Tuskegee Airman flew ‘63 and a half’ missions
Robert L. Martin, a combat pilot who said he flew “63 and a half” missions during World War II as part of the Tuskegee Airmen, was shot down over German territory on the 64th and spent five weeks trying to return to Allied lines with the help of Yugoslav partisans, died of pneumonia July 26 at a senior living center in Olympia Fields, Ill. He was 99.
Mr. Martin, known as “Fox,” grew up in Iowa and became entranced by airplanes when he attended an air show as a 13-year-old Boy Scout. He persuaded his father to let him take a ride on a Ford Trimotor.
“And the pilot, after starting the engine, buckled me in, he touched me with a wire and shocked me, and he said, ‘You’re going to be a pilot,’” he remembered in a video interview for the Experimental Aircraft Association, a Wisconsin-based international group. During college, he completed a civilian pilot-training program, joking that for a small fee “you could get silver wings and get all the girls.”
War was raging when he graduated from Iowa State University. He joined the Army Air Forces and trained at the segregated military complex in Tuskegee, Ala., in January 1944. With the rank of lieutenant, he set sail for Italy and was attached to the 100th Fighter Squadron, which helped provide cover for Allied bombers on missions in Europe.
On March 3, 1945, he was one of 24 Tuskegee Airmen who climbed into their single-seat P-51 Mustang fighters from their base in Ramitelli, Italy, to conduct a rail-strafing mission in parts of Slovenia and Austria. Two pilots did not return — Mr. Martin and Alphonso Simmons. “We flew over this airfield where there was no opposition,” Mr. Martin said in 2008 at Chicago’s Pritzker Military Museum & Library. “We saw two airplanes parked a little bit off the field, and we said, ‘We’ll get more credit for destroying two airplanes than shooting up a railroad train.’ We went in to shoot up these planes.”
Mr. Martin and Mr. Simmons were hit by antiaircraft fire. Mr. Simmons was killed. “I said, ‘I’m not going to fry, I’m going to get out of here,’” he recalled in the Pritzker talk. “I got up high enough to bail out and my beautiful parachute opened and knocked me out — cut my chin open and floated me down to earth.”
He was spotted by members of Josip Broz Tito’s partisan forces, which controlled swaths of Yugoslav territory. Taken to a farmhouse, Mr. Martin was greeted by one of Mr. Tito’s men. “The guy fried me an egg and gave me a glass of grappa when he found I was hungry, and just told me to sit and wait.”
On March 10, he was taken to Topusko, Croatia, where he met with an Allied mission manned by British soldiers that helped downed Allied airmen. After a month, he was airlifted to Bari, Italy, and weeks later he celebrated V-E Day in Naples.