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Boy, what a small world.
Everything had to be perfect.
The instructor gave me a maneuver to practice until
my next check ride.
I practice, practice, practice until I got it perfect.
I'm having a birthday party next year.
The 100th?
Huh?
- 100? - Yeah.
You fly along and the sky is so tranquil.
And then all of a sudden: bang!
And here's an 88 anti-aircraft shell that might explode
right next to you.
Each one of us wanted to be the best.
You get all those best together.
You've got quite an organization.
And that's what we had.
We painted not only the rudder, but
the whole damn tail red.
And so became known as the "Red Tails."
And it was just a symbol.
Because people started talking about, "The Real Red Tails."
In the waters of Lake Huron,
lies a P-39 Airacobra
flown during a Tuskegee training mission in 1944.
Hey there!
Please stand by.
.
Let me know when there are 12 there.
I got it.
You ready?
A recovery team is piecing together what happened
in these waters all those years ago.
How many people know that there are
World War II assets and archeological sites in America,
no less in the Great Lakes?
Wayne Lusardi and Brian Smith...
Gary, do you want to zip me up?
...partnered up six years ago and they've been
dedicated to this unique chapter of America's
first Black military airmen ever since.
Bringing all this back together,
especially in a museum of the Tuskegee Airmen,
it's going to just solidify the fact that
these men who were not treated as equal citizens,
were willing to give their lives.
I think what's not in the history books is...
just the blood, sweat, and tears that the
Tuskegee airmen went through to fight for their country.
In training missions alone, 15 young men
lost their lives here between 1943 and 1944.
We have a sense of urgency to bring the
aircraft up because of its deterioration,
because of a potential looting threat.
The clock is definitely ticking.
The plane was piloted by 22-year-old Frank Moody,
who had already completed the rigors of the
fledgling Tuskegee program.
Recovering this from the lake bottom is
really going to hopefully lead to answering a lot of the
questions that we have about the site.
The Great Lakes were an advanced training site,
so by the time the pilots arrived here,
they were already the cream of the crop.
As a kid, I used to view the planes
taking off and landing and fantasizing about myself being
the pilot who's flying the plane.
So, I think that's what actually pointed me towards
trying to get into the aviation field when
World War II started.
Training for Tuskegee pilots on the home front
was difficult and dangerous.
There's this anxiety, every time you
get in that cockpit, you're always got it in the back of
your mind the danger that you're in.
The coastline here in the Great Lakes was
just like the coastline in France.
I didn't know what to expect.
All this is new to me.
I completed the exam, passed it, then went off to learn to fly.
So, they trained here in P-39 aircraft.
They would take off from Selfridge and fly no more than
50 feet above trees, hills, mountains, all the way to
Muskegon, turn around and
come back just to prepare them for combat.
At that time, Selfridge Field would have
been abuzz with wartime activity.
The 332nd had moved from Tuskegee, Alabama to Michigan
and was supported by young men who had volunteered to join
the war effort, just like Frank Moody.
He started working for an aviation
manufacturing company during the war and then ultimately
was able to get a spot at Tuskegee, where he earned his
wings in February 1944.
He had gone through the primary training,
the basic training, the advanced training,
and he was in combat training here
at Selfridge Air National Guard Base.
It's important to remember how young these
men and women were when they were called into the service,
taking on these training missions.
Each time you go up, you could potentially lose your life and
you're training to go to war.
I volunteered to serve my country and
I'm ready to serve my country and the war.
Their patriotism was deep and profound
because they not only wanted to win these military battles,
but they also wanted to change what America was about.
This isn't the Army's war.
It isn't the Navy's war.
It's the war of all Americans.
But at the time, the military didn't see
all Americans as fit to serve equally.
It took the lobbying of civil rights activists to force
Congress to alter the Selective Service Act of 1940.
The Selective Service Act has
non-discrimination provisions that are written into it based
on the previous protests of civil right activists.
That means that Black Americans can't be excluded
from military service.
Well, I volunteered at 17, but I was
taken into the service at 18.
