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In Sarasota, an Airman for life

By COLETTE BANCROFT
Published July 26, 2005

	[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
	Dr. Yenwith Whitney, 80, holds a picture of himself from 1943 when he started primary flight training as a member of the 44F Tuskegee Airmen, a branch of the U.S. Army Air Force. Whitney gave this picture to his parents; the faded inscription at the bottom reads Your Son Yenwith.
	[Photo courtesy of Dr. Yenwith Whitney]
	Yenwith Whitney poses with members of his squad, who called themselves the Lucky Seven. They were part of 44F Tuskegee Airmen. Whitney, who flew a single-engine fighter plane, was the youngest in his class at the age of 18. Whitney is pictured at top, second from right. d>
	They were pilots - and pioneers In 1925, a study by the Army War College concluded that African-Americans were inherently ill-suited for combat physically and psychologically. Starting in 1941, 992 men proved how wrong that study was. Sixty years after the end of World War II, the surviving members of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black pilots in the U.S. Armed Forces, will gather next month to recall their distinguished record. Two former Tuskegee Airmen who live in the Tampa Bay area talk about their experiences and how the ground-breaking program changed their lives. Always a flier at heart At 80, Henry Bohler still maintains his military bearing: spine straight, shoulders squared. And he is still passionate about what he learned as a Tuskegee Airman: "I love to fly."

SARASOTA - The first time Yenwith Whitney tried to sign up to fight in World War II, he was rated 4F. At 112 pounds, he was described by the draft board examiners as "underweight and physically immature."

"I was devastated. But it turned out to be probably the best thing that ever happened to me," Whitney says, because he ended up becoming a Tuskegee Airman.

Whitney, 80, lives in Sarasota. "I've retired three times," he says, after a distinguished career that included degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Columbia University and more than 30 years as an educator and administrator for the United Presbyterian Church.

But in 1943, he was 18 years old, a graduate of Stuyvesant High School in New York City. He read a newspaper story about the Tuskegee Airmen program.

"I had never been near an airplane. The only thing I knew was I had built model airplanes when I was a kid." But he wanted to fly, and, like his friends, he wanted to go to war. "We were 18; to us it was a big adventure."

He sailed through the written exam, but, after that 4F rating, the physical was daunting.

"The day I was to take the medical exam, I ate all the bananas I could hold and drank all the water I could." But his pulse was elevated, and the doctors told him to go home and calm down.

"The next day it was the same. So my dad's friend, who was a doctor, gave me something to calm me down, and that worked."

Whitney waited to see the flight surgeon along with a big, strapping fellow. "I thought, he looks like a pilot. Then he came out with his face down on his chest, disappointed. And I thought, they'll never take me."

He was even more daunted when he saw the flight surgeon, a blond Southerner. "I had never been in the South, but I was sure he wouldn't take me. Then he looked at me and he said, "I think you'd make a good pilot'."

Soon, Whitney was bound for Keesler Field in Biloxi, Miss. "Mississippi: It had a nasty sound to me," he says.

He had grown up in the Bronx in a mostly white neighborhood. "I was in a white Boy Scout troop. All my close friends were white."

But he knew he would be treated differently in the South in the 1940s. "At the base they told us, "If you want to be pilots, if you want to be successful, what's out there is not your affair now. You have to learn'."

After three months in Biloxi, Whitney's class moved on to the pilot training program at Tuskegee, Ala. Not long after arriving, he says, "I saw a black pilot for the first time. It was the most exciting moment in my life up to then."

Flying was as thrilling as he had hoped. "I'll never forget my first flight. I could see the ground going by under me and then, whoosh, we were in the air."

The class' cadet captain, Hugh White, was harder on them than the instructors were, Whitney says. "The hierarchy was very rigorous. You had to learn (nonsense) verses, and if you got any of the words wrong, you had to do the duck walk.

"If you were a cadet and you damaged a plane, you were finished. Some guys just cracked."

His class, 44F, started with 64 members. In June 1944, 26 graduated.

