Original subtitles

Isn't that something?

Yeah, it is.

Boy, what a small world.

Everything had to be perfect.

The instructor gave me a maneuver to practice until

my next check ride.

I practice, practice, practice until I got it perfect.

I'm having a birthday party next year.

The 100th?

Huh?

- 100? - Yeah.

You fly along and the sky is so tranquil.

And then all of a sudden: bang!

And here's an 88 anti-aircraft shell that might explode

right next to you.

Each one of us wanted to be the best.

You get all those best together.

You've got quite an organization.

And that's what we had.

We painted not only the rudder, but

the whole damn tail red.

And so became known as the "Red Tails."

And it was just a symbol.

Because people started talking about, "The Real Red Tails."

In the waters of Lake Huron,

lies a P-39 Airacobra

flown during a Tuskegee training mission in 1944.

Hey there!

Please stand by.

.

Let me know when there are 12 there.

I got it.

You ready?

You ready?

A recovery team is piecing together what happened

in these waters all those years ago.

How many people know that there are

World War II assets and archeological sites in America,

no less in the Great Lakes?

Wayne Lusardi and Brian Smith...

Gary, do you want to zip me up?

...partnered up six years ago and they've been

dedicated to this unique chapter of America's

first Black military airmen ever since.

Bringing all this back together,

especially in a museum of the Tuskegee Airmen,

it's going to just solidify the fact that

these men who were not treated as equal citizens,

were willing to give their lives.

I think what's not in the history books is...

just the blood, sweat, and tears that the

Tuskegee airmen went through to fight for their country.

In training missions alone, 15 young men

lost their lives here between 1943 and 1944.

We have a sense of urgency to bring the

aircraft up because of its deterioration,

because of a potential looting threat.

The clock is definitely ticking.

The plane was piloted by 22-year-old Frank Moody,

who had already completed the rigors of the

fledgling Tuskegee program.

Recovering this from the lake bottom is

really going to hopefully lead to answering a lot of the

questions that we have about the site.

The Great Lakes were an advanced training site,

so by the time the pilots arrived here,

they were already the cream of the crop.

As a kid, I used to view the planes

taking off and landing and fantasizing about myself being

the pilot who's flying the plane.

So, I think that's what actually pointed me towards

trying to get into the aviation field when

World War II started.

Training for Tuskegee pilots on the home front

was difficult and dangerous.

There's this anxiety, every time you

get in that cockpit, you're always got it in the back of

your mind the danger that you're in.

The coastline here in the Great Lakes was

just like the coastline in France.

I didn't know what to expect.

All this is new to me.

I completed the exam, passed it, then went off to learn to fly.

So, they trained here in P-39 aircraft.

They would take off from Selfridge and fly no more than

50 feet above trees, hills, mountains, all the way to

Muskegon, turn around and

come back just to prepare them for combat.

At that time, Selfridge Field would have

been abuzz with wartime activity.

The 332nd had moved from Tuskegee, Alabama to Michigan

and was supported by young men who had volunteered to join

the war effort, just like Frank Moody.

He started working for an aviation

manufacturing company during the war and then ultimately

was able to get a spot at Tuskegee, where he earned his

wings in February 1944.

He had gone through the primary training,

the basic training, the advanced training,

and he was in combat training here

at Selfridge Air National Guard Base.

It's important to remember how young these

men and women were when they were called into the service,

taking on these training missions.

Each time you go up, you could potentially lose your life and

you're training to go to war.

I volunteered to serve my country and

I'm ready to serve my country and the war.

Their patriotism was deep and profound

because they not only wanted to win these military battles,

but they also wanted to change what America was about.

This isn't the Army's war.

It isn't the Navy's war.

It's the war of all Americans.

But at the time, the military didn't see

all Americans as fit to serve equally.

It took the lobbying of civil rights activists to force

Congress to alter the Selective Service Act of 1940.

The Selective Service Act has

non-discrimination provisions that are written into it based

on the previous protests of civil right activists.

That means that Black Americans can't be excluded

from military service.

