Encoded for the Experiencing War web site for the Veterans History Project.
The recording of the interview with Alexander Jefferson was digitized.
This transcription was encoded with minimal changes to the original text in an effort to preserve original content and idiosyncrasies of the person interviewed. Period language and terminology are also retained. Encoding is literal with regard to the transcriptionist's capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. Spelling errors are indicated with [sic]; however, recurring errors in spelling within a single document have been marked the first time and not subsequently.
(inaudible) at the Quality Inn, Prescott, Arizona, during the P-40 Warhawks latest reunion.
Reunion.
And we have a witness here today.
Alexander Jefferson.
And your address, sir?
[address redacted]. Lieutenant colonel, USAAC, retired.
And your date of birth?
[birth date redacted].
Okay. And you were in World War II and any others?
No. Only in World War II.
All right.
Went into service - Well, first of all, Chadsey High School in Detroit, 1938. Clark College, Atlanta, Georgia, chemistry and biology. I majored in chemistry and biology. I minored in math and physics. 1942. And at that time if - You must remember, if there had been a - if I had been caught in the draft as a Negro, I would go into the quartermaster. Heavy, nasty, dirty work, $21 a month. But the opportunity came to become a pilot because the Army had been badgered by the NAACP, Urban League, to admit blacks to fly in the Army Air Corps, and we had to be college graduates at that time to be qualified for pilot training. And I qualified. And I was told - I thought I was going to Tuskegee Army Airfield for pilot training. They told me to go home and wait. So in September '42 - I graduated in June. So September I went to Howard University in chemistry, got my master's in chemistry, until April. April '43 the orders came to go to Tuskegee Army Airfield. And I quit Howard University and, bingo, went to Tuskegee Army Airfield to become a pilot. And as a pilot you made $75 a month. And after nine months you became a second lieutenant, made $150 a month. Plus $75. Plus the wings and the bars and all the pretty girls. There was a difference. There was a difference. But I enjoyed pilot training. It was exciting to me because I put together model airplanes all my life, read about World War I, comic books of World War I, fighter pilots of World War I fighting the Germans, and I enjoyed pilot training. Of course, there were 125 men who started in my class. I finished in '44A, January of '44. Approximately 125 guys started, only 25 of us finished nine months later. The wash-out rate was tremendous, but it was competitive. I was fortunate enough to finish. After finishing in January, we stayed one month at Tuskegee Army Airfield in Alabama and flew the P-40, ten hours in the P-40. And after that we were assigned to Selfridge Air Force Base in Michigan right north of Detroit, 25 miles north of Detroit. And while there we were transitioned into P-39s and spent 200 hours in a P-39. And it was at Selfridge we were clamoring to get into the Officers Club, segregated. On the base there were approximately 35 to 40 black pilots and with the enlisted men and had a tremendous amount of white personnel, white officers and personnel. But we were denied entrance into the Lufberg Hall. Lufberg Hall, the Officers Club. We were turned away many times. The Army had taken one of the rooms in the barracks and put a wooden bar in it and said, Okay, guys, this is your bar. One day I was out over Lake Huron flying gunnery, we were flying P-39s firing at a tow target. The radio said, all officers report to the post theater on the double, right as you are. So quite naturally we wheeled around, landed, walked up to the post theater in flying suits, the black officers and the white officers on base. What's going on? We don't know. So we went in, had a seat, and all of a sudden down the aisle comes a two-star general. And we said, what the heck's going on? He ranted on and on, he talked about two or three minutes, and these are the words I remember all my life. Gentlemen, this is my airfield. As long as I'm in command, there will be no socialization between white and colored officers. Are there any questions? Quite naturally, we're all second lieutenants. We were stunned. Then he said, that's all. Ten-hut. We stood up. Oh, if there are any questions, I will deal with that man personally. Somebody said, ten-hut. We stood up and he walked out. That was Thursday. They locked the gates. And when you lock gates on an officer that means he's under arrest. All the black officers were restricted to post. Saturday morning they backed in a Pullman train, and we were loaded onto the Pullman train with our black enlisted personnel, and that train left Selfridge and went north to Port Huron, through the tunnel, across Canada, across Ontario to Niagara Falls. To this day we have never seen PCS orders, permanent change of station. We were transferred to Walterboro, South Carolina, 45 miles west of Charleston, 85 miles northwest of Savannah, one of these small airfields built along the eastern seaboard in opposition to an invasion and was kept in by housekeepers, young men housekeepers. And when the train stopped, we jumped up quite naturally, and every 20 feet there was a little