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| Tuskegee
Airman remembers life as a trainee by Tech. Sgt. John B. Dendy IV Aiman Magazine SAN ANTONIO (AFPN) — When retired Senior Master Sgt. Dan Summers basks with his son, Dan, in the golden company of 1940s-era warplanes, he recalls life with the Tuskegee Airmen flight training program as a junior, but vital aircraft maintainer. "Perfection existed on our flightline. Our integrity ensured it, " Summers said. A 22-year-old hotshot aircraft mechanic displays history-making courage as he and 29 other African-Americans arrive on a muddy work site 13 miles outside the Tuskegee city limits. He finds his machinery in crates. His government housing is a tent in the cold air of an Alabama pine forest. This man's outfit is not wanted in America, but the patriot stands tall. "That was my introduction to Tuskegee," retired Senior Master Sgt. Dan Summers said. Yes, Tuskegee, as in "The Tuskegee Airmen," the African-Americans trained largely by fellow African-Americans for status as airmen within the Army Air Corps of 1940s America. Like many republics, the United States had a legacy of ethnic tension. The sort of injustice our country rebuffs today. Tuskegee helped give diversity a fighting chance in America.
He has always told the truth on who "ran" the training pipelines at Tuskegee. Did the enlisted and civilian members run those lines to perfection? You bet your lambskin flight jacket they did! "There's no way they could have done that without enlisteds and civilians," the 81-year-old Summers stressed. "The results of their work were evident. The pilot is the end product of the flight training program. He's in the observable spot, so he gets the attention. "Credit for this thing should include the enlisted support people," he said. "But that's just beginning." That first cadre of African-American technicians repeatedly wrenched results from a flight of mostly rebuilt training aircraft. Civilian and enlisted members outnumbered officers 10-to-1, but they got no "ink" for posterity. It is as if they did not exist. One must "unentomb" details on the technicians from well-preserved yearbooks in the chests of the Tuskegee veterans' homes. They show freshly shaven faces like Summers' and the first enlisted African-American meteorology, chemical warfare and aircraft maintenance airmen. Young Summers entered this system by chance. Studying at Virginia's Hampton Institute had him strapped for tuition. So he left school to toil in a steel foundry. A year before the war, he traded that job for a mechanic's post at Pennsylvania's Olmsted Air Depot. He was an apt pupil. "I was interested in the airplane from a mechanic's standpoint, rather than a pilot's," Summers said. By the 1941 Christmas season, the bookish technician got wind of an outlandish project to determine if ethnicity was a factor in the flying business. This shot across the bow brought out the patriot in the slender, tennis-playing aircraft mechanic with unfinished business at college. "I thought, 'Daniel, what can I get out of this besides a trip to Alabama?'" When federal recruiters said " 'A promotion goes with it,' I said, 'Hey, you've got me.' " In May 1942, the War Department manifested Summers and 28 more black aircraft workers on a contracted Pullman car train. Porters drew the blinds for security as the train wove south to a new military stop at Chehaw, Ala. The technicians went to their airfield site in Army trucks. Summers toughed out the beddown period at Tuskegee as a very junior aircraft maintenance man. He became an assistant superintendent of civilians who trained prospective airmen. "I'd only been in the game a year, and I fell into training people on hydraulics and props," he said. As a man who was admittedly not military-minded when he got to Tuskegee, Summers warmed to the experience "without a lot of trauma." But there were problems. Quality of life was not good for Tuskegee's civilian maintainers. They had to scrap for housing in the area. Only African-American landlords opened their homes and hearts. "The first year, paydays came sometimes a month late. People we rented from understood, because they had been through (discrimination) themselves," Summers said. Tuskegee became a war machine and a home, once housing was built, halfway into the war. "They had about 100 houses on the base. With the number of people we had, 100 was nothing. It was called Mitchell Village, after Gen. Billy Mitchell," he recalls. (Mitchell was one of the founding fathers of Air Force aviation.) "I was fortunate to merit one as a supervisor," Summers said. "When people moved on base, they were living among friends in an Air Force community. The families enjoyed it." "Mister" Summers became "Private" Summers in 1944. His first hitch after basic was Tuskegee. "They sent me back as a private, and I still had the house," he said. "That was like putting a rabbit in a briar patch. It could only happen in this great country of ours." Summers worked hard in his rookie Air Corps season. His team of civilians and airmen had lots of old warplanes to make over. People at the busy base bonded over maintenance sessions. They furiously fixed flight controls on worn, sky blue-bellied, open cockpit Stearman training biplanes and the ubiquitous BT-13 Vultee monoplanes. Unforgiving but agile, the enclosed cockpit Vultees were known as "Vibrators" for shaking airmen violently at low speeds. The team also coaxed missions out of silvery T-6 Texan trainers with banged-up cockpits, P-40 Warhawk fighters and B-25 Mitchell bombers. Their airfield sparkled with tough warplanes and airmen with competitive attitudes to match. "The people assigned to Tuskegee made Tuskegee," Summers said. "Our airfield probably had more enlisted people with college experience than any other. They knew inspections and aircraft." Summers flew inspection check rides in Tuskegee's trainers and B-25 Mitchell bombers. "I liked the B-25 because I was in a position to test-fly, just the pilot and me," he said. His first encounter with Tuskegee cadet and later — Gen. Daniel "Chappie" James Jr., was "accidental." (James was a World War II instructor pilot and veteran of more than 179 combat missions during the Korean and Vietnam conflicts.) "I ran the crash crew for a while and this cadet couldn't get his gear down. They foamed the runway, and he came in with his gear up. "When we got out there, here was this cadet (James) just sitting cross-legged on the wing of the airplane. I was wondering who it was,"the incredulous airman said. Summers' crash crew found a broken emergency "up-lock release" cable inside the metal of that P-40 Warhawk fighter plane — and respect for James. "People took a personal interest in the airplanes and each other," he said. Usually, the flight chief would meet the airplane along with the crew chief. 'Never put a sick airplane to bed.' That was the philosophy. You got it well, then put it to bed, or you'd lose your job in a hurry." Losing true friends was a horrific and too-frequent event in training for war, Summers said. Summers was on the night crash shift as a civilian. One of his tennis partner college buddies launched from a Tuskegee runway in the P-40 Warhawk. The first lieutenant was killed when that aircraft crashed several minutes into the training flight. "It wasn't always pleasant," Summers reflected. He also said such experiences make integrity his favorite measure of an airman's worth. "Perfection existed on our flight line," Summers said. "Our integrity ensured it. We put lives on the line at 10,000 feet." Summers' attitude steeled his fellow airmen through the tough Tuskegee training years. "I told people, 'Forget what's outside the gate. Put everything you have into the effort at hand.' Today I'd like to tell them, 'Don't forget to credit everyone for a job well done,'" he said. (Courtesy of Airman Magazine) |
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