Well, I volunteered at 17, but I was

taken into the service at 18.

At the beginning of World War II,

they had a mandatory for all

able-bodied males between the ages of 18 and 36

were to register for the draft.

What machines did you operate?

I operated boring mills, tool grinders,

drill presses, planes.

But most of the African American soldiers,

even though they did a fine job,

they were segregated to the point where

they were put into strictly menial labor.

White military leaders just didn't believe

that Black Americans had the intelligence, courage,

bravery, to be able to be good soldiers, and they,

military leaders wrote that into the official documentation.

"According to the studies, a Negro was

barely qualified for combat duty.

Was by nature subservient, mentally inferior, and

believed himself to be inferior to the White man.

Was susceptible to crowd psychology, cannot control

himself in the face of danger, and did not have the initiative,

courage, and resourcefulness of the White man."

That's what we had to put up with.

All wrong.

I went down to join the Army Air Corps.

Took the test.

Did very well on it, and after I had hassled them a bit about

not being called, I was informed by the military that

I would never be called for the Army Air Corps because

there were no colored units.

There was never going to be one.

There was no way I could go.

But the Black activist movement continued

its political assault on Washington

demanding military equality.

And what Black activists are demanding are

all things related to the war: they want access to defense

industry jobs and they want specific parts of the military

to be opened up, particularly things like the Army Air Corps.

The White House, Roosevelt, and other federal officials

just can't ignore anymore.

Roosevelt was running for a third term.

The Negro press and the NAACP, they were on the backs of

Congress wanting something to happen.

And Roosevelt figured that if he started a fighter squadron,

he'd get the Black vote, which he did.

And he won.

But all politics; but it worked out for us.

In January 1941, the war department established

the 99th Pursuit Squadron,

based out of Tuskegee, Alabama.

It was the first segregated unit within the Army Air Corps.

I'm proud of what Tuskegee has done.

I don't whether in any individual institution,

realize how much they are being watched by the outside world.

They were trained to be successful

fighter pilots, but they're also trained to really prove

to the larger military establishment that

Black Americans could do this work.

And that's exactly what Frank Moody was doing as

he advanced through the program.

An airman would have started out at

Tuskegee and then move to another base that

specifically focused on combat training.

And that's why they came to Selfridge.

They were learning how to come from over the horizon on the

water to strafe or destroy radar towers or installation

along the coast.

On the morning of April 11th, 1944, Frank Moody

was flying one of the most sophisticated

fighter aircraft built at the time: the P-39.

And did his pre-flight, and the mission for the day was to

leave early in the morning and to fly up over Lake Huron,

up the Saint Claire River, and get out over the Lake Huron

and do some gunnery exercises.

A P-39 Airacobra.

That's a unique airplane; the engine was behind the pilot.

It had four 50-caliber machine guns, two of which sat

right on top of the cowling.

In the middle of the airplane, was a 37-millimeter canon,

which shot a shell that would destroy tanks.

So, four aircraft, all P-39s,

left Selfridge Field.

Right before 8:00 in the morning, they came up over

Lake Huron.

They were flying in formation from south to north.

And when it was Lieutenant Moody's time, he discharged

his weapons, fired into the lake.

And then something happened to the aircraft that resulted in

an almost instantaneous crash into the water, cartwheeling

of the aircraft, and he was gone.

He was killed immediately in that accident.

His body was recovered in 54 days,

but the plane was never found.

Until April 11, 2014,

exactly 70 years to the date of the crash.

Frank Moody's P-39 was discovered by

Drew and David Losinski, a father-son dive team.

We were diving, my son and I, and the water

was crystal clear, this was early in the Spring, I think.

We went out and went to the first spot.

We figured it was a rock, I think, and the second spot,

Drew's at the very bow of the boat looking down;

we're looking, and he goes,

"Dad, I think you found, we found an airplane!"

And I'm back driving the boat,

and I says, you know how parents are,

"yeah, sure, okay."

"No, Dad, it's really an airplane."

