience the way other men learned to fly.

By March 1945, the group had flown more than 1,500 [music] combat missions.

Its escort loss rate was roughly half the 15th Air Force average.

Bomber crews at airfields across southern Italy [music] had started requesting the Red Tail specifically, writing their names on mission [music] boards, calling them Red Tail Angels over the intercom when they spotted the Crimson Tails sliding into formation at 27,000 ft.

None of that information had reached the briefing room at Brandenburgg Bree.

It wasn’t that the Luftvafa couldn’t get it.

It was that the Luftvafa couldn’t file it.

[music] The men who compiled threat assessments for JG7 were looking for German-speaking enemies and Anglo-Saxon [music] enemies.

They had no category called African-Amean fighter pilot flying at 30,000 ft over Germany.

And because they had no category, they had no warning.

That absence, not the Yumo engine, not the MK 108 cannon, not the R4M rocket, was what killed three of Hines Arnold’s squadron mates on the morning of March 24th.

The document that mattered most that morning was not a flight plan.

It was a 1925 United States Army War College study [music] titled The Employment of Negro Manpower in War.

and German military intelligence [music] had a copy by 1939.

The study had been written by white American [music] officers in Carile Barracks, Pennsylvania for white American commanders.

It concluded in language that was treated as science that the African-American soldier was a rank [music] coward in the dark.

That his fear of the unknown and unseen made him unsuited to independent action and that he could not be trusted with mechanized or technical weapons.

The study became doctrine.

It shaped how the US Army organized its black units through the First World War, through the interwar years, and [music] into the opening months of the Second.

And because American military documents moved through the Ataché Circuit in Berlin the way gossip moves through a small town, the AB there filed it, translated the key passages, and passed them up to the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment.

Joseph Gerbles had his confirmation.

Herman Guring had his.

Adolf Hitler, whose mine conf had already declared the presence of Africans in Europe a deliberate bastardization of the white race, had his.

and the racial theory that ran through Nazi Germany like a nerve, that there [music] were master races and subject races, and that aircraft were master race machines, received an American stamp of approval [music] it would keep until 1945.

By early 1944, the Luftvafa had a pet name for the men of the 332nd, Shvatza Vogelment, to the black bird man.

[laughter] The name was used in daily briefings at fighter bases from Britany to East Prussia.

It was the kind of name that is meant to be laughed at.

[laughter] It was laughed at.

Intelligence officers at Yagdash 2 and [music] Yagdash 26 showed photographs of captured American airmen to pilots fresh out of flight school.

[music] They pointed.

They explained that the Americans, desperate for bodies, had begun sending black men up in mustangs and that the [music] black men would not press an attack, would not hold formation under stress, would flee at the sound of a cannon shell striking metal.

Guring agreed with them, more or less.

His view of air combat had calcified [music] around the First World War, around single squadron chivalry over trenches, around the idea that a nation’s fighter arm was an extension of that nation’s character.

He did not believe in long-range escort.

He did not believe in it because he could not build it.

and he could not build it because the Reich had never fully committed to 4ine bombers, never mass-produced a drop tank program, never solved the problem of navigating a single seat fighter a thousand miles from its home base.

When American fighters first appeared over Hanover in late 1943, Guring, according to his own postwar interrogation, refused to believe the reports.

When they appeared over Berlin in March 1944, he stopped refusing and started drinking.

The doctrine had an operational cost that was not visible in the briefing slides.

Because the Luftvafa believed the 332nd Fighter Group was second rate, the Luftvafa did not plan around it.

Pilots at Brandenburgg Bree on the morning of March 24th [music] have been told to expect the usual escort.

P38 Lightnings, P47 Thunderbolts, some P-51s, all of them flown by pilots who would break formation and chase decoys [music] the moment decoys were offered.

The standard JG7 attack plan against American bomber boxes [music] in the first quarter of 1945 depended entirely on this assumption.

It was called the slashing attack.

A flight of ME262s would die from contrail altitude, punch through the escort screen at 540 [music] mph, fire a burst of R4M rockets into the bombers, and climb away before the Mustangs could react.

The jet speed made the tactic nearly invulnerable as long as the escort behaved the way German intelligence predicted.

Colonel Benjamin O.

Davis Jr.

