Forgotten Souls: The Lost Tuskegee Airmen

In her first book, NPR investigative reporter Thompson examines the lives of 27 Tuskegee Airmen who went missing in combat during World War II. (Thompson is herself the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman.) While maintaining its policy of racial segregation, the Army Air Force (a coveted landing spot for soldiers) established in Tuskegee, AL, in 1939 a separate flight school for aspiring Black aviators from across the country. As the war went on, several squadrons of Tuskegee graduates went on to fly in combat abroad; 27 of these men were lost during the war’s final missions in Europe, protecting bombers piloted by all-white crews. The Tuskegee Airmen were equipped with obsolete, poorly maintained planes whose mechanical failures were responsible for a number of their deaths. For the relatives of these men, information about their deaths trickled in slowly or not at all. Their frustration and anger at the unresponsiveness of the military lingers decades later, as Thompson reveals via empathetic interviews with some of these families.