The main thing that we wanted to do was to find out what the

plane was or how it got there, whose it was.

We were down swimming, looking at the wing,

and we dust it off.

You could see the red position light.

And looking at pictures, I figured there should be

something, something painted, so we fanned it off.

And there was a star, a box with a star.

It means that it's military, and it's a U.S. military plane.

So later on, we found out through lots of

research and finding key parts of the airplane, we got the

radio call number, which we linked to the accident report,

which told us that we found that plane 70 years to the

date of when it crashed.

It was pretty unbelievable.

The Losinski's became immediate stewards

of this site.

We started kind of putting our head together about

what are the options.

Should we leave it in place?

Should we document the entire wreck site ahead of time?

Should it be recovered either in part or partially?

Finding Frank Moody's plane triggered one of

the most important World War II archeological missions in

the Great Lakes.

This is the first airplane that has been

archeologically documented in the state of Michigan.

We're trying to determine a cause of the accident;

we're trying to see how an intact,

very complicated machine, suddenly breaks apart.

Recovering a plane that's been underwater for

70 years is no easy task.

It's a multi-year effort,

trying to raise it piece by piece

and then immediately start preservation efforts.

And the collaboration with the

Tuskegee Airmen National Museum has been key.

Frank Moody and his crash brings to light

the sacrifices that the Airmen made just to get to combat.

While we don't have his first-hand accounts from

Frank, we do from other Tuskegee Airmen.

I remember that when I went into the

service, the first place I was assigned to was

Kessler Field, Mississippi,

that being below what they call the Mason-Dixon Line.

Below that geographical point, segregation was the law.

It was not a choice, but a law there.

For Moody and other Tuskegee pilots,

they're always fighting two battles at the same time.

They're trained to fight a military battle, which was

frightening in its own right, but they're also fighting a

battle against racism,

a battle against second-class citizenship.

We got to Washington D.C.

a little early, so I got off the train, went and had

breakfast, came back, went to get in the car I was in,

conductor says, no, no, no, no.

You ride in the car where Negroes ride.

So, that was my introduction to segregation and the South.

So, if you're trying to think of a welcoming

place to train Black troops, Alabama in the 1940s wouldn't

be the first place that you would think of.

One of the challenges at Tuskegee Air Base was that it

was a Jim Crow base in a Jim Crow city in a Jim Crow state,

and that shaped almost every aspect of what training was

like for these Black pilots.

I didn't go to town.

I stayed on the base the whole time.

You get into trouble going into town.

Now, down at Tuskegee, one of the guys went into town,

and the Sheriff told him, if I ever catch you back in town,

I'll blow your brains out.

The Tuskegee Airmen had to channel their

frustration, their anger, into their military performance.

My heart must have skipped a couple of

beats and that type of thing, but I guess it was more with

joy than anything else.

I took off, and as soon as I broke grounds, I just felt

this exhilaration; I've done it, I've done it, I've done it!

Despite their excellence, the military and

the public were not on board,

so the NAACP and the Black press doubled down.

The Black press understood themselves

as a fighting press.

And the thing they were fighting for in the lead up to

World War II and then during World War II was to make sure

Black Americans had a chance to be able to serve their

country equally.

This relentless advocacy laid the foundation

for an innovative initiative: the Double Victory Campaign.

The Double V Campaign, is really the

rallying cry for Black Americans during the war.

It's launched by the Pittsburgh Courier.

What they're calling for is a victory over fascism abroad

and victory over racism at home.

Eleanor Roosevelt lent her powerful voice to the

fight early on.

Everything Eleanor Roosevelt says and

does becomes news.

Well, she had always heard that Negroes

could not fly airplanes, so she went to Tuskegee,

and she rode with a guy we call "Chief" Anderson.

And she found out we can fly airplanes

just like anybody else.

So, when they took the picture of she and Chief Anderson in

the airplane and it was in all the newspapers

throughout the country.

That sealed the deal right there.

Yes, they can fly just like anybody else.

As a matter of fact, they can fly better.

Just ask me.

