Stayed.

There was a fundamental reason the Red Tails were so well-regarded by their colleagues in the Army Air Corps at a time when black people doing any jobs were unlikely to receive their due. Namely, when the Red Tails were given a mission to escort flights of bombers over Germany, they didn’t allow themselves to get distracted by insubstantial adversity.

The Luftwaffe by that point in the conflict was low on aircraft and even lower on pilots. They didn’t have the numbers to mount full-scale attacks on those bomber flights. They certainly couldn’t mass fighters to turn the skies into the scenes of massive air battles. Thus their primary tactic was to hit and run, to harass the Americans and try to draw our fighters away from the bomber convoys. When that worked, our fighters left our bombers unprotected and gave other German pilots a better chance to shoot more of them down.

But the Red Tails earned notoriety for better performance on that score. Unlike other American fighter pilots who would take the bait and run off to do battle with the Germans, they stayed with the bombers all the way to the target.

The buzzing of the enemy never distracted the Tuskegee Airmen. They stayed on mission.

And the results were demonstrable. The average number of bombers lost during escorts in the European theater was 46. When the Tuskegee Airmen were providing the escorts, they only lost an average of 27. On March 24, 1945, the Red Tails escorted a flight of bombers on an 1,800-mile mission over Berlin and didn’t lose a single one.

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