George Hardy, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who was one of the last surviving combat veterans of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black squadron in the segregated U.S. military during World War II, and who subsequently flew 45 mission in the Korean War and 70 in the Vietnam War, died on Wednesday in Sarasota, Fla. He was 100.
His death, at his home, was announced by the national office of the veterans organization Tuskegee Airmen Inc.
Colonel Hardy, a Philadelphia native, was 19 and had never even driven a car when he began aviation cadet training in September 1944 at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. By early the next year, in the closing months of the war in Europe, then-Second Lieutenant Hardy was assigned to an Army Air Forces base in Italy, from which he flew 21 missions accompanying bombers to their targets over southern Germany in early 1945.
In addition to those high-altitude missions in P-51 Mustang aircraft, he made strafing runs on German trains, trucks or river barges and was once struck by small-arms fire. He knew he was hit, he recalled to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, when he saw a flash of light coming through the cockpit floor, which was usually dark.
Colonel Hardy reflected on the camaraderie between Black and white airmen during that period.
“When we got back to the base, we would get together and drink,” he told The Tampa Tribune in 2012. “They really appreciated us. But once we got back to the States, we were reminded that things hadn’t changed. When we walked down the gangway of the boat as it docked, there was a sign: Whites to the right, coloreds to the left. After all we had been through, it really didn’t feel too good.”
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The post George Hardy, Tuskegee Airman Who Fought in Three Wars, Dies at 100 appeared first on New York Times.