In 1942, the first class of cadets graduated from

Tuskegee Army Airfield.

One of the most fantastic days in my life

there that I can never forget.

But it was graduation day, and just before going up and being

presented my wings and my bars, as I said,

"I think I've done it!"

Yes, it was a special day.

We succeeded in the training and got our wings and now

we're commissioned as an actual Second Lieutenant in

the United States Army.

And in July, a year before,

I was just getting into the service.

And now I'm a pilot.

I can fly airplanes.

But the risks were great.

Nearly 15,000 servicemen died during training exercises

in the United States alone.

Today, the archeological quest to understand what happened to

Frank Moody is in its tenth year.

According to the U.S. Army accident report,

the other three pilots that were in formation

with Lieutenant Frank Moody, two of them

reported seeing fragments coming off of the aircraft,

near the forward fuselage.

It's always a possibility that there's some kind of

mechanical problem with the aircraft.

The airplane started to shake apart,

and he lost control.

The airplane nosed into the lake, Lake Huron.

The Army, because they never found the

airplane, really never came to any conclusions as to

what caused the accident.

When the team started exploring the site in

2015, they had to figure out the best way to recover

all of the parts.

Looking at a vastly scattered airplane

has been a challenge.

It became very overwhelming.

It's like, okay, well, how are we going to do this?

The ultimate goal of this project is to bring the

aircraft up in its entirety.

Nick, you have the go-pro?

Yep.

The site is broken.

It's highly disarticulated.

You had and airplane that was roughly 30 feet in length and

about a 32-foot wingspan that is now in literally thousands

of pieces across the lake floor.

Gimme that knife for the cable.

Alright. Winch up.

We got this humongous propeller blade

with the gearbox.

I say stop.

Cool!

The accident report suggested that

something may have happened up forward in the fuselage,

and that could have been a propeller issue.

Of course, I was imagining

the whole airplane.

That's exactly what I was thinking too.

The remarkable thing is how far apart they all are.

You know, this one was 500 feet beyond, or the single

blade was 500 feet north, and the other one was

1,200 feet to the south of it.

This is maybe the last piece in the puzzle

of why the airplane went down.

It's, so far, you know, up until this point,

it's just been unexplainable.

It's about 70-some years and, wow.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy.

By the time Frank Moody was flying his

training missions, Tuskegee Airmen had

been in the European theater for over a year.

Wing cameras, synchronized with

blazing guns, record dramatic evidence of Nazi planes

blasted from the skies.

I never thought about air-to-air combat as

a big problem.

I looked for it.

I'd be flying along, "oh, I hope we get some enemy aircraft."

I thought about that is a duel between two men.

I believed that I was a competent pilot, and I knew in

my mind that I was.

Lee Archer flew under the command of

Benjamin O. Davis, Junior.

Davis is one of the amazing figures

from World War II.

He graduates from West Point in 1936.

He's the first Black person to graduate from West Point

in the 20th century, only the fourth overall.

It's only with the Tuskegee Experiment getting started

that he has the opportunity to pursue his lifelong dream of

becoming a pilot.

He was a no-nonsense guy.

Everything had to be done right.

And you can't knock him for that.

That's the way things should be no matter what you do,

you do it right.

And he was our commander.

He made a military man out of me.

I think that he taught us discipline.

And he always tried to encourage us to improve

ourselves because he said, "America's watching you."

Today is a really big deal.

It's a major piece of the puzzle.

It's going to tell us a lot about the airplane and what

was going on with it when Lieutenant Moody crashed here.

It's really murky down there.

I thought it would be better today because

it's sunny and calm.

I think yesterday just stirred everything up.

We're still waiting on straps, ok?

Ok.

Do not move the cable.

Very good. Good.

In a few minutes we're going to see

Alison engine coming up that powered the P-39 that

Frank Moody was flying.

I can't wait.

I got that the cradle's

going to be the way.

I'm seeing the airbag.

The crane hook is coming up.

There it is!

About two feet underwater and it hasn't been this this high

since 1944, April 11th.

Yeah, you can stop right there.

