"Never lost a bomber when they were flying escort. Never. This story was an HBO movie back in the mid-90's and it was very, very good"
They probably did a fine job, but I have never been convinced that they were superior to other American pilots which seems to be the point of everything that I have ever read about them.
As post 10 mentions their main claim to fame is simply not true.
Here is another link to a rewriting of history, it is about an award winning documentary that was revealed to be simply made up.
"It took a months-long campaign by veterans of the genuine liberator units to get PBS to disavow the 1992 documentary,"Liberators: Fighting on Two Fronts in World War II," which falsely credited the 761st Tank and another African-American battalion (183rd Combat Engineers) with liberating Buchenwald and Dachau, the two largest camps freed by Americans."
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3b125b384e8f.htm
Like I said the Tuskegee unit was a fine unit, but I have never seen the evidence that shows them as so vastly superior to our other units.
Thanks for the correction. Must remember: read before shooting off mouth.
I think most people take the wrong lesson from the Tuskegee airman. It wasn't a matter of black or whites being better pilots. It was the training. The Tuskegee airman weren't sent to Europe for a long time so they had more time to train and fly their planes, I'm guessing more than a year, before they got into combat. While the American pilot trained for a much shorter time before they were shipped overseas, I wouldn't be surprised if were talking a few months.
If you went into combat, would you want a soldier who went to the range and fired his weapon every day for a year or some guy out of basic training. They have both met the minimum training and are qualified but the one first one you would consider an expert with equipment and not just familiar.