, sitting in the breathing hut at Rammitelli 600 m south had issued an order months earlier that German intelligence did not know existed.

The order was short.

Don’t come back [music] if you lose a bomber.

Davis’s pilots were forbidden on penalty [music] of grounding from chasing enemy fighters away from the bomber stream for any [music] reason.

Not for a kill.

Not for a confirmed AC’s fifth victory.

not for personal glory.

The 332nd Fighter Group would produce zero aces in the [music] entire war because of this order.

It would also produce the lowest bomber loss rate of any escort group in the 15th Air Force.

The slashing attack depended on the escorts leaving.

The Red Tales did not leave.

Brandenburgg bree at 10:47 on the morning of March 24th, 1945.

cold enough for the ground crews breath to fog the canopy glass.

16 ME262s of the 11th stafle sat under camouflage netting at the edge of a taxiway ribbed with bomb craters that had been patched the night before.

Oberfeld Vable Hines Arnold climbed into Yellow 7, set his flight log on his knee, wrote the date in the margin, and waited for the Yumo O4s to spool up.

42 kills, almost all of them Yakovvs and Lavokkins over the mud of Bellow Russia.

Pilots who flew wooden airplanes and died in them.

Arnold had learned the specific art of killing men who were already losing.

He had not yet learned the other art.

The order came at 1100.

A stream of American [music] heavy bombers was approaching Berlin from the south.

Altitude 25,000 ft.

Estimated strength 300 aircraft.

The target was the Daimler Benz tank engine works in the Marion fell the district of southern Berlin.

The escort was reported as routine.

Arnold’s flight taxied onto the cratered runway, ran up the engines, and lifted into a white [music] March sky.

600 m south at Rammitelli.

The 332nd fighter group had launched at 0730.

43 P-51D [music] Mustangs dropped tanks bulging, climbing east over the Adriatic on a mission brief that had described the March 24th strike as the longest escort the 15th Air Force would ever fly.

1600 m round trip Berlin and back.

the kind of distance the Luftv Fafa high command had declared impossible [music] as recently as 1943.

The bombers they were protecting belonged to the fifth bombardment wing, B17 flying fortresses from the 463rd and 483rd bombardment groups.

10 men per airplane, 300 [music] aircraft, 3,000 lives stacked in the cold air above Vittenberg.

When Hines Arnold squadron arrived, the first contact happened at 12:07.

A pair of contrails appeared above and behind the bomber stream, descending fast.

First Lieutenant Richard S.

Harter of the 99th Fighter Squadron saw them first and called them.

The contrails resolved into ME262s.

Flight Officer Thirsten L.

Gaines Jr.

watched the second jet glide down onto a B7 and fire a single burst.

His combat report would record what came next in clean [music] procedural language.

A puff of smoke from the jet’s cannons and a flying fortress doing an abrupt high wing over to the right beginning to spin.

Arnold got that B7.

It was his 49th victory and his last.

Then the physics of the fight changed.

Rosco C.

Brown Jr.

, first lieutenant, 100th Fighter Squadron, flying a P-51D named Bunny after his daughter, had been watching the jet’s approach for 40 seconds.

He had noticed the thing that every Mustang pilot in the Red [music] Tales had been briefed to watch for the moment the jet bled off its speed to line up a killing shot.

The Me262 could not dogfight at low speed.

The Jumo O4 engines flamed out if the throttle moved too fast, and the airplane’s turn radius at 300 mph was closer to a medium bombers than a fighters.

The briefings at Ramatelli had been specific.

Don’t chase.

Wait for the slow moment.

The slow moment always comes.

Brown waited for it.

He had fuel for another 40 minutes over Berlin.

A tight stack of bombers below him that the group had been assigned to Shepherd home.

And a standing order from Colonel Davis that meant the jet at his 12:00 low was not a prize, but an obstacle between Bunny and the fortresses he was responsible for.

He did not hear the voices [music] of the bomber crews on the intercom.

He did not need to.

He had flown this mission profile 26 times already in 1945.

[music] When Arnold’s wingman, a pilot whose name has not survived in the combat records, pulled up to re-engaged the bombers, the jet’s air speed dropped [music] through 320 mph.

That was the number the briefings [music] at Ramatelli had circled in red grease pencil.

320 was the slow moment.