The bolts are underneath.

Good work Wayne!

Pretty smooth!

Congratulations!

.

Piece by piece airplane's coming up.

I don't have the words to express.

Probably the heaviest single component of

the aircraft.

So, very cool, it's really going to start to teach us

a lot about this airplane.

Getting it back to the

Tuskegee Airmen National Museum in Detroit

will start the conservation process.

Having the engine, the propeller, the gearbox,

all of that to examine from a forensics side will help us

determine what was the cause of the accident.

Are we good to good?

Alright.

Now, we have to transport it to shore.

We've got to get it off of this barge, move it onto a

flatbed vehicle, and then transport it to the

conservation laboratory in Detroit.

We do need to move the water machine.

Are you pumping currently?

No.

- No. - Ok.

- We just turned it off. - Ok.

Ready for the engine?

- We got it. - I got it.

You go up, just a little bit.

Alright, hold.

Alright, nice and slow.

Nice.

The laying out the plane like this today is

an incredible visual opportunity to get a feel

for how big this airplane is.

It's hard to imagine it when you're underwater looking at

just a little piece here and a little piece there and it's

pretty impressive to kind of see it like this.

This is the first time these artifacts have come together

in this orientation since the airplane went apart

79 years ago.

This is the artifact that designed this entire airplane:

the 37-millimeter cannon.

It was mounted at the nose.

It was also armed with 50-caliber machine guns

on either side.

And so with all of this stuff up in the forward fuselage,

it was no room for the engine.

So, the engine went back behind the pilot.

And that was a very unique situation for a single-seat

fighter aircraft at that time.

It gives me pause to think this big, massive

1200- pound engine, would actually fly in an airplane.

But the P-39's had their limitations;

they performed best at lower altitudes,

better for strafing.

They needed airplanes that would go

further, and they got the 51.

It could go further. It could go higher.

It could fly longer. It could turn better.

It had all of the agile traits of a fighter.

When I got in the P-51 and I took it off,

I fell in love with it, the first time I flew it.

It was such a beautifully handling aircraft.

The Tuskegee pilots had a very specific

role in combat.

Their job was to accompany bombers on these

targeted bombing runs.

Huge fleets of allied bombers

protected by umbrellas of fighter planes, continue their

all-out offensive upon Nazi war plants in Europe.

The White fighter groups, they were

averaging 46 bombers lost per mission.

Per mission.

That's a lot of people.

A lot of people.

That's why we got the job of escorting bombers.

Colonel Davis said, "don't leave the bombers.

If that German fighter leaves, let him go and you stick with

the bombers.

There's ten men on each bomber airplane, only one man in that

German fighter.

We want to protect the bombers and bring those home.

When we first started flying with them,

they knew that there was a new fighter group that had joined:

the Red Tails.

They said who are these guys flying these damn Red Tails?

These guys are with us all the way.

By the way, who are these guys?

One of the things that happens after the

Tuskegee Airmen get into combat is they start to

receive media attention, not just from Black newspapers,

but now from national newspapers.

They say that they've mastered the art of aviation,

that they're squashing Hitler's Aces like bugs.

It got to the point where they were

requesting us.

They wanted us.

They didn't believe we were flying airplanes when we got

over there, because the book said "no, they can't do that."

On a bombing mission over enemy

territory, a fighter escort is a mighty comforting sight.

This man thought it was plenty good enough.

As far as he was concerned, this man could fly tough cover

for him any day.

When I was escorting the bombers,

there were White guys in these planes here,

they were just Americans there.

We were all on the same team.

That's what they were, and I never looked at them as being

White or anything else.

We were just team members.

After their many successes in Europe,

the Tuskegee Airmen were unstoppable.

Now, you may ask, who was the best?

Depends on who's telling the story!

Right now, I am!

Throughout the world, throngs of people

hail the end of the war in Europe.

Victory Over Europe Day was a time of

jubilation for Black Americans.

The whole world must be cleansed of the

evil from which half the world has been freed.