Soon, Whitney was in the war. He was stationed in Italy at Foggia, with the 332nd Fighter Group, 301st Fighter Squadron. The group had four squadrons instead of the usual three. "We were black and they couldn't send us to any other group.

"But we weren't fighting any of this stuff. We were there to fly."

Whitney was assigned a new plane, a P-51D Mustang. "Everybody loved that plane. It was sleek, it was secure."

The plane's top speed was about 435 mph, its cruising speed 300. The first thing Whitney did was dive it to 600 mph, and at 550 it started to vibrate because of uneven cable tension.

"My buddy said, "Are you crazy? Why are you doing that?' And I told him if I have a (German) on my tail I want to know I can get down there."

Whitney says the person who had the most impact on him during his service was Benjamin O. Davis, who commanded the 332nd and was the first black officer in the Army Air Corps. Davis' leadership was the key to the Tuskegee Airmen's proud record of never losing a bomber in 200 escort missions.

"He talked to the new pilots and said, "You will follow the orders exactly. If you are attacked, you will head them off and get back in formation immediately'."

Fighter pilots were eager to become "aces" by shooting down five enemy planes, but pursuing German fighters made them and the bombers they escorted vulnerable to attack.

"We never lost a bomber to enemy fighters, and it was due to Benjamin O. Davis," Whitney says. "I flew Davis' wing once, when I was a green young pilot. I considered that a great honor."

Whitney says the black pilots got along well with the Italian people but still dealt with prejudice on the part of white Americans. "We were very good in the air, but on the ground we were just black. This was 1945. It wasn't 1955 or 1965."

The white pilots had a rest camp on the Isle of Capri, but blacks were not admitted, so a camp was set up for them in Naples. After a sightseeing trip in the nearby countryside one day, Whitney and a friend were trying to hitchhike back to camp.

"The Jeeps just kept passing us by. We figured out the problem was me. He was light-skinned, so I hid across the road in the shadows, and when a Jeep stopped I ran out and we jumped in.

"They were really mad at us. They went down those hills as fast as they could. It scared the stuffing out of us."

By November 1945, Whitney's service was completed. In June 1946, he began classes at MIT. "There were four black students, one in each year. At one point, three were Tuskegee Airmen."

In three years, he had a degree in aeronautical engineering. "I didn't stay in it for very long," he says.

At the Church of the Master, a Presbyterian church in New York, he met Jim Robinson, "a great man and a great preacher. He came back from a mission trip to Africa and said there was this school in Cameroon that needed someone who could teach math and physics. I knew who he was looking at."

Whitney, his wife, Muriel, and daughters Saundra and Karen moved to Paris to learn French, then traveled to Cameroon, which was on the verge of gaining its independence.

"It was a real privilege to be there at that time," he says. "The Presbyterian Church built this beautiful school, and the kids were just terrific. It was a mountaintop moment."

It was also the beginning of a long association with the United Presbyterian Church, for which Whitney served as assistant education secretary, overseeing projects all over Africa and Asia, and later as Africa secretary, the first African-American to hold the post. He also was director of global ecumenical programs for the National Council of Churches.

Along the way, he earned master's and doctoral degrees in education from Columbia. "The hardest thing I ever did was finish my dissertation."

After his first wife's death, Whitney married his second wife, Lorenza, also an educator, in 1978.

Since leaving the service, Whitney hasn't done much flying. "I was in the reserves for a while. But I didn't have any money" for a plane.

At a Tuskegee Airmen event at Fantasy of Flight last summer, he says, "I got to go up in a P-40 and take the controls. Oh, what a thrill. I hadn't flown a fighter since 1945."

Although he retired in 1996, he says he's busier than ever. He often speaks for various groups about his Tuskegee Airmen experiences and is very active in MIT alumni affairs, serving on its national selection committee. He also tries to get his golf game good enough to satisfy his 11-year-old grandson.

Although his military service was only a brief part of his life, Whitney says, it had a tremendous impact. "Being a Tuskegee Airman made failure unacceptable. You do what you have to do to achieve your goals."

- Colette Bancroft can be reached at 727 893-8435 or bancroft@sptimes.com

[Last modified July 22, 2005, 11:20:06]