At the beginning of World War II,
they had a mandatory for all
able-bodied males between the ages of 18 and 36
were to register for the draft.
What machines did you operate?
I operated boring mills, tool grinders,
drill presses, planes.
But most of the African American soldiers,
even though they did a fine job,
they were segregated to the point where
they were put into strictly menial labor.
White military leaders just didn't believe
that Black Americans had the intelligence, courage,
bravery, to be able to be good soldiers, and they,
military leaders wrote that into the official documentation.
"According to the studies, a Negro was
barely qualified for combat duty.
Was by nature subservient, mentally inferior, and
believed himself to be inferior to the White man.
Was susceptible to crowd psychology, cannot control
himself in the face of danger, and did not have the initiative,
courage, and resourcefulness of the White man."
That's what we had to put up with.
All wrong.
I went down to join the Army Air Corps.
Took the test.
Did very well on it, and after I had hassled them a bit about
not being called, I was informed by the military that
I would never be called for the Army Air Corps because
there were no colored units.
There was never going to be one.
There was no way I could go.
But the Black activist movement continued
its political assault on Washington
demanding military equality.
And what Black activists are demanding are
all things related to the war: they want access to defense
industry jobs and they want specific parts of the military
to be opened up, particularly things like the Army Air Corps.
The White House, Roosevelt, and other federal officials
just can't ignore anymore.
Roosevelt was running for a third term.
The Negro press and the NAACP, they were on the backs of
Congress wanting something to happen.
And Roosevelt figured that if he started a fighter squadron,
he'd get the Black vote, which he did.
And he won.
But all politics; but it worked out for us.
In January 1941, the war department established
the 99th Pursuit Squadron,
based out of Tuskegee, Alabama.
It was the first segregated unit within the Army Air Corps.
I'm proud of what Tuskegee has done.
I don't whether in any individual institution,
realize how much they are being watched by the outside world.
They were trained to be successful
fighter pilots, but they're also trained to really prove
to the larger military establishment that
Black Americans could do this work.
And that's exactly what Frank Moody was doing as
he advanced through the program.
An airman would have started out at
Tuskegee and then move to another base that
specifically focused on combat training.
And that's why they came to Selfridge.
They were learning how to come from over the horizon on the
water to strafe or destroy radar towers or installation
along the coast.
On the morning of April 11th, 1944, Frank Moody
was flying one of the most sophisticated
fighter aircraft built at the time: the P-39.
And did his pre-flight, and the mission for the day was to
leave early in the morning and to fly up over Lake Huron,
up the Saint Claire River, and get out over the Lake Huron
and do some gunnery exercises.
A P-39 Airacobra.
That's a unique airplane; the engine was behind the pilot.
It had four 50-caliber machine guns, two of which sat
right on top of the cowling.
In the middle of the airplane, was a 37-millimeter canon,
which shot a shell that would destroy tanks.
So, four aircraft, all P-39s,
left Selfridge Field.
Right before 8:00 in the morning, they came up over
Lake Huron.
They were flying in formation from south to north.
And when it was Lieutenant Moody's time, he discharged
his weapons, fired into the lake.
And then something happened to the aircraft that resulted in
an almost instantaneous crash into the water, cartwheeling
of the aircraft, and he was gone.
He was killed immediately in that accident.
His body was recovered in 54 days,
but the plane was never found.
Until April 11, 2014,
exactly 70 years to the date of the crash.
Frank Moody's P-39 was discovered by
Drew and David Losinski, a father-son dive team.
We were diving, my son and I, and the water
was crystal clear, this was early in the Spring, I think.
We went out and went to the first spot.
We figured it was a rock, I think, and the second spot,
Drew's at the very bow of the boat looking down;
we're looking, and he goes,
"Dad, I think you found, we found an airplane!"
And I'm back driving the boat,
and I says, you know how parents are,
"yeah, sure, okay."
"No, Dad, it's really an airplane."
The main thing that we wanted to do was to find out what the
plane was or how it got there, whose it was.