Below that speed, the Me262’s turn radius opened up to almost 1,00 m, and the Jumo engines could not spool back up fast enough to run away from a Mustang in a diving pursuit curve.

Brown rolled Bunny onto her back, pulled through, and came out behind and below the jet at 450 mph.

He opened fire at 600 ft.

The Mustang’s 650 caliber [music] Browning machine guns fired a combined 120 rounds per second.

The armor-piercing incendiary [music] rounds entered the ME262 through the port engine and walked forward along the fuselage.

The left Jumo turbine came apart in a cloud of white hot compressor blades.

The wing route followed.

The ME262 disintegrated from the tail forward.

Brown saw the canopy come off.

He did not see a parachute.

Charles V.

Brantley, First Lieutenant, 100th Fighter Squadron, got the second jet 90 seconds later.

Again by waiting for the slow moment.

Again by firing from [music] dead a stern.

Earl R.

Lane, first lieutenant, 100th fighter squadron got the third at 1214.

Three ME262s in 7 minutes.

Three of the fastest combat aircraft on Earth, destroyed by propeller-driven fighters flown by men whose existence German intelligence had categorized as propaganda.

Hines Arnold turned yellow 7 for Brandenburgg Bree with his claim confirmed and his squadron scattered.

He would land.

He would write the date in his flight log.

He would be dead himself within 6 weeks.

killed over [music] Ruland on April 17th in the same airplane by another Mustang flown by another pilot whose name the Luftvafa had not bothered to file.

The bombers over Berlin kept their formation.

The Daimler Ben’s works at Marianfelda was hit at 1231.

Out of 300 B7s, all 300 came [music] home far enough to reach friendly territory.

The 332nd Fighter Group’s escort loss figure for the mission was zero.

To grasp why three American pilots could wait calmly for a Mi262 to reach its vulnerable speed while German intelligence assumed they would be panicking, you have to look at who those three pilots were before they ever saw a Mustang.

Rosco Brown had a bachelor’s degree from Springfield College.

Before Tuskegee, he had been a graduate student.

Charles Brantley had two years of university engineering courses under his belt when he enlisted.

Earl Lane had attended West Virginia State College.

Not one of the three had entered flight training [music] directly from high school.

Not one of them could have.

The Army Air Force’s requirements for black pilot candidates, imposed in 1941 and never relaxed, specified 2 years of college as a minimum prerequisite.

White [music] pilot candidates had no such requirement.

A white 18-year-old with a driver’s license and a high school diploma could walk into a recruiting office in 1943 [music] and be in a training cockpit within 90 days.

The result was a human ratio problem that Luftvafa intelligence never noticed and never calculated because noticing [music] it would have required examining a premise they had agreed never to examine.

Consider the math in one direction.

In the 4 months before the Normandy invasion, General Adolf Galland, inspector of fighters for the Luftvafa, reported the [music] loss of more than 1,000 trained German fighter pilots.

The replacements [music] arriving at operational units in the spring of 1944 had an average of 112 flight hours on advanced types.

By the winter of 1944 to 45, that number had dropped below 90.

By March of 1945, when Hines Arnold strapped into Yellow 7, the average [music] Luftvafa replacement pilot reaching a frontline fighter squadron had roughly 130 total flight hours, of which perhaps 40 were on a single engine fighter and perhaps 10 were on the specific type he would die in.

Now consider the math in the other direction.

The average pilot of the 332nd [music] fighter group reached Ramatelli with more than 400 hours of total flight time, more than 200 of them on the P-51 specifically and a college transcript in [music] his personnel file.

Galland interrogated in the summer of 1945 at the USSBS detention facility in Latimer, England, said it cleanly.

Gravity of our failure.

The standard of your fighter pilot training in the last year of the [music] war was astonishingly high.

My own pilots were children.

The ratio that mattered was not Mustangs per Messers.

It was something else.

For every German fighter pilots scrambling from Brandenburgg Bree in March 1945, the United States Army Air Forces was graduating on average between 11 [music] and 14 newly qualified single engine fighter pilots per week through its advanced training pipeline at Lukefield, Williamsfield, Napierfield, and Craigfield.

11 to 14 per week per one enemy [music] pilot.

And every one of those graduates had logged more hours in a training cockpit than Hines [music] Arnold’s average wingman had logged in his entire flying career.

