Tuskegee Airman, 100, passes

Tuskegee airman Harry Stewart died at his home in Bloomfield Hills, MI on Sunday.

Harry T. Stewart Jr. was born July 4, 1924, in Newport News, Virginia. His family moved to New York City two years later. Stewart told the National World War II Memorial he used to walk over to nearby North Beach Army Airfield (now LaGuardia Airport) as a young boy and fantasize about being the pilot of the planes taking off and landing there.

After the start of the war in Europe, the ehn-16 year old volunteered for pilot training but was turned down due to his race.

He was watching P-39 fighters take off from that same airfield when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. He once again volunteered for service and took the exam for pilot training. By then, the Army had established an all-Black aviation training center at Tuskegee, Alabama, where segregation was the law of the land. Growing up in Queens, Stewart had no idea what segregation was until he joined the service.

He was among the first of 1,000 Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Army Airfield in the 1940s. He graduated in June 1944, then went to South Carolina’s Walterboro Field for combat training. Before the year was over, he would be in Italy, flying combat missions with the 332nd Fighter Group. He would fly 43 combat missions during World War II.

Got a Distinguished Flying Cross for shooting down three German planes in one day, too.

But Stewart would survive World War II as one of only four Tuskegee Airmen with three air-to-air victories in a single day, leading a storied Air Force career before leaving active duty in 1950.

Stewart stayed in the Army Air Forces after the war, and he remained after it became the U.S. Air Force in 1947. In 1949, he was part of the four-man team that represented the 332nd to compete in the USAF’s first aerial gunnery competition, the first-ever “Top Gun”-style wargame. His team, which included James Harvey, Alva Temple, Halbert Alexander and Buford A. Johnson won the “Top Gun’ prize despite flying obsolete aircraft. It was a win the Air Force essentially hid until 1995.

He left active duty in 1950, and applied for pilot’s jobs with civilian airlines – who were still practicing segregation.

Instead, he attended New York University to learn engineering and went to work at ANR Pipeline Company in Detroit, where he would retire as vice president in 1976.

After retiring, he took to the skies once more, flying local children to inspire them to become aviators well into his 80s.

“[I was] hoping that maybe someday, one or two of them might decide that they would take in piloting as a vocation, which they did,” he said in 2020. “And there are a couple of kids that I had flown during that time now who are currently flying with the airlines.”  Military.com

Sounds like a good man, a good pilot, and a leader, one who, in the famous words of Magee, ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings’.*

Per Air and Space Forces Magazine there are only two of the 992 graduated pilots left. Air and Space Forces magazine dated June 20, 2023. Note that depending on the source, there were 992, or 1000, or 1007 pilots, so like Pearl Harbor survivors there may be a couple more than some sources say.

*”High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

Category: Air Force, We Remember, WWII