We were down swimming, looking at the wing,
and we dust it off.
You could see the red position light.
And looking at pictures, I figured there should be
something, something painted, so we fanned it off.
And there was a star, a box with a star.
It means that it's military, and it's a U.S. military plane.
So later on, we found out through lots of
research and finding key parts of the airplane, we got the
radio call number, which we linked to the accident report,
which told us that we found that plane 70 years to the
date of when it crashed.
It was pretty unbelievable.
The Losinski's became immediate stewards
of this site.
We started kind of putting our head together about
what are the options.
Should we leave it in place?
Should we document the entire wreck site ahead of time?
Should it be recovered either in part or partially?
Finding Frank Moody's plane triggered one of
the most important World War II archeological missions in
the Great Lakes.
This is the first airplane that has been
archeologically documented in the state of Michigan.
We're trying to determine a cause of the accident;
we're trying to see how an intact,
very complicated machine, suddenly breaks apart.
Recovering a plane that's been underwater for
70 years is no easy task.
It's a multi-year effort,
trying to raise it piece by piece
and then immediately start preservation efforts.
And the collaboration with the
Tuskegee Airmen National Museum has been key.
Frank Moody and his crash brings to light
the sacrifices that the Airmen made just to get to combat.
While we don't have his first-hand accounts from
Frank, we do from other Tuskegee Airmen.
I remember that when I went into the
service, the first place I was assigned to was
Kessler Field, Mississippi,
that being below what they call the Mason-Dixon Line.
Below that geographical point, segregation was the law.
It was not a choice, but a law there.
For Moody and other Tuskegee pilots,
they're always fighting two battles at the same time.
They're trained to fight a military battle, which was
frightening in its own right, but they're also fighting a
battle against racism,
a battle against second-class citizenship.
We got to Washington D.C.
a little early, so I got off the train, went and had
breakfast, came back, went to get in the car I was in,
conductor says, no, no, no, no.
You ride in the car where Negroes ride.
So, that was my introduction to segregation and the South.
So, if you're trying to think of a welcoming
place to train Black troops, Alabama in the 1940s wouldn't
be the first place that you would think of.
One of the challenges at Tuskegee Air Base was that it
was a Jim Crow base in a Jim Crow city in a Jim Crow state,
and that shaped almost every aspect of what training was
like for these Black pilots.
I didn't go to town.
I stayed on the base the whole time.
You get into trouble going into town.
Now, down at Tuskegee, one of the guys went into town,
and the Sheriff told him, if I ever catch you back in town,
I'll blow your brains out.
The Tuskegee Airmen had to channel their
frustration, their anger, into their military performance.
My heart must have skipped a couple of
beats and that type of thing, but I guess it was more with
joy than anything else.
I took off, and as soon as I broke grounds, I just felt
this exhilaration; I've done it, I've done it, I've done it!
Despite their excellence, the military and
the public were not on board,
so the NAACP and the Black press doubled down.
The Black press understood themselves
as a fighting press.
And the thing they were fighting for in the lead up to
World War II and then during World War II was to make sure
Black Americans had a chance to be able to serve their
country equally.
This relentless advocacy laid the foundation
for an innovative initiative: the Double Victory Campaign.
The Double V Campaign, is really the
rallying cry for Black Americans during the war.
It's launched by the Pittsburgh Courier.
What they're calling for is a victory over fascism abroad
and victory over racism at home.
Eleanor Roosevelt lent her powerful voice to the
fight early on.
Everything Eleanor Roosevelt says and
does becomes news.
Well, she had always heard that Negroes
could not fly airplanes, so she went to Tuskegee,
and she rode with a guy we call "Chief" Anderson.
And she found out we can fly airplanes
just like anybody else.
So, when they took the picture of she and Chief Anderson in
the airplane and it was in all the newspapers
throughout the country.
That sealed the deal right there.
Yes, they can fly just like anybody else.
As a matter of fact, they can fly better.
Just ask me.
In 1942, the first class of cadets graduated from
Tuskegee Army Airfield.
