Training Ground of the Tuskegee Airmen | History Traveler Episode 90

[Music] after the japanese attack on pearl harbor on december 7th of 1941 there was a rush of young men from all over the country who really kind of dropped everything that they were doing and went and volunteered to fight against imperial japan and nazi germany there was a different group of americans who had to wage a different fight even before they could start training and go overseas that group was the african-americans and the fight that they had to wage was one to prove that they were equal and that they were competent to go and fight and take up arms just like anybody else and one of the places where they trained and made a name for themselves was right here in tuskegee alabama [Music] hello you've reached the tuskegee airman national historic site a unit of the national park service we are open six days a week monday through saturday from 9 a.m to 4 30 pm so uh earlier today i checked on the website which told me that this place was open and then i called just to be sure and got that message which also told me it was open and we got here turns out everything is closed uh so anyway i'm glad i didn't drive two hours just to come see this place but anyway uh we're going to make the the best of a bad situation unfortunately we're not going to be able to go inside any of these places at the tuskegee airfield our molten airfield is technically what it is but we're going to take a look around and and look at the external structures and and kind of show what we can so as i just mentioned this is uh motonfield i think i'm pronouncing that right m-o-t-o-n and you can see there are two hangers originally there was just one i believe and then there were so many recruits coming in that it increased the demand and they they built a second hangar this little tarmac area that you see right out here this would have been the busy part of this field so buses would have come in dropped off recruits and picked them back up to take them over to the tuskegee institute where they were being housed so during the war years this would have been this would have been a flurry of activity right here where we're standing oh look we found a little crack in the hangar door where we can look inside and that is one of the planes that the tuskegee airmen would have trained on so there you go whenever you're talking about the tuskegee airmen it's very easy to think that that just includes the pilots uh in fact anybody who was on the maintenance crew or the ground crew or anything like that was considered a tuskegee airman so this is an original structure here at the airfield this was an oil storage shed i mentioned that there were two hangers that were built here this is hangar number one so this would have been the original and uh this is where all of the main activities would have taken place here at the airfield so flight debriefings uh record keeping aircraft maintenance all of that would have taken place right here and then that door if we could go in was originally a machine shop but they've i think made it like an orientation information area now so again we're still looking at hanger number one here and there used to be two buildings on this side of the hangar and you can see they're no longer there but they've put up a frame to show what used to be there uh this one right here was the cadet house so this is where you would have like flight briefings and uh kind of a training school type thing uh for the flight cadets and then this one right here this was a maintenance shed yeah so they're kind of just preserving the idea at least of what was there now one of the things that is an ever-present danger at an airfield is fire there's a lot of fuel there's a lot of oil you know everything here is you know flammable so this is a fire protection shed so this would have had hoses fire extinguishers different tools for fighting fires again took it took everybody to to make this happen lots that goes into getting a pilot in the air what we're looking at right here is the bath and locker house here at moton field now ordinarily i wouldn't pay much attention to this but what makes this kind of historically interesting is that this was open to both blacks and whites so it's quite possible that this may have been one of the few if not the only integrated facility in the south in 1941. kind of cool all right and here's hanger number two that was constructed to meet the demand of all of the african-american recruits that were coming in now just to be clear i don't think this is the original i read that the original burned down in 1989 and this might be a rebuild but i'll have to check up on that right here is the brains of the entire field this is the control tower so this is where flight instructions would have been given out and orders to to land instructions to land would have would have been sent to the pilots would have been a whole lot going on there during training in the 1940s and i wish i could go in [Music] the tuskegee airmen are an important part not only of world war ii history but american history i mean it was these men who who really started paving the way for desegregation in this country so yeah even though we didn't get to go inside uh and look at the artifacts in the museum i'm glad that we came here because this is an important place and uh it was still fascinating to me to be able to walk these grounds where where all of these men walked and trained and got ready to go fight all right well it's alabama it's august i feel like i'm standing on the surface of the sun so we're gonna hop back in the car we're gonna head off to the next place [Music] [Music]

Channel: The History Underground

Views: 17,110

Keywords: history, history traveler, history underground, wwii, world war ii, tuskegee airmen, black pilots, black history, air force, red tails, tuskegee alabama, travel, alabama

Id: bmUFZ1Hf34Q

Length: 8min 15sec (495 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020