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ation: LABOR BATTALION TROOPS IN THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, MAY 1943. _Stevedores pause for a hot meal at Massacre Bay._] [Illustration: SERGEANT ADDRESSING THE LINE. _Aviation squadron standing inspection, 1943._] When the War Department supported these demands the Army Air Forces capitulated. Its 1941 mobilization plans provided for the formation of nine separate black aviation squadrons which would perform the miscellaneous tasks associated with the upkeep of airfields. During the next year the Chief of Staff set the allotment of black recruits for the air arm at a rate that brought over 77,500 Negroes into the Air Corps by 1943. On 16 January 1941 Under Secretary Patterson announced the formation of a black pursuit squadron, but the Army Air Forces, bowing to the opposition typified by General Arnold's comments of the previous year, trained the black pilots in separate facilities at Tuskegee, Alabama, where the Army tried to duplicate the expensive training center established for white officers at Maxwell Field, just forty miles away.[2-24] Black pilots were at first trained exclusively for pursuit flying, a very difficult kind of combat for which a Negro had to qualify both physically and technically or else, in Judge (p. 029) Hastie's words, "not fly at all."[2-25] The 99th Fighter Squadron was organized at Tuskegee in 1941 and sent to the Mediterranean theater in April 1943. By then the all-black 332d Fighter Group with three additional fighter squadrons had been organized, and in 1944 it too was deployed to the Mediterranean. [Footnote 2-24: USAF Oral History Program, Interv with Maj Gen Noel F Parrish (USAF, Ret.), 30 Mar 73.] [Footnote 2-25: William H. Hastie, _On Clipped Wings: The Story of Jim Crow in the Army Air Corps_ (New York: NAACP, 1943). Based on War Department documents and statistics, this famous pamphlet was essentially an attack on the Army Air Corps. For a more comprehensive account of the Negro and the Army Air Forces, see Osur, _Blacks in the Army Air Forces During World War II_.] [Illustration: PILOTS OF THE 332D FIGHTER GROUP BEING BRIEFED _for combat mission in Italy_.] These squadrons could use only a limited number of pilots, far fewer than those black cadets qualified for
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