white soldier in full battle dress with a rifle, hand grenades, because they were expecting Negroes who had rioted, kicked out of Selfridge Field. I was there only two weeks because my class went overseas to join the 332nd Fighter Group. After that there was much confusion at Walterboro because it was right there in South Carolina. A lot of confusion, blacks and whites. But I didn't - I didn't experience any. My class was '44A. We joined the 332nd Fighter Group in May, latter part of May, because on June the 7th I was on the overseas - I was on the ship going over to Italy. I was on the ship that ran the Atlantic in seven days all by itself. I joined the 332nd Fighter Group in the latter part of June as a replacement pilot, and the 301st Fighter Squadron. We left Naples by chuck across, by train across to Ramitelli. Our base was on the heel of Italy, right on the Asiatic. And the morning we joined - my group joined the group, I remember coming in sitting on a 6 x 6 on the end of the runway watching the P-47s take off on the last mission, the 332nd flight crew, and the P-47 took off at end of the runway and stalled and went in, boom. That was our introduction to combat. I was there for the introduction of the P-51s, and I flew 18 and one-half, bang. All my missions were long-range escort, escorting B-17s from Italy to France, Italy to Germany, Italy to Ploesti, Italy to Greece, 18 long-range missions, high altitude, the bombers were at 22 and 23, and we were at 23, 24, 25. And my 19th mission was the one in which we were assigned to strafe radar stations on the coast of southern France, previous to the invasion of southern France which came off on the 15th of August. And the 301st had the target right outside the radar stations on the coast right outside the city of Toulon on the cliff. And the 301st went in, and I was number 16. I'm tailing Charlie. Of all the first floor of flights, first floor of flights, next floor of flights, the last floor of flights I'm tailing Charlie. And when my flight went in to fire on these radar stations, I saw Danny, he was number two, when he got hit about 2,000 yards out, he turned off, went in, and landed in the water because he was afraid to bail out. And when I went across the top of the target, the darn shell came up through the floor, on fire, and ironically we had never had any instructions on how to get out of the P-51. In fact, when the P-51s came in and I walked out to look at the darn thing, the mechanic said, Lieutenant, this is - here's the mags, here's how you check your mags, here's the throttle, here's the landing gear, here's the flaps. We take off, we flew three hours that was it. The fire came up out of the floor, and quite naturally to this day I reiterate this story and in my mind - my mind, pull up off the deck, we were going 400 miles an hour, and as you go up, you reach up and pull the little red knob and the canopy goes off. You get up with the forward trim tab, so if you pull the stick loose, the nose goes down. As I got up, I don't know, maybe 800 feet, maybe a thousand, turned the stick loose, and when the nose dipped I hit the buckle, and these straps, they came loose, with the nose dip, I came out. I remember the tail going by and I pulled the D ring. I remember looking at the son of a gun and said Oh, hell, too low. And by that time, boom, chute popped open, and I'm going down through the trees. Scratches, bruises. And I remember they told us that if we went down in southern France, to dig a hole and hide your parachute and get with the Free French, the French Maquis. Hell, I hit the ground, rolled over, and damn German said (German words). I said, Oh, hell. I landed right in the middle of the guys who shot me down. So I spent nine months in Germany as a POW.
Oh, wow.
And got to Frankfurt, Frankfurt on the Main, where we were interrogated. And the German officer had a big book on the table and said 332nd Fighter Group, Negroes, Red Tails. Tails are painted red for air identification. And he had a tremendous amount of pictures, and I looked at them, and he finally said, Lieutenant, isn't that you? There's my class picture. These pictures had been published in many magazines and newspapers all the time, so somebody back here was accumulating this information. They had my complete high school records, all my marks in college. They knew more about me than I knew about myself. They even knew the amount of taxes my dad paid on his house. I find out when I got to POW camp, all of this information was accrued on all the other POWs also. When I got there, I was number 4 black. I was the 4th member out of my unit to be a POW. There were 5,000 American flying officers in Stalag Luft III, 80 miles east of Berlin on the Polish border. And every one of these other guys, all the whites, they also admitted the fact that the Germans had all this information on them also.
Really.
They knew their high school records, college records, they knew everything. This was the German intelligence at the time. And today when I tell this to high school kids, I said today you don't have to worry about it because every one of you has a number. What is it? They look at each other and after about four or five minutes, oh, a Social Security number. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And everything about you will fall out. But I spent nine months in Germany as a POW.
