IN MAY 1949 THEY WERE THE THE VERY FIRST U. S. AIR FORCE TOP GUN PILOTS
332nd Fighter Group - Awarded First Place In The Conventional (Propeller) Aircraft Division

*** THE TUSKEGEE AIRMEN ***

"Top Gun Commander" - Captain Alva Temple

Tuskegee Airmen Virtual Cemetery

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The following biography was brought to my attention by JimmyH, a fellow Find A Grave member. It was written by Sue Tryforos, and she has graciously given her permission to include it on Flight Officer Thomas Hawkins' memorial page.

FRIDAY JANUARY 14, 2011, 9:58 AM
BY SUE TRYFOROS
GLEN ROCK BOROUGH HISTORIAN
GLEN ROCK GAZETTE

Hawkins served in WWII with Tuskegee Airmen

Thomas Lawson Hawkins was born in 1923 in Springfield, Mass. and moved to Glen Rock with his parents, William and Rebecca, when he was very young. The family lived in several homes in Glen Rock over the years, residing on Hamilton Avenue and Broad Street before settling on Dean Street by 1941.

Hawkins was very bright and athletic and had a gift for vocal music. He attended Central School, Glen Rock's new junior high school on Harristown Road, and Ridgewood High School (as all Glen Rock public school students did at the time) before graduating as a member of the Class of 1942.

In high school, Hawkins was a part of the track and football teams and a member of the Glee Club and A Capella Choir. His family attended the Mt. Bethel Baptist Church on South Broad Street in Ridgewood where he sang in the Junior Choir. He attended Temple University's School of Chiropody in Philadelphia after high school graduation, but it was a time of war and his college degree would have to wait. On March 17, 1943, Hawkins enlisted in the Army Air Forces and began his training to become one of World War II's Tuskegee Airmen.

The recruits enlisted into a program, ordered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (over the objections of his top generals), to train African-American men to fly and maintain combat aircraft. This was a revolutionary concept for a country that was still deeply segregated, especially in the South where much of the flight training was to take place.

Thomas' parents were both born in Virginia, so perhaps Cadet Hawkins was not as shocked as some of the other northern recruits when they first encountered Jim Crow laws while traveling to basic training at Keesler Field in Mississippi or Moton Field in Alabama. Union Station in Washington, DC was the demarcation line for many; at that point, the train conductor would force all black passengers to move to a designated car, which was the dirty, smoky, smelly car directly behind the coal car. In J. Todd Moye's excellent book "Freedom Flyers" (2010), pilot Maurice Thomas, a native New Yorker, is quoted, "I'll tell you the God's honest truth: when I got into the South, I thought I was in a loony bin."

After basic training, the men were assigned to Tuskegee Army Air Field (TAAF) in Macon County, Ala. for flight instruction. The entire program at TAAF - instruction, administration, cadets, maintenance and support - was strictly segregated.

During their training in Alabama and later in other states across the country, the Tuskegee pilots often faced discrimination both on and off the military bases. The NAACP and the existing network of black newspapers throughout the United States made certain that civil rights issues encountered by the Airmen were not ignored. Many government and military leaders did not support the Tuskegee program and the training facilities were initially inferior or inadequate, but by 1945 almost 1,000 pilots had been trained and 450 Tuskegee Airmen served overseas, flying over 1,500 missions in Africa and Europe. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was an early and very public supporter of the program, as was Sen. Harry S. Truman (D-Missouri).

Once on active duty across the Atlantic, the Airmen became the legendary Red Tails - so called because they painted the tails of their P-15 Mustangs with the reddest paint available. The pilots wanted everyone, friend and foe, to know that they were "on station."

U.S. military strategy was to use heavy bombers based in Italy to pound away at German industrial targets, and the Red Tails (officially the 332nd Fighter Group) were fighter escorts used to protect the bombers on their missions. The 332nd was so skilled and proficient that the bomber crews began referring to them as the "Red Tail Angels." In November 1944, Flight Officer Hawkins was assigned to the 100th Fighter Squadron, 332nd Fighter Group and by Jan. 1 he had 28 missions and three kills to his credit. He was awarded the Air Medal and Oak Leaf Cluster in early 1945 for bombing missions against German trains carrying supplies to the Russian Front. Soon after, he was named flight leader of his group and was in command of a squadron of nine pilots.

On March 7, 1945, Flight Officer Hawkins was killed taking off from the Ramitelli Airdrome in Italy when his plane crashed on the runway during a mission to Munich. He was 22 years old, and left behind his parents, who remained in Glen Rock for the remainder of their lives, and his wife, Gloria, whom he had married in Alabama on Christmas Day in 1943.

After the war, the veterans of the 332nd Fighter Group returned to a United States still decades away from the enactment of the Civil Rights Act (1964). They came home to continuing discrimination in housing, jobs and education. Their exemplary performance in battle as the 332nd Fighter Group helped convince President Harry S. Truman to sign Executive Order 9981 to desegregate the U.S. Armed Services in 1948. This order opened up job opportunities in the military for African-Americans that were still denied to them in the private sector.

In March 2007, President George W. Bush presented the Congressional Gold Medal, the most prestigious medal Congress can bestow, to the Tuskegee Airmen for their contributions and sacrifices made decades earlier. At the presentation ceremony, former Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the 300 airmen, widows and other relatives gathered in the Capitol rotunda: "Why did you serve a nation that would not serve you? When the conflict was over, you returned to the same conditions. You still believed in a vision of what the Declaration and Constitution set forth of what America could be. Thank you for what you did for African-Americans. Thank you for what you've done for America."

The Congressional Gold Medal, part of which belongs to Glen Rock's Flight Officer Thomas Hawkins, is on display at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC.


Since the publication of the above article, Ms Tryforos found the following additional information:

When he crashed his plane in Italy, he was in an unfamiliar plane: his usual plane, the "Gloria", experienced engine trouble that morning so he switched to a different airplane for the mission. This new plane ran off the side of the runway and crashed, killing Hawkins. He was a remarkable young man and my town of Glen Rock, NJ is very proud to call him "one of ours".