- Pieces of a downed Tuskegee Airmen P-39 fighter plane wreckage are being hauled from Lake Huron to preserve history on the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum.
- The Tuskegee Airmen were the nation’s first all-Black air fighter squadron, and were known for excellence within the skies during World War II.
- Michigan served as a key training home for the pilots, though they were based in Tuskegee, Alabama.
A crucial chunk of American military aviation history sits engulfed by Lake Huron’s cold waters. That’s all changing due to a team mining the lake to drag up pieces of World War II-era fighter planes flown by the Tuskegee Airmen, with the plan to revive them as a part of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum in Detroit.
The primary all-Black air fighter squadron rose to prominence in World War II. Known officially because the 332nd Fighter Group of the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force, the Tuskegee Airmen—also often known as Red-Tails for the paint on their P-51 Mustangs—were considered among the most daring and talented fighter pilots for the U.S., routinely undertaking the damaging job of escorting bombers through German skies. They flew greater than 15,000 individual sorties and roughly 1,500 combat missions in World War II, including nearly 200 escort missions between the greater than 320 pilots within the group. They lost just 27 bombers in total, well below the common of 46.
Though based in Tuskegee, Alabama, the crew trained in Michigan. It’s there an estimated 15 airmen lost their lives, including five in Lake Huron. One among those young pilots was 2nd Lt. Frank Moody, 22, of Los Angeles. On April 11, 1944, experts imagine his machine guns malfunctioned, causing his plane to go down. “For whatever reason the guns went out of sync, and so when the pilot pulled the trigger, the bullets ripped off one propeller blade and damaged one other,” Wayne Lusardi, the state maritime archaeologist for Michigan, told Live Science. “And he was only about 50 feet above the lake, so it was throughout.”
The crash was likely at greater than 200 miles per hour and about one mile offshore.
“Since the engine is unbroken, you realize it crashed very shallow within the lake,” Isis Gillespie, the museum’s conservator of the P-39 told the AP, “and it was in fresh water, so it helped preserve it so much more. This find is so essential for Black history to learn the way Tuskegee airmen fought for this country and the way they fought a war at home.”
Months after the 1944 crash, Moody’s body washed ashore, but his fighter wasn’t seen again until 2014, and the museum didn’t start a recovery process until 2018.
“They got here across what looked like a automobile door, and wondered why there was a automobile door on the lake floor,” Lusardi told Live Science. “And it turned out that it was from a P-39.”
Crews have already salvaged the tail, guns, gauges, and munitions. A recent effort brought the 1,200-pound engine to the surface. “It’s broken, unfolded over almost a half-a-mile underwater and consists of hundreds of pieces,” Lusardi told the AP. “There’s still a very good amount of the plane that’s still on the underside.” The propellor was also found, showing off the holes from the guns.
Preservation of the engine—which remained intact even after the crash—has begun, and the hassle continues to drag more 80-year-old wreckage from the lake as a strategy to preserve Tuskegee Airmen history, including a pair of 32-foot-long wings.
Experts imagine that three additional Tuskegee planes remain underwater in Lake Huron. “Tuskegee Airmen are known for his or her valor and excellence in fighting the Germans within the air war over Germany in World War II,” Lusardi told the AP. “But what we haven’t heard about is the accidents in training that the airmen suffered.”