A Top Honor For Soaring Achievements

Sensing that the air corps might be good duty, he applied for the fledgling black aviators' outfit that would blossom at Tuskegee. His flight training began in an open cockpit biplane and progressed to the war's early fighters.

He was shipped overseas and wound up outside Naples, Italy, in January 1944. At first, he flew patrols in a P-39, an oddball aircraft with an engine in the middle and a door that opened like a car's. But he soon graduated to the powerful P-51C.

He and others in the all-black 332d Fighter Group had the tails of their planes painted the distinctive red that would make them the famous Red Tails.

McGee also had the word "Kitten" painted in big, red letters on the nose of his plane in honor of his wife, Frances, whose nickname was Kitten, and to salute his crew chief, who kept his aircraft's engine purring.

With the P-51, McGee said his job was bomber escort, and he was instructed to stay with the bombers unless ordered to attack marauding German fighters.

One day, McGee said, he was so ordered, and during a dogfight managed to get behind a German fighter, the FW-190, and shoot it down. "The pilot did not get out," he said. It was his only kill.

McGee went on to fly 136 missions in World War II -- he said white fighter pilots usually flew about 50. He flew 100 missions during the Korean War and 173 in Vietnam. The reason: Although the military was by then happy to have black pilots, he said, "the airlines weren't ready."

Walter L. McCreary, 89, of Burke, the son of a railroad worker, was raised in San Antonio and had graduated from Tuskegee University in 1940 when he got a draft notice. He already had a civilian pilot's license and signed up for the Tuskegee Army Air Corps program, becoming one of the first pilots of the all-black 100th Fighter Squadron.

He was also shipped overseas in January 1944 and, like McGee, was based outside Naples. He flew 88 missions in the P-39, the P-47 and the P-51. He said he learned firsthand that strafing was the most hazardous.

During a strafing run Oct. 12, 1944, on his 89th mission, he was hit by enemy flak.

"I was on a mission to the Danube to shoot anything floating in the river," he said Tuesday. Unbeknown to him, he said, there was an enemy antiaircraft school on the ground in the area -- and the gunners started practicing on him.

One shell exploded just in front of him, he said. A second blew up a little closer, and, as he pulled up the nose of his plane, a third went off right under the belly.