Post by nubaka on May 11, 2009 8:25:00 GMT -5
Before Tuskegee, There was Bullard
February 19, 2009
Military.com|by Bryant Jordan
He's probably the most famous African-American combat pilot that you've never heard of.
His name was Eugene Bullard, and he didn't fly in Vietnam or Korea or even with the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame.
Bullard, a Georgia native whose father had once been a slave, flew in World War I. And he flew for the French.
"A lot of Americans don't [know of Bullard] because his part in aviation history came to be known, I think, only in the late 1950s and early '60s, shortly before he died," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Russell Davis, president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., the official organization that honors America's black WWII airmen. "He set a pretty high standard. He also proved that African-Americans could fly and were human beings like everyone else."
Bullard's story is the stuff of high adventure. Born in 1894, he grew up in an American South where lynchings were not uncommon but justice for blacks certainly was. He had only a few years of grade school education behind him when he left home, working odd jobs here and there until finally, in 1912, he stowed away on a German ship bound for Scotland, according to a memoir he wrote in his last years.
He eventually reached France, where he worked in vaudeville and became a prizefighter. And when France went to war