One of the most fantastic days in my life
there that I can never forget.
But it was graduation day, and just before going up and being
presented my wings and my bars, as I said,
"I think I've done it!"
Yes, it was a special day.
We succeeded in the training and got our wings and now
we're commissioned as an actual Second Lieutenant in
the United States Army.
And in July, a year before,
I was just getting into the service.
And now I'm a pilot.
I can fly airplanes.
But the risks were great.
Nearly 15,000 servicemen died during training exercises
in the United States alone.
Today, the archeological quest to understand what happened to
Frank Moody is in its tenth year.
According to the U.S. Army accident report,
the other three pilots that were in formation
with Lieutenant Frank Moody, two of them
reported seeing fragments coming off of the aircraft,
near the forward fuselage.
It's always a possibility that there's some kind of
mechanical problem with the aircraft.
The airplane started to shake apart,
and he lost control.
The airplane nosed into the lake, Lake Huron.
The Army, because they never found the
airplane, really never came to any conclusions as to
what caused the accident.
When the team started exploring the site in
2015, they had to figure out the best way to recover
all of the parts.
Looking at a vastly scattered airplane
has been a challenge.
It became very overwhelming.
It's like, okay, well, how are we going to do this?
The ultimate goal of this project is to bring the
aircraft up in its entirety.
Nick, you have the go-pro?
Yep.
The site is broken.
It's highly disarticulated.
You had and airplane that was roughly 30 feet in length and
about a 32-foot wingspan that is now in literally thousands
of pieces across the lake floor.
Gimme that knife for the cable.
Alright. Winch up.
We got this humongous propeller blade
with the gearbox.
I say stop.
Cool!
The accident report suggested that
something may have happened up forward in the fuselage,
and that could have been a propeller issue.
Of course, I was imagining
the whole airplane.
That's exactly what I was thinking too.
The remarkable thing is how far apart they all are.
You know, this one was 500 feet beyond, or the single
blade was 500 feet north, and the other one was
1,200 feet to the south of it.
This is maybe the last piece in the puzzle
of why the airplane went down.
It's, so far, you know, up until this point,
it's just been unexplainable.
It's about 70-some years and, wow.
Yeah, it's pretty crazy.
By the time Frank Moody was flying his
training missions, Tuskegee Airmen had
been in the European theater for over a year.
Wing cameras, synchronized with
blazing guns, record dramatic evidence of Nazi planes
blasted from the skies.
I never thought about air-to-air combat as
a big problem.
I looked for it.
I'd be flying along, "oh, I hope we get some enemy aircraft."
I thought about that is a duel between two men.
I believed that I was a competent pilot, and I knew in
my mind that I was.
Lee Archer flew under the command of
Benjamin O. Davis, Junior.
Davis is one of the amazing figures
from World War II.
He graduates from West Point in 1936.
He's the first Black person to graduate from West Point
in the 20th century, only the fourth overall.
It's only with the Tuskegee Experiment getting started
that he has the opportunity to pursue his lifelong dream of
becoming a pilot.
He was a no-nonsense guy.
Everything had to be done right.
And you can't knock him for that.
That's the way things should be no matter what you do,
you do it right.
And he was our commander.
He made a military man out of me.
I think that he taught us discipline.
And he always tried to encourage us to improve
ourselves because he said, "America's watching you."
Today is a really big deal.
It's a major piece of the puzzle.
It's going to tell us a lot about the airplane and what
was going on with it when Lieutenant Moody crashed here.
It's really murky down there.
I thought it would be better today because
it's sunny and calm.
I think yesterday just stirred everything up.
We're still waiting on straps, ok?
Ok.
Do not move the cable.
Very good. Good.
In a few minutes we're going to see
Alison engine coming up that powered the P-39 that
Frank Moody was flying.
I can't wait.
I got that the cradle's
going to be the way.
I'm seeing the airbag.
The crane hook is coming up.
There it is!
About two feet underwater and it hasn't been this this high
since 1944, April 11th.
Yeah, you can stop right there.
