Black and White Airmen: Their True History (review)

Herb Heilbrun and John Leahr were in the same third-grade classroom in Cincinnati, but neither paid a bit of attention to the other: Herb was white and John was black. Both became pilots in World War II; both were stationed in Italy and flew missions to the north; both participated in two of the same sorties to bomb synthetic oil factories. They never met there either, because Tuskegee fighter pilots were kept segregated by the military from the white bomber pilots they escorted into battle. Years later, retiree Heilbrun "crashed" a Tuskegee Airmen's reunion and met Leahr; about a million shared memories later, the pair hit the road to lecture a new generation on the realities of the color line that divided servicemen and servicewomen six decades ago. Fleischman reconstructs their story from interviews and reference sources, and the bulk of the text is devoted to the engrossing details of the two pilots' parallel military careers and their actions in battle. Woven throughout are Fleischman's own observations on the cruel ironies of Jim Crow laws and customs, which could make soldiers mortally dependent on each other and yet never afford them so much as a mutual greeting. Fleischman's commentary is occasionally repetitive and a bit heavy handed, but the power of Leahr's and Heilbrun's alternating stories, illustrated with personal photographs and period documents, handily trumps that concern. Teens who followed the cooperative civil rights efforts of John Lewis and Jim Zwerg in Ann Bausum's Freedom Riders (BCCB 4/06) will find reason to ponder just how much difference two decades can make.