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Special Units · Tunisia and Pantelleria, 1943
The 99th Fighter Squadron
The first Black American flying unit sent overseas reached Casablanca on 24 April 1943, flew its first combat missions from Cap Bon against Pantelleria in June, and began the combat record of the Tuskegee Airmen.
- U.S. Army Air Forces · Twelfth Air Force
- Fez, Cap Bon, Pantelleria, Sicily
- April–July 1943
From Chanute Field to Tuskegee
The 99th Pursuit Squadron was activated on 22 March 1941 at Chanute Field, Illinois, with Black enlisted men and a white commander, Capt. Harold R. Maddux. It was to be the first fighter unit for the Black pilots whom the Army had agreed, under political pressure, to train at a segregated field at Tuskegee, Alabama. The squadron became the 99th Fighter Squadron in May 1942. By the end of September 1942 there were at least 33 trained Black military pilots, enough for the squadron to be operational (Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology).
On 22 August 1942 Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. took command. He was the son of Benjamin O. Davis Sr., who in 1940 had become the Army’s first Black general, and a West Point graduate of June 1936, 35th in a class of 276, after four years in which most of his classmates refused to speak to him except on duty. He had been one of the first Black officers to earn pilot’s wings at Tuskegee. The squadron he took over had trained hard, but none of its pilots had flown in combat, and because the Army kept Black and white flying units separate, none of the veterans of the white P-40 groups could be posted to it (Chapter 7).
North Africa, April–May 1943
The squadron left Tuskegee Army Air Field on 2 April 1943, sailed from New York harbor on the steamship Mariposa on 16 April, and reached Casablanca on 24 April to serve with the Twelfth Air Force. On 29 April it moved to Oued N’ja, near Fez in French Morocco, to train on its new P-40L Warhawks (Haulman). The fighting in Tunisia was in its last weeks; the Axis armies surrendered on 13 May, while the 99th was still in Morocco. The answer to the question whether the Tuskegee Airmen fought in the Tunisian campaign is therefore no. They arrived during it and flew their first missions from Tunisian soil a few weeks after it ended.
At Oued N’ja, by the squadron’s own accounts and Davis’s autobiography, experienced fighter pilots flew with the newcomers and passed on what they had learned in the winter’s fighting. Among them was Lt. Col. Philip Cochran, who had commanded a P-40 squadron in Tunisia. A Signal Corps photograph taken near Fez on 12 May 1943 shows the squadron’s staff: Davis; Capt. Hayden C. Johnson, adjutant; Capt. E. Jones of the service detachment; Lt. William R. Thompson, armament; Lt. Herbert E. Carter, engineering; Lt. Erwin B. Lawrence, operations; and Lt. George R. Currie, ordnance (NARA 531174).
Pantelleria: the first missions
On 29 May 1943 the 99th was attached to the 33rd Fighter Group, commanded by Col. William W. Momyer, which had flown P-40s from Thelepte through the Tunisian winter. Between 30 May and 7 June the squadron moved to Fardjouna on the Cap Bon peninsula, the northeastern tip of Tunisia (Haulman). The target of the moment was Pantelleria, a fortified volcanic island in the Sicilian Strait about 45 miles off the Tunisian coast, with an airfield whose hangar was cut into the rock. Before invading Sicily, the Allies wanted the island’s airfield and wanted it out of Axis hands, and Eisenhower decided to see whether bombing could force its surrender. The operation was called Corkscrew (Craven and Cate).
The squadron’s first combat mission, on 2 June 1943, was a patrol over the Mediterranean in which no enemy aircraft were met. Some accounts describe that day’s work as dive-bombing on Pantelleria, and a wartime Office of War Information caption gives 4 June as the date the squadron “first went into action” (Haulman; NARA 535767). On 9 June four of its P-40s, escorting twelve A-20s over the island, intercepted four Bf 109s, which broke away: the squadron’s first meeting with enemy fighters (Haulman).
The bombing of Pantelleria was the heaviest the Allies had yet concentrated on one small place. From 1 to 10 June the air forces dropped 4,844 tons in 3,647 sorties, and on 10 June alone nearly 1,100 aircraft dropped 1,571 tons. On 11 June, as British infantry came ashore, the garrison surrendered; the formal surrender was signed at 17:35 in the underground hangar, and more than 11,000 prisoners were rounded up. The bombing had been much less accurate than its planners expected, and the official air historians themselves doubted that it proved what enthusiasts claimed for it. But the island fell, and the 99th had flown in the campaign that took it (Craven and Cate; Chapter 7).
2 July 1943: the first victory
The squadron followed the war to Sicily. On 2 July 1943, escorting B-25s on a raid on the airfield at Castelvetrano in western Sicily, 1st Lt. Charles B. Hall, flying a P-40L, shot down a fighter he identified as a Focke-Wulf Fw 190. It was the first aerial victory credited to a Tuskegee Airman (Haulman). Hall, born in Brazil, Indiana, on 25 August 1920, was congratulated by Eisenhower and by Maj. Gen. John K. Cannon and received the Distinguished Flying Cross. He flew 198 combat missions before the war ended.