The Tuskegee pipeline, precisely because it was segregated and held to a higher educational bar, produced something even more extreme [music] at the top end.

By 1944, Tuskegee Army Airfield in Mon County, Alabama, was graduating pilots who had completed more ground school hours than the instructors at some German fighter schools.

They had been taught celestial navigation.

They had been taught engine thermodynamics.

They had been taught the Meredith effect, the principle by which the P-51’s belly radiator converted engine heat [music] into forward thrust.

The aerodynamic trick that let the Mustang reach 437 mph on a single Merlin engine without [music] the drag penalty a conventional cooling system would have imposed.

Most Luftvafa fighter pilots in 1945 had never heard the words Meredith effect in their lives.

Most Tuskegee graduates could explain it from memory on an oral exam.

This is the piece of the story that does not fit on a movie poster and does not show up in the dialogue of the Hollywood films.

The Red Tales were not a scrappy underdog unit that succeeded through heart.

They were the most academically qualified fighter group in the entire [music] United States Army Air Forces.

Flying the best piston engine fighter in the world commanded by a West Point [music] graduate, operating under a tactical doctrine designed specifically to neutralize [music] the exact German attack profile they encountered on March 24th.

Their success was not improbable.

It was engineered.

The improbability lived somewhere else.

It lived in the distance between the men the pipeline produced and the men the doctrine of the Third Reich said could exist.

Nazi intelligence had been studying the wrong question for 4 years.

The Vermach had filed reports on American tank production, aircraft production, [music] fuel reserves, shipping tonnage.

It had not filed a single useful report on who the Army Air Forces were actually putting into cockpits because that question did not fit into the racial categories that Gerbles had drawn on the map of the human species.

On March 24th, 1945, over Vittenberg at 12:07 in the afternoon, a pilot named Hines Arnold, whose frame of reference had been built on a 1925 War College study and a Hitler Youth Handbook, met a pilot named Rosco Brown, whose frame of reference had been built on a Springfield College physics degree [music] and a doctrine written by Benjamin O.

Davis, Jr.

One of those frames of reference was going to break.

It wasn’t Browns.

Wright Marshall Herman Guring sat in a bare interrogation room at Bad Mondorf Luxembourg [music] in August 1945.

His medals were gone.

His morphine was being rationed down.

Across the table was a United States Army Air Force’s lieutenant [music] general named Carl Spatz, who had commanded the eighth and 15th Air Forces during the strategic bombing campaign.

Spat had one question he wanted answered first before the lawyers arrived with the Nuremberg charges and the room filled with stenographers.

When did you know? Spat said that the Luftvafa was losing control of the air.

Guring did not hesitate.

He had been thinking about the answer for 6 months.

When the American long range fighters were able to escort the bombers as [music] far as handover and it was not long until they got to Berlin, we then knew we must develop the jet planes.

It is a famous quote.

It appears in almost every standard history of the European air war.

But there is a second part that is rarely cited.

Spatz followed up.

He asked Guring whether the Reich’s high command had estimated in 1943 or 1944 the possibility that American escort doctrine would hold formation under jet attack instead of breaking to pursuit.

Guring gave a different kind of answer.

He said the possibility [music] had not been estimated.

He said it had not been estimated because no one in his own intelligence staff believed American pilots, certainly not American pilots [music] from groups the Luftvafa had been tracking for ideological reasons, possessed the discipline to ignore a fleeing target.

Spatz asked which groups specifically.

Guring said he could not remember all the names, but there was one group the daily briefings at Airfleet Reich had mentioned by its tail marking.

D Roach Fansa, the Red Tales, the group the daily briefings had mocked until the briefing [music] stopped mentioning them at all in March of 1945 because the pilots had begun asking whether it was true what they were hearing on the radio that the redtailed American fighters could not be drawn away from their bombers by any decoy the Luftvafa could throw into the sky.

Guring in a room in Luxembourg to an American general who would never have been granted a conversation with him in 1938 confirmed that the group the Third Reich had categorized as a propaganda stunt in 1943 [music] had become by 1945 the group his own pilots had been ordered to avoid.

The order, if you see a red tail, don’t go in, would be remembered by captured Luftwaffa pilots in the debriefing transcripts collected at Camp Richie, Maryland in the summer of 1945.

