WINNING THE RIGHT TO FLY

By CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY

Five decades later the wounds are still fresh. Charles Dryden is 74 years old now, but during World War II, when he was young, he was one of the Tuskegee airmen, the U.S. Army Air Corps's first unit of African-American combat pilots. He remembers traveling in the South with his fellow airmen and being forced out of his seat and into the Negroes-only car at the front of the train, where the soot and smoke were thickest, to make room for German pows. He recalls being barred from the cafeteria at military bases, where Italian pows were served hot meals. As he tells these stories, Dryden begins to cry. "How could my country do this to me?" he asks. "It still hurts like hell."

The first battles of a war are fought over territory; the final ones are waged over memory. The lack of recognition of the black Americans who first struggled for the right to train as pilots, then for the right to fly in combat, is one of the saddest lapses in U.S. military history--an important saga missing from most textbooks. Now after decades of struggle, the story of the Tuskegee airmen, and the vicious racism they overcame to become war heroes, will finally reach a wide audience. Starting on Aug. 26, with additional play dates over the following few weeks, HBO will broadcast a TV drama based on the adventures of the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron, which first went into combat in April 1943 and eventually shot down 16 enemy planes, destroyed four more and damaged six others in just nine months. Laurence Fishburne (What's Love Got to Do with It), Allen Payne (New Jack City), Cuba Gooding Jr. (Outbreak) and Andre Braugher (TV's Homicide) play the much-decorated flyers. "Nothing compares to this," says Robert Williams, 73, an airman who sold the story concept to hbo after spending 43 years shopping it around Hollywood. "Not even flying 50 missions, shooting down two Germans and getting the Distinguished Flying Cross from the President"--all of which he's done--"compares with getting this movie made."

The real-life story of the Tuskegee airmen began in 1939, when black leadersstarted to pressure President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to desegregate the armed forces. But among the military brass "there was a general consensus that colored units are inferior to the performance of white troops, except for service duties,'' according to a 1942 memo to General Dwight D. Eisenhower. And the idea of blacks flying planes was preposterous to many white officers. Williams, who had learned to fly in his hometown of Ottumwa, Iowa, before the war, recalls applying for military service when he was 20 and being told by the white recruiter, "The Air Corps is not taking niggers."

As the war effort geared up, the Army was eventually cajoled into establishing one flight-training school for black pilots in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1941. Hundreds of applications flooded in. The blacks who entered the program were a stellar group, with degrees from such top universities as Howard and Northwestern. Their military-aptitude-test scores were so high that white officers suspected cheating and made them take the tests again. Still, only five out of the first 13 trainees survived the rigorous course and the corrosive racism of some white flight instructors. Former Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and prominent New York City businessman Percy Sutton were among the 992 African Americans who eventually passed through Tuskegee--only to discover that they were still second-class citizens in the eyes of the military. The Tuskegee units were continually passed over for combat assignments. According to Charles ("Chief") Anderson, who headed the group of African-American civilian flight instructors training the Tuskegee pilots, there were several suicides and daredevil fatalities among the intensely frustrated young flyers. Things began to change when First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited Tuskegee in 1941 and, against the advice of her staff, took a test flight with Anderson. It was a well-publicized vote of confidence in the program. Soon the 99th Fighter Squadron was formed under the command of Benjamin O. Davis, the first black graduate of West Point, and dispatched to North Africa.

Once there, however, the 99th was relegated to the routine duty of strafing ground targets. Eventually, they began escorting bombers to their targets, but the commander of the fighter group, Colonel William Momyer, went out of his way to make them feel unwelcome. Time, in its Sept. 20, 1943, issue, questioned the fighting capability of blacks in general, asking, "Is the Negro as good a soldier as the white man?"

Then, in January 1944,the squadron happened upon a group of enemy planes. In less than five minutes, the airmen knocked down five. Later that same day, another group from the 99th downed three more. They had proved they could fight. The 99th eventually became part of the 332nd, a larger all-black unit, and altogether the pilots of the 332nd flew 1,578 missions and won 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses and 744 air medals , making them among the most highly decorated pilots of the war. They never lost a bomber under their protection, and eventually white bomber pilots began to specifically ask for them.

At a screening of the hbo movie in Atlanta this month for the annual reunion of the Tuskegee airmen, the audience cheered at the moment when Braugher, playing Lieut. Colonel Davis, says, "The word's in about our next mission: Berlin. And we weren't assigned--we were requested." By and large, the Tuskegee veterans loved the film, even though it takes artistic license with their story. "I'd like to have seen some more of the hazing and Army regulations we had to put up with,'' says former navigator James Warren, "and I would like to have seen more on the officers' club mutiny.'' War ren was in a Tuskegee group sent to Freeman Air Force Base in Seymour, Indiana, in April 1945 for further training. When they arrived, they discovered that a separate officers' club, with few amenities and dubbed Uncle Tom's Cabin, had been hastily set up for their use. The black officers protested, presenting themselves in waves for admittance at the regular officers' club until 104 of them were arrested and restricted to their quarters. One, 2nd Lieut. Roger Terry, was court-martialed.

Fifty years later, Terry, who completed law school but couldn't join the bar because of this conviction, is president of the Tuskegee Airmen's Association. Presiding over the reunion banquet this year, he was flabbergasted when an Assistant Secretary of the Air Force stood up and announced that the service had set aside his conviction, calling it "a terrible wrong in the annals of U.S. military history." Says Terry: "I spilled my water glass. It is a relief for my wife and children."

After the war, the Tuskegee airmen found that their medals and flight experience counted for little in the professional world. Flying jobs in the private sector--indeed, most good jobs in the private sector--remained mostly closed to them. Airman LeRoy Eley worked as a flight instructor in civilian life; all 68 of the white pilots he taught were hired for commercial work, but he never got a job offer.

The airmen also faced obstacles in Hollywood. Williams started pitching his airmen movie script to studios in 1952. Others also tried to bring the story to the screen. A 1977 film about the airmen, starring Henry Fonda and Billy Dee Williams, fell apart because of financing problems. Steven Spielberg toyed with the project, as did actor and producer Tim Reid, who tried to develop a mini-series for cbs in 1980. Finally producer Frank Price, who had carried the Williams script with him from one studio job to another since 1984, struck a deal with hbo. Even with a modest $8.5 million budget, the television proj ect had no trouble attracting major talent. Says Malcolm-Jamal Warner (The Cosby Show), who plays one of the airmen: "It's a crime, literally, that people don't know who they are [and] that it takes a television movie to legitimize them."

--Reported by Deborah Edler Brown and Sylvester Monroe/Los Angeles and Joseph J. Kane/Atlanta

With reporting by DEBORAH EDLER BROWN AND SYLVESTER MONROE/LOS ANGELES AND JOSEPH J. KANE/ATLANTA