Training the Tuskegee Airmen

Front inscription

Graduates of the Tuskegee Army Flying School, who belonged to the first African-American units in the U.S. Army Air Corps, took further combat flight training at Walterboro Army Air Field from May 1944 to October 1945. Many of the first “Tuskegee Airmen” had already won distinction and fame in missions over North Africa, Sicily, and Italy in 1943-44, and several of them were assigned here as combat flight instructors.

Reverse inscription

Trainees here flew the P-39, P-47, and P-40 fighter planes and the B-25 bomber. The officers’ quarters and enlisted men’s barracks stood just east and just west of this spot, respectively. Segregation on American military posts, in place until 1948, was made worse by the fact that German POWs held here could use “White” facilities but the “Colored” officers and men of the U.S. Army Air Corps could not.