Charles McGee: Tuskegee And Beyond

Charles McGee never thought much of flying until he started training at Tuskegee. When he finally left the U.S. Air Force, he had 30 years and three wars behind him.

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Interview by Jon Guttman

Eugene Jacques Bullard, a former infantryman of the French Foreign Legion, set a precedent when he obtained his flying certificate on May 5, 1917, for it qualified him as the first black airman in American history. Significantly, however, the volunteer from Columbus, Georgia, had earned his flying status from the French Air Service, which he served as a fighter pilot in Escadrilles N.93 and Spa.85 from August 27 to November 11, 1917. Bullard’s native United States would not allow black airmen to fight for their country until 1943, when the first of a contingent trained at Tuskegee, Alabama, were formed as the 99th Fighter Squadron and shipped out to North Africa. That unit and the 332nd Fighter Group that followed would prove their worth in the last two years of World War II.

Besides establishing an outstanding record for not losing a single bomber they escorted to enemy fighters, several of the Tuskegee Airmen went on to distinguished postwar careers in the U.S. Air Force. One of them was Colonel Charles Edward McGee, who shared highlights of his long career with Aviation History senior editor Jon Guttman.

Aviation History: Could you tell us something of your childhood and education?

McGee: I was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on December 7, 1919. My mother passed away at my sister’s birth, when I was little over a year old. We spent time in Cleveland and with grandparents who were in Morgantown and Charleston, West Virginia. When I was in third grade, my father was teaching at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida. We spent a year there, then back to Cleveland until 1929, when he moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he was doing social work.

AH: Your father seems to have been a fairly prominent citizen.

McGee: Yes. In addition, he was an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister. We never had a lot, but I never remember being hungry or not being clean. I don’t have any recollections of specific actions of bigotry, except that schools were segregated, and when we were in Florida, we lived in a small house that was out on the edge of town. Also, because of the level of schooling for blacks in the South, when we returned to Cleveland, I had to repeat third grade. I became a Boy Scout in Illinois, and when my father’s ministry took him to Keokuk, Iowa, in the mid-1930s, I spent my second through senior years of high school there. In the fall of my senior year, he returned to south Chicago and I graduated from Du Sable High School in 1938. My family didn’t have the money to send me to college then, so I worked for a year with the Civilian Conservation Corps in northern Illinois, where I learned engineering and contour farming. I was then able to attend the University of Illinois in 1940. I took engineering and was also in the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) program and a member of the Pershing Rifles.

AH: What were your feelings when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor–on your birthday–brought the United States into the war?

McGee: My father was preaching in a church in Gary, Indiana, in 1941, and I had taken a summer job in the steel mill there. I was also in the Coleridge Taylor Glee Club. We were driving to sing at a church in south Chicago at 4 that Sunday afternoon when we heard the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor. We went on with the show, but I knew that one way or another we were going to be involved in the war.

AH: When did you first become interested in flying?

McGee: I don’t recall even seeing an airplane when I was young. It was about the time I was in college that the Army was beginning to recruit nonflying personnel–communications, engineering, armament and mechanics–for a one-squadron black experiment at Chanute Field. Word of that was spreading through the black community. Well, I already had a draft card, so I filled in that pilot’s application. I was sent over to a couple of places in Indiana to take the examination, and when I passed that, in April 1942, I had to take a physical. I’d also been going with a girl from Champaign, Illinois, Frances E. Nelson, and that summer we became engaged. In my expectation of the call to arms, I did not go back to school in September–I continued working. Frances and I were married on Saturday, October 17, and Monday morning’s mail had that letter I knew was going to come. On October 27, I was sworn into the enlisted reserve, and a few weeks later, I got the call to go to Tuskegee.

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