Tuskegee Airman still hopeful about US
Harold H. Brown tends to understate things. On his fourth mission during World War II, the P-51 pilot battled back from a disorienting case of vertigo when he burst out of the clouds and confirmed he was flying not straight and level, as his brain was insisting, but spiraling down to the Adriatic Sea some 10,000 feet below.
“It was no big deal, really,” he said.
In 1945, he bailed out over Austria when his plane was crippled by shrapnel from an exploding German locomotive that he’d just “lit up like a Christmas tree” with his .50-caliber guns.
Brown blew the plane’s canopy, rolled the Mustang upsidedown, and dropped out of the cockpit into the sky. He deployed his chute and waved to let nearby pilots know he was alive.
“So it’s quite simple,” he said of the process.
This modesty might be why many of Brown’s friends and past colleagues, including those at what is now Columbus State Community College, didn’t know many details about his time spent with the legendary Tuskegee Airmen.
It wasn’t until the 1990s, when the Airmen caught the attention of Hollywood, that mainstream America got up to speed with the groundbreaking exploits of the first African-American aviators in the U.S. Armed Forces.
“We were the best kept secret ever,” Brown said.
With the help of his wife, Marsha Bordner, Brown has memorialized his own story in a book titled, “Keep Your Airspeed Up: The Story of a Tuskegee Airman.”
He and Bordner, who live in Port Clinton, are on a book tour now, which began in Alabama with a standing ovation from 1,200 members of the U.S. Air Force. Last week
they visited Brown’s old employer, Columbus State.
Brown, who just turned 93, was born in 1924 in Minnesota. His parents met there after separately fleeing the overt racism of the Deep South.
Brown was always fascinated with flying. By 16 he had saved up enough money, $35, to pay for five flying lessons.
He couldn’t afford more and saw the military as the best, maybe only, chance for a black man to fly. In the buildup to World War II, the military followed a “no black pilots” policy based on a 1925 Army War College report that claimed blacks had “not progressed as far as the other subspecies of the human family.”
The policy changed in 1941 with creation of the Tuskegee Airmen.
“As a young man, I had no idea what we were doing, the importance of it,” Brown said. “None of that really stuck with me.”
Every pilot knew, though, “This outfit had to succeed. We always had to be one step above, in order to be equal.”
They proved themselves in the skies over Europe, protecting bombers and strafing German targets. Brown flew his first mission in late 1944. On his 30th mission in March 1945, the exploding locomotive knocked his
Mustang from the sky. He floated down, landing in knee-deep snow.
He thought: “What the hell have I gotten myself into?”
He was captured by enraged Austrians from a nearby village. Brown didn’t speak German, but he knew they were going to kill him.
Then a village constable stepped between him and the angry mob. They barricaded themselves in a building until nightfall, when the constable sneaked him out and turned him over to German soldiers.
He spent the last days of the war as a POW and came home to a still-segregated country where “nothing had changed.” But he couldn’t dwell on that.
“I still got a life to live,” he said.
Lt. Col. Harry Brown retired from the service in 1965. He knew Columbus because of Lockbourne Air Force Base and began teaching at Columbus Technical Institute. He helped shepherd the school through its early growth, eventually becoming vice president of academic affairs. He retired in 1986.
Brown saw bigotry, hate and cruelty, both in the war and here at home. But he prefers to look for the good in people, because he knows the strength of it.
He knows an Austrian constable will risk his life to save the life of a
young African-American pilot because it is the moral thing to do.
He knows an old woman who speaks no English will answer a hungry POW’s knock at her door and gently touch the visitor’s strange brown face with what must have been
wonder. He knows she will gesture for him to wait as she gathers up what she can spare. Potatoes, onions and a chunk of pork.
If wartime enemies are capable of such kindness, Brown knows that Americans will find a way forward even when their unity is tested.
“This too will pass,” he said. “This is still the greatest country in the world. It’s just that we have a little more work to do.”