A great man has died.
Friend spent 28 years in the Air Force, serving in the Korean and Vietnam wars. He also worked on space launch vehicles and served as a foreign technology program director before retiring as a lieutenant colonel and forming his own aerospace company.
https://www.redtail.org/portraits-tuskegee-airmen-robert-friend/
Sad. The are/were great men doing a shitty job with mostly outdated P-40’s that were vastly inferior to the German and Italian fighters they faced and they performed at such a level as to baffle their commanders.
In doing so they earned the respect of pretty much everyone in the service as well as those who read or saw the war films about them.
Once they moved into the P-47’s and P-51’s they proved they could take it to the very best under any conditions and succeed.
Too bad they were mistreated in and out of the service, and later generations of American Blacks pissed on their legacy.