The hope that with the war over, they will

finally be able to come back to the United States and start

to see some of what they fought for come into reality.

I remember this for the rest of my life:

we were coming down the gangplank, getting off the

boat, they had a sign at the bottom of the gangplank:

Whites to one side.

Colored to the other side.

And I said to myself, "This is some country."

After the war, the Tuskegee pilots returned to

segregated units, but their successes in Europe

served as a rallying cry for change.

One of the first and most important

civil rights milestones after the war was the signing of

Executive Order 9981.

By Executive Order of President

Harry S. Truman: integration of all military units.

It will take time, but the policy was established.

The more I thought about it,

we really did something special.

If we had not been as successful as we were, there is

no way that Truman would have possibly made that move.

So, the military becomes integrated

before most of corporate America, before most of

higher education does.

And so, it really provides one of the building blocks for the

larger success of the Civil Right Movement

in the 1950s and 60s.

One of the troubling things that happens at the end of

World War II is that the first wave of books that come out

about the war,

really write Black Americans out of the story.

That's why it took so long before the service,

the patriotism, the tremendous successes, and path-breaking

work of the Tuskegee Airmen to come to the forefront.

Now, Frank Moody's recovered P-39...

Hey, we'll swing around.

Is adding a new chapter to the Airmen's stories.

It's amazing that this gun isn't bent.

When we start to look at this and when we

have this all kind of laid out here, we're starting to see a

lot of damage that happened in the propeller blades.

And you might think that that's just a rock hole or

something that was damage as this artifact was sitting on

the lake floor for the last eight decades, but when you

start looking at the other two blades and they have identical

holes in them, suddenly we're starting to see something

here; a major problem that's going on with this aircraft.

Synchronization, if you've ever

gone to dance class and danced with a partner,

you don't want to step on their toes.

So, you would synchronize your steps, so that you always

miss each other's feet.

And this airplane had a synchronizer or an interrupter

in the hub, which knew where the propeller blade was and

would stop this gun from firing when the blade was

in front of the gun.

In in a sense, the pilot's not actually

shooting the gun.

He's pulling the trigger, but then the airplane's deciding,

right here, when that gun is actually firing.

Yes.

When Lieutenant Moody pulled the trigger,

the guns fired into the propeller blades and

they created an entry hole and an exit wound.

And that's the same, very consistent,

on all three of these blades.

If it was Frank Moody's fault, you know,

due to pilot error or a collision with another aircraft,

we would see other damage, especially in these blades

that we're not seeing.

The proof found in these blades serve as a

testament to Frank Moody and his extraordinary journey.

Amazing!

In the end, it was the mechanical system

that failed him.

Now we can chronicle, highlight, and

talk about his life and the importance of his life toward

the war effort, toward fighting the Germans.

Artifacts like the plane help us make those

jumps between scale in terms of how we talk about history.

Frank Moody's story is one piece of the puzzle that helps

to fill in our larger understanding of what America

was like during World War II.

And more than anything, it gives us an opportunity to

help honor the service and sacrifices of

those Black veterans.

For years the Tuskegee Airmen pushed the

boundaries of what was possible,

distinguishing themselves in the air,

while breaking barriers for Black Americans everywhere.

One of the through lines in Black history

is Black people having to prove they could do things

other people doubt that they could do.

Outside, the next day, then it all came back.

Everything we did had to be perfect.

Everything had to be perfect.

That helped us and made us better pilots.

That's why we were so good.

What can I say?

They were trying to take us down the drain,

and we said, no, no, no.

Well, it's a matter that we prove them wrong

that we could do a job and that's about all you can do.

But they'll always be some doubting Thomases,

but we did the best we could.

Well, that's it.

That's it, we proved it.

And that hangs on you when you feel as though that every day

you have something to prove.

We showed them that yes, we can think.

We can think under pressure, we can think all the time.

We know how to do the job and get the job done, done right.

I'm in the mood to fly that Cessna

right now, you want to go up with me?

Ok. If I can get in!

That's my problem!

Ok!

Captioned by Cotter Media Group.