Understood, sir.

James H.

Harvey III, a Tuskegee pilot who reviewed those transcripts years later, said reading them was the first time he understood what his squadron had actually been doing at 27,000 ft.

He had thought they were escorting bombers.

They were, but they were also conducting a 4-year experiment in racial physics whose results had been tabulated by the enemy in real time and whose conclusions the enemy had accepted operationally, long before accepting them ideologically.

The 332nd Fighter Group destroyed 112 enemy aircraft in aerial combat between June 1943 and [music] April 1945.

Three of them were ME262 jets shot down over Berlin on the same afternoon.

It destroyed 150 more on the ground, shattered 950 rail cars, sank 40 supply vessels, and crippled a captured Italian destroyer, the TA22, formerly the Jeppe Missouri, in the Adriatic on June 25th, 1944.

the only warship ever sunk by American fighter aircraft alone.

It did all of this while producing zero [music] aces.

[bell] That statistic is the one the Luftwaffa could not understand.

In every German fighter unit, every pilot was hunting a personal kill [music] count.

In the Red Tales, no pilot was.

And the difference between those two cultures was visible.

at 12:07 on March 24th, 1945 in a 3-se secondond window when Rosco Brown rolled Bunny onto her back and chose not to chase Hines Arnold for glory, but to wait for [music] Arnold’s wingman to slow down for a kill that would never happen.

That choice was the war.

The Red Tales came home to a country that had not changed.

Benjamin O.

Davis Jr.

returned to a segregated officer’s club he was not allowed to enter.

Rosco Brown was refused service at a lunch counter in Texas while still wearing his uniform.

[sighs] Charles Brantley [music] was told in Mississippi that he could not pump gas into his own car at a white-owned station.

[music] The men who had destroyed three of Hitler’s jet fighters over Berlin came home to states where they could be arrested for sitting in the wrong seat on a bus.

But the data they had generated was harder to bury than the men themselves.

In 1947, the Gillum Board, an Army study tasked with examining the future of black troops in the post-war military, received the 332nd Fighter Group’s combat record as [music] an exhibit.

The board read it.

The board read the 15th Air Force’s escort loss comparisons.

[music] The board read Goring’s Mondorf interrogation.

The board read the line about the red tales and the order not to engage.

On July 26th, 1948, President Harry S.

Truman signed Executive Order 9981, abolishing racial segregation in the United States Armed Forces.

The order did not mention the 332nd Fighter Group.

It did not need to.

The men who wrote the policy memo that reached Truman’s desk had the combat statistics in front of them.

And they knew what those statistics had cost the men who produced them.

And they knew what the statistics would cost the 1925 war college doctrine if the doctrine tried to survive them.

The doctrine [music] did not survive them.

The 1925 study was pulled from active use.

The Carile Barracks Library kept a copy on a reference shelf where historians would find it decades later.

Its conclusions preserved in amber as evidence of what American military [music] thought had been before three Mustangs met three Messers over Wittenberg at 7 minutes past noon on a cold Saturday in March.

Hines Arnold died on April 17th, 1945 over Ruland, flying the same Yellow 7 he had flown on March 24th.

His aircraft was recovered intact from a forced landing site near the end of the war.

It was shipped to the United States for technical evaluation.

It passed through Wrightfield in Ohio, through Silver Hill in Maryland, through decades of museum storage, and finally [music] through restoration in the 1970s.

It never flew again.

Today, Yellow 7 sits in Hangar B at the Smithsonian’s Udvarhazi Center in Chantelli, Virginia, 26 mi from the White House, where Truman signed Executive Order 9981.

The jet is positioned so that visitors walk past its port side [music] first, reading the placard, admiring the sleek Junker’s engine necessels, the swept wing, the four 30 mm cannons in the nose.

[music] Then they walk around.

On the other side of the same hanger, suspended from the ceiling, there is a P51D Mustang with a crimson tail.

The two aircraft face each other across a polished concrete [music] floor.

A child on a school trip can stand between them and see both at once.

The jet that was supposed to save the Third Reich and the fighter [music] flown by the men the Third Reich said could not exist.

The placards do not draw a line between them.

They don’t need to.

The aircraft do it themselves.

Every day the museum is open in the only language either [music] of them ever really spoke.

Silence.