The bolts are underneath.
Good work Wayne!
Pretty smooth!
Congratulations!
.
Piece by piece airplane's coming up.
I don't have the words to express.
Probably the heaviest single component of
the aircraft.
So, very cool, it's really going to start to teach us
a lot about this airplane.
Getting it back to the
Tuskegee Airmen National Museum in Detroit
will start the conservation process.
Having the engine, the propeller, the gearbox,
all of that to examine from a forensics side will help us
determine what was the cause of the accident.
Are we good to good?
Alright.
Now, we have to transport it to shore.
We've got to get it off of this barge, move it onto a
flatbed vehicle, and then transport it to the
conservation laboratory in Detroit.
We do need to move the water machine.
Are you pumping currently?
No.
- No. - Ok.
- We just turned it off. - Ok.
Ready for the engine?
- We got it. - I got it.
You go up, just a little bit.
Alright, hold.
Alright, nice and slow.
Nice.
The laying out the plane like this today is
an incredible visual opportunity to get a feel
for how big this airplane is.
It's hard to imagine it when you're underwater looking at
just a little piece here and a little piece there and it's
pretty impressive to kind of see it like this.
This is the first time these artifacts have come together
in this orientation since the airplane went apart
79 years ago.
This is the artifact that designed this entire airplane:
the 37-millimeter cannon.
It was mounted at the nose.
It was also armed with 50-caliber machine guns
on either side.
And so with all of this stuff up in the forward fuselage,
it was no room for the engine.
So, the engine went back behind the pilot.
And that was a very unique situation for a single-seat
fighter aircraft at that time.
It gives me pause to think this big, massive
1200- pound engine, would actually fly in an airplane.
But the P-39's had their limitations;
they performed best at lower altitudes,
better for strafing.
They needed airplanes that would go
further, and they got the 51.
It could go further. It could go higher.
It could fly longer. It could turn better.
It had all of the agile traits of a fighter.
When I got in the P-51 and I took it off,
I fell in love with it, the first time I flew it.
It was such a beautifully handling aircraft.
The Tuskegee pilots had a very specific
role in combat.
Their job was to accompany bombers on these
targeted bombing runs.
Huge fleets of allied bombers
protected by umbrellas of fighter planes, continue their
all-out offensive upon Nazi war plants in Europe.
The White fighter groups, they were
averaging 46 bombers lost per mission.
Per mission.
That's a lot of people.
A lot of people.
That's why we got the job of escorting bombers.
Colonel Davis said, "don't leave the bombers.
If that German fighter leaves, let him go and you stick with
the bombers.
There's ten men on each bomber airplane, only one man in that
German fighter.
We want to protect the bombers and bring those home.
When we first started flying with them,
they knew that there was a new fighter group that had joined:
the Red Tails.
They said who are these guys flying these damn Red Tails?
These guys are with us all the way.
By the way, who are these guys?
One of the things that happens after the
Tuskegee Airmen get into combat is they start to
receive media attention, not just from Black newspapers,
but now from national newspapers.
They say that they've mastered the art of aviation,
that they're squashing Hitler's Aces like bugs.
It got to the point where they were
requesting us.
They wanted us.
They didn't believe we were flying airplanes when we got
over there, because the book said "no, they can't do that."
On a bombing mission over enemy
territory, a fighter escort is a mighty comforting sight.
This man thought it was plenty good enough.
As far as he was concerned, this man could fly tough cover
for him any day.
When I was escorting the bombers,
there were White guys in these planes here,
they were just Americans there.
We were all on the same team.
That's what they were, and I never looked at them as being
White or anything else.
We were just team members.
After their many successes in Europe,
the Tuskegee Airmen were unstoppable.
Now, you may ask, who was the best?
Depends on who's telling the story!
Right now, I am!
Throughout the world, throngs of people
hail the end of the war in Europe.
Victory Over Europe Day was a time of
jubilation for Black Americans.
The whole world must be cleansed of the
evil from which half the world has been freed.