How were you treated?
I was treated as an officer and a gentleman. Geneva Convention. Because the officers are placed in a barbed wire and could not make the officers work. But if you're enlisted personnel in a different camp, the enlisted personnel could be made to work on the roads and the mines and so forth. So literally I sat the war out. And the only thing that was missing was food. Many of the guys lost weight. Some of the guys admitted in their two-and-a-half to three years lost 8 or 9 pounds. Some of the guys went to North Africa, they lost 10, 15, 20 pounds. But that's another thing. But when the Russians started pushing through in January '44 -- '45, January '45, to prevent us from being recaptured by the Russians, the Germans put us out on the road and we walked 80 kilometers west. Quite naturally we didn't want to be rescued by the Russians anyway. It was 20 below zero. It was colder than hell. And ironically, we laugh about it now, because the German guards who walked along with us with the (German words), the old men, men with white hair, and they complained, hell, they were 65 and 70, and many of us helped carry their guns and the rifles because these men, they couldn't hardly make it.
Right.
I remember that now. I think about it. Now I'm the same age as those men who guarded me, so I think about it now. We walked from Stalag Luft III to Springberg (phonetic), then they put us on these forty-and-eights. And there were instead of 40, they jammed in 60 to 70 to 80, and so many that we could not lie down.
Railroad cars.
Railroad cars, those forty-and-eights. We wound up at Stalag VII-A near Munich, and it was there in which we were liberated by Patton's Third Army on the 29th of August '44 - '45. The place was - well, it had been covered with I suspect Russian prisoners or something because the place was littered with lice and bed bugs. It was horrendous. It was a horrible place. A lot of us slept outside on the tents because the barracks inside were infested with rodents. Tremendous number of German - Russian prisoners were on the other side of the barbed wire. The Germans treated the Russians horribly. Oh, they were horrible. They refused to give them food. And if it had not been for International Red Cross food parcels, we would have starved because food in Germany was almost nil. But that's another story. We were finally liberated by Patton's Third Army on the 29th of April, and that's when somebody said -- two days later we were waiting for transportation back, and somebody said, Hey, Jeff, there's a place down the road with a lot of dead people. What the hell are you talking about? He said, they've got dead people down there stacked up like cordwood. Dead people. So we got a Jeep and hooked a ride. You could smell the place two miles before you got to it because the ovens were still warm. To reiterate to a lot of high school kids, everybody's barbecuing in your neighborhood on Saturday morning, you can smell barbecue. Well, the ovens were still warm and you could smell the human flesh. I'll never forget. Tables - tables covered with hair because before they burned the human bodies, they had somebody cut off their hair and use the hair for cushions. Tables covered with jewelry, you know, rings. Gold and amalgam because before you burn the bodies, you have somebody with a pair of pliers pulling out the gold and amalgam. Table just covered with gold and amalgam. Man's inhumanity to man. And someone back here has the audacity to tell me that the Holocaust never happened. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I've given presentations in the Thumb District in Michigan. Who's the guy from Oklahoma? The bombing in Oklahoma, what's the name? Terry. From the Thumb District. That's where he came from. And some of these characters said, Mr. Jefferson, the Holocaust never happened. The Jews, never. Then I had to use expletive and deleted words. Describing how they had so many bodies, you had to take a bulldozer and dig a trench and shove these bodies over there and cover with lime. Man's inhumanity to man. But at the same time I tell this, I relate this to black audiences, they said, Wait a minute, have you forgotten the black Holocaust? What do you mean, Mr. Jefferson? How many black Africans died on the middle passage between Africa and these shores? Millions. Man's inhumanity to man. Same thing going on two or three years ago in Bosnia with the Muslims. Same thing going on in India where the Muslims and the Hindus are killing each other. Same thing with Saddam Hussein who is a Shi'ite or was he a Sunni?
Shi'ite.
He was a Shi'ite. Killing the Sunnis. Man's inhumanity to men. Same thing in Burundi, Burundi, where the Tutsis, two black ethnic groups, the Tutsis and the Hutus, millions. In the Sudan, in Nigeria, Liberia. Taylor, this guy Taylor in Liberia. Man's inhumanity to man. South America, Colombia, the same thing. All over the world. During Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge. All over the world, man's inhumanity to man. I was simply fortunate enough to see one particular series of it, but it stuck in my memory all of these years. I came back after the war and became a schoolteacher, stayed in the Reserves, and finished elementary science schoolteacher. I wanted to be a research chemist, but after going to war and coming back, I had to go back to school. And with a wife and kids and the mortgage, I said, oh, heck no, I don't have time enough for that. So I became a schoolteacher teaching science. I had one big hell of an enjoyable life.