Later research has qualified the details but not the credit. German records studied by Andrew Arthy and Morten Jessen suggest that no Fw 190s were present that day and that the defenders were Bf 109s of Jagdgeschwader 77, two of which were lost. Misidentification of enemy types was common on all sides, and the credit stands (This Day in Aviation, citing Arthy and Jessen, 2013).
The record questioned, and defended
The squadron’s first months were also its hardest politically. In September 1943 Momyer, under whose group the 99th had flown since 29 May, gave Maj. Gen. Edwin J. House a sharply critical report, judging that the squadron lacked aggressiveness. On 16 September House sent Cannon a memorandum titled “Combat Efficiency of the 99th Fighter Squadron,” drawing partly on Momyer, which recommended that the squadron give up its P-40s for P-39s and coastal patrol and that no Black fighter group be sent overseas for combat. Cannon endorsed it on 18 September, writing that the squadron’s pilots fell “well below the standard” of his other squadrons, and on 19 September Spaatz forwarded both papers to Gen. Henry H. Arnold. Time asked in its issue of 20 September whether the “experiment” was over (Haulman; Commemorative Air Force archive).
Davis had handed the squadron to Maj. George S. Roberts on 2 September and gone home to command the new 332nd Fighter Group. He defended the 99th at a Pentagon press conference and before the War Department’s Advisory Committee on Negro Troop Policies in October 1943. Arnold ordered a statistical comparison. Released at the end of March 1944, the Army Air Forces study “Operations of the 99th Fighter Squadron Compared with Other P-40 Aircraft Squadrons in the MTO, 3 July 1943–31 January 1944” found that the 99th had performed in combat about as well as the white P-40 squadrons. The historian Walter J. Boyne later put it plainly: “Momyer’s assessment was wrong” (Chapter 7).
By then the squadron had answered in the air. Over the Anzio beachhead in January 1944 it was credited with twelve German aircraft in two days. A wartime caption written about a year after its first mission reported more than 3,000 sorties flown and 17 enemy aircraft credited as shot down, with 3 probables and 6 damaged (NARA 535767). In 1944 the 99th joined Davis’s 332nd Fighter Group in Italy, the group remembered as the “Red Tails.” Davis became the first Black general in the U.S. Air Force in 1954, and the combat record that began over Pantelleria helped the Air Force integrate in 1948–49.
The insignia, rendered
Illustration Original insignia-style artwork made for the Lake Norman Brief. It is not the unit’s official emblem.
Timeline
- The 99th Pursuit Squadron is activated at Chanute Field, Illinois.
- Lt. Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr. takes command.
- The squadron sails from New York on the Mariposa.
- Arrival at Casablanca; on 29 April it moves to Oued N’ja, near Fez.
- Attached to the 33rd Fighter Group; moves to Fardjouna on Cap Bon.
- First combat mission.
- Four P-40s escorting A-20s over Pantelleria meet four Bf 109s.
- Pantelleria surrenders.
- Lt. Charles B. Hall scores the first Tuskegee Airmen aerial victory, over Sicily.
- An Army Air Forces study finds the 99th performed about as well as the other P-40 squadrons.
People of the unit
Read the full story
- Chapter 7: The Air War over Tunisia
- XII Air Support Command and the 57th Fighter Group, the other P-40 units of this section
- The Kasserine Pass collection and atlas
By the numbers
The 99th Fighter Squadron by the numbers
The first year’s air-combat claims
Enemy aircraft credited to the 99th Fighter Squadron, June 1943 to about June 1944
Source: Office of War Information caption, NARA 535767
Victories in proportion
Aerial victory credits. The 99th’s early-1944 total is 17 in a wartime OWI caption and 18 in Tuskegee Airmen Inc.’s tally, so a range is shown
Source: Daniel L. Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology (AFHRA); Tuskegee Airmen Inc., “112 Victories”
In pictures
More photographs
In the art of World War II
Insignia, posters and art
Sources
- Daniel L. Haulman, A Tuskegee Airmen Chronology (Air Force Historical Research Agency, 2016).
- Commemorative Air Force Rise Above archive, “Maj Gen Cannon memo on 99th Fighter Squadron, 18 Sep 1943,” with the House memorandum of 16 September 1943.
- Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate, eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. II (1949), ch. 13, “Pantelleria.”
- Bryan R. Swopes, “2 July 1943,” This Day in Aviation, citing Andrew Arthy and Morten Jessen (2013).
- U.S. National Archives photographs 111-SC-184968 (NARA 531174), 208-FS-872-3 and NARA 535767, with their wartime captions.
- Benjamin O. Davis Jr., Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., American: An Autobiography (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991); Alan L. Gropman, The Air Force Integrates, 1945–1964 (Office of Air Force History, 1978).
- Wikipedia, “Benjamin O. Davis Jr.,” “William W. Momyer” and “99th Flying Training Squadron,” for the works they cite.