The hope that with the war over, they will
finally be able to come back to the United States and start
to see some of what they fought for come into reality.
I remember this for the rest of my life:
we were coming down the gangplank, getting off the
boat, they had a sign at the bottom of the gangplank:
Whites to one side.
Colored to the other side.
And I said to myself, "This is some country."
After the war, the Tuskegee pilots returned to
segregated units, but their successes in Europe
served as a rallying cry for change.
One of the first and most important
civil rights milestones after the war was the signing of
Executive Order 9981.
By Executive Order of President
Harry S. Truman: integration of all military units.
It will take time, but the policy was established.
The more I thought about it,
we really did something special.
If we had not been as successful as we were, there is
no way that Truman would have possibly made that move.
So, the military becomes integrated
before most of corporate America, before most of
higher education does.
And so, it really provides one of the building blocks for the
larger success of the Civil Right Movement
in the 1950s and 60s.
One of the troubling things that happens at the end of
World War II is that the first wave of books that come out
about the war,
really write Black Americans out of the story.
That's why it took so long before the service,
the patriotism, the tremendous successes, and path-breaking
work of the Tuskegee Airmen to come to the forefront.
Now, Frank Moody's recovered P-39...
Hey, we'll swing around.
Is adding a new chapter to the Airmen's stories.
It's amazing that this gun isn't bent.
When we start to look at this and when we
have this all kind of laid out here, we're starting to see a
lot of damage that happened in the propeller blades.
And you might think that that's just a rock hole or
something that was damage as this artifact was sitting on
the lake floor for the last eight decades, but when you
start looking at the other two blades and they have identical
holes in them, suddenly we're starting to see something
here; a major problem that's going on with this aircraft.
Synchronization, if you've ever
gone to dance class and danced with a partner,
you don't want to step on their toes.
So, you would synchronize your steps, so that you always
miss each other's feet.
And this airplane had a synchronizer or an interrupter
in the hub, which knew where the propeller blade was and
would stop this gun from firing when the blade was
in front of the gun.
In in a sense, the pilot's not actually
shooting the gun.
He's pulling the trigger, but then the airplane's deciding,
right here, when that gun is actually firing.
Yes.
When Lieutenant Moody pulled the trigger,
the guns fired into the propeller blades and
they created an entry hole and an exit wound.
And that's the same, very consistent,
on all three of these blades.
If it was Frank Moody's fault, you know,
due to pilot error or a collision with another aircraft,
we would see other damage, especially in these blades
that we're not seeing.
The proof found in these blades serve as a
testament to Frank Moody and his extraordinary journey.
Amazing!
In the end, it was the mechanical system
that failed him.
Now we can chronicle, highlight, and
talk about his life and the importance of his life toward
the war effort, toward fighting the Germans.
Artifacts like the plane help us make those
jumps between scale in terms of how we talk about history.
Frank Moody's story is one piece of the puzzle that helps
to fill in our larger understanding of what America
was like during World War II.
And more than anything, it gives us an opportunity to
help honor the service and sacrifices of
those Black veterans.
For years the Tuskegee Airmen pushed the
boundaries of what was possible,
distinguishing themselves in the air,
while breaking barriers for Black Americans everywhere.
One of the through lines in Black history
is Black people having to prove they could do things
other people doubt that they could do.
Outside, the next day, then it all came back.
Everything we did had to be perfect.
Everything had to be perfect.
That helped us and made us better pilots.
That's why we were so good.
What can I say?
They were trying to take us down the drain,
and we said, no, no, no.
Well, it's a matter that we prove them wrong
that we could do a job and that's about all you can do.
But they'll always be some doubting Thomases,
but we did the best we could.
Well, that's it.
That's it, we proved it.
And that hangs on you when you feel as though that every day
you have something to prove.
We showed them that yes, we can think.
We can think under pressure, we can think all the time.
We know how to do the job and get the job done, done right.
I'm in the mood to fly that Cessna
right now, you want to go up with me?
Ok. If I can get in!
That's my problem!
Ok!
Captioned by Cotter Media Group.