Air Force Museum
Political Pressure
In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt anticipated that the U.S. could be drawn into a war in Europe. His administration began a pilot training program in 1938 to create a reserve of trained civilian fliers in case of a national emergency. African American leaders argued that blacks should share with whites the burden of defending the United States, and the government opened the program to African Americans.
In depth
History & service
In the late 1930s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt anticipated that the U.S. could be drawn into a war in Europe. His administration began a pilot training program in 1938 to create a reserve of trained civilian fliers in case of a national emergency. African American leaders argued that blacks should share with whites the burden of defending the United States, and the government opened the program to African Americans. In 1940, the Selective Training and Service Act banned racial discrimination in conscription, clearing the way for blacks to be trained for U.S. Army Air Corps service.
Tuskegee Institute, a black college founded in Alabama in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, participated in the Roosevelt administration's pilot training program, and graduated its first civilian-licensed pilots in May 1940. Tuskegee Institute and the flying school at Tuskegee Army Air Field were the main sources of black military pilots in WWII (nine others were trained as liaison pilots at Fort Sill, Okla.).
Aircraft change the battlefield
In the First World War, aircraft became valuable because they could see beyond the front line. Reconnaissance and artillery observation affected decisions on the ground. Once that information mattered, opposing forces had reason to attack the aircraft gathering it. Fighters, defensive armament, and increasingly specialized missions developed around this contest over observation and freedom of movement.
The aircraft were fragile by later standards, but their crews worked inside a rapidly expanding military system. Training, maintenance, replacement aircraft, photography, communications, and weather reporting supported each sortie. Improvements in engines and armament changed tactics, while the pressures of combat exposed weaknesses that might have taken much longer to discover in peacetime.
Personal stories should be read alongside those systems. A uniform or a named aircraft connects the war to an individual, but the individual depended on many others and operated under constraints that skill could not eliminate. Aircraft from opposing sides show how designers answered similar problems in different ways. The later military collections in Dayton and at Udvar-Hazy reveal what endured: the need to gather information, protect friendly forces, move people and supplies, and coordinate action across distance. The scale changed enormously; the relationship between an aircraft's design and the job it had to perform remained fundamental.