Super.
Super life. I enjoyed it, had a ball. Today as an example, I just had prostate radiation about three or four years ago, my urologist is my former 6th grade student. And ministers of churches are my former students. Some of the characters who have been killed, notorious former students. But life has been darned good to me. I'm still at least once a week going into some school talking to young people -
Great.
- about how to join the system. It's the best system in the world. Not perfect. I have been Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African-American, Black, whatever. But trying to teach these young people today how to join the best system in the world. It ain't perfect and teachers ain't supposed to say ain't. It's not perfect, but I at least try to tell these young people to join the system to get in on the inside in order to vote and to become part of it. Don't stand on the outside. What are you all doing? Always finding fault. Life has been very good to me, very good. Very profitable. I've enjoyed it. To tell you the truth, with a bunch of characters like this P-40 organization, we're old. We can't help it. I go to Tuskegee airmen reunions. By the way, there were approximately 1,000 men who got their wings in World War II. Approximately one-fourth of us are still living. For every one pilot there are ten other blacks who were cooks, bottle washers, truck drivers, clerks, doctors, nurses, because we were segregated. There were approximately 15,000 people who are, quote, Tuskegee airmen and today approximately one-fourth of us are still living. And there's a chapter in every large city, every large city has a Tuskegee airmen chapter, and we meet once a year, every August, either on the east coast, west coast or central for a reunion, and bring our grandchildren, and we still get together and talk about the so-called good old days, which weren't good worth a darn, but we still enjoyed them. I belong to the P-40 organization. Anybody who touch the P-40, plus those who didn't touch it, want to join, come on out and talk about the good old days. The P-47 organization. The P-51 organization. Plus, you name it, we get together and enjoy.
All right.
We enjoy. So between Tuskegee airmen, P-40, P-51, Clark College, Howard University, you name it, still involved. Still involved. I know I missed a heck of a lot of things but to give an overall, an overall picture of the things I've been through. I've got a book coming out. Forgot to talk about it. All of this yak-yak-yakking is in my book. Supposed to come out in January or February through the Fordham University Press. While I was a POW I drew a series of pictures, got about 60 or 70 pictures, and these pictures are going to be in the book, in color, I hope, with all the comments. I'm looking forward to it.
What's the name of your book?
Sometime in January, February.
What's the name of the book, the title?
Tuskegee Airman Captured, Tuskegee Airman Freed, Memoirs of a POW, Tuskegee Airman POW, Memoirs of a Tuskegee Airman POW. And there I was typical, you know, there I was. It will go in detail more about my life, how I grew up in Detroit, and many of the discriminatory things that I saw as a child, as a child, all through life, how we had to sit on the front of the train. Remember, trains were propelled by smoke and coal, and the blacks were in the first car behind the smoke, and we could not go to the dining car. This was previous World War II. And coming back after the war, coming down the gangplank in New York Harbor, a big sign, whites to the right, Negroes to the left. Coming back home after serving. Ironically, through the Tuskegee airmen and other blacks in World War II, the 761st tank battalion that led Patton down in France, a bunch of guys, they were bad, bad. Really actually very, very good. Who are the guys - the truck drivers who kept gasoline going to Patton?
The Red Ball.
The Red Ball Express. These are blacks. When the movie was made, the guys were all white.
Oh, wow.
You see how - you see how history has changed. Well, due to the Red Ball Express, the 761st, the blacks who fought and Tuskegee airmen, in 1948 old man Truman took out his pen and this Executive Order 9981, he integrated the Armed Forces. And ironically, what happened six years later? If you integrate your Armed Forces, social change. Brown versus Board of Education. Six years later. Which opened up the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Malcolm. Johnson with the voters rights, the whole shebang. I've lived through this, and the rest of us have lived through it, and we have been part of this change of America. And it's been exciting. Very exciting. Even today where we can go wherever we want to go up to a certain point, as much as our money, because there are certain places in Flagstaff, is that the place, certain places my money can't take me. But it's been an exciting life. I don't know where to go from here, but that's about it.
Well, we thank you, Alex, for sharing your story. We were enthralled, that's for sure. We enjoyed it.
I left out a whole lot of stuff, left out a lot of detail. Glad to get this on film so somewhere down the line somebody can use it to good.
I think they will.
Thanks much.
Thank you.
Bye.