A Top Honor For Soaring Achievements

Walter L. McCreary, 89, of Burke spent eight months in a German prisoner of war camp after his plane was hit by enemy fire in 1944. (Photos By Michel Du Cille -- The Washington Post)

"The P-51 is liquid-cooled," he said. The flak "tore the radiator out, so the plane didn't fly very well." A liquid he at first thought was gasoline began leaking onto the cockpit floor. When it didn't ignite, he realized it was probably coolant, but he also knew that it was time to bail out.

On the ground, he was turned over to German soldiers and transported to a German prison camp in what is now Poland.

He was there for eight months and did not try to escape. He is sometimes asked why. "Escape, and pass for what?" he said he responded. "I mean, if I was a Caucasian, maybe I could blend in. No way could I blend in."

McCreary said he was not racially harassed or mistreated by his German captors or fellow prisoners. He said that a solidarity developed among POWs that seemed to span racial lines.

"From the time that I was captured until the time I arrived [back home] in the United States, I didn't know who I was, racially," he said. "No one ever mentioned it."

He said he did not encounter racism again until he and other former POWs had been freed and, on their way home, were taken to eat in a segregated cafeteria in St. Louis. The staff objected to McCreary. A fellow POW, a rangy, white Texan, summoned the manager, took him by the collar and said: "We just got through fighting one war, and we will start another one right now," McCreary related.

"That was . . . the bonding that existed," he said.

McCreary said he has mixed emotions about today's accolade, which required broad support from Congress.

"It was earned under the most difficult terms," he said, during a time when many in Congress "identified us as being ignorant, didn't have the intelligence, didn't have the coordination and didn't have the leadership to become military."

"I'm not one who carries hate," he said. "When we were flying at 30,000 feet above the bombers" and their white crews, he said, he and his comrades would chuckle and remark that the white aviators had no idea that they were under the watchful eyes of supposedly inept black fighter pilots.

But it is the pilots who always get the glory, Crockett said. There were thousands of dedicated Tuskegee Airmen who were not pilots, and yesterday, during a gathering at Bolling Air Force Base in Washington, Crockett, 88, of Annandale, told one of his favorite stories about the unsung ground crews.

It happened March 23, 1945, the day before a big raid on Berlin, and has come down in Tuskegee lore as "the great train robbery."

Crockett, a pilot and operations officer from rural Arkansas, was based in Italy and learned that the long mission would require his P-51s to carry more gas than their two 70-gallon drop tanks could hold. Base officials "came to me and asked me how many planes we had with 110-gallon tanks," he recalled. "I said only three. We knew we needed some more larger fuel tanks."

The men searched in vain for the bigger tanks. With less than 24 hours before the mission, word came that an Allied supply train carrying the larger tanks was en route. The crews hatched a plan to secure the tanks, Crockett said.

"They went and held up the train and took the larger tanks," he said. "Then they worked all night to put them on the P-51s. It took a lot of work, because they had to first drain, then take off, the 70-gallon tanks, put the 110s on and then fuel them. They worked all night to get the planes ready, but by 5 or 6 in the morning, we were ready to go."

Yesterday, as he pondered today's Capitol Hill honor, Crockett said he was happy that Tuskegee's aviators are getting their due.

But deep inside, he feels a little of the sting he felt when he returned from Europe to find that he was still not afforded the privileges he fought for.

"It's more then 60 years later," he said. "Sixty years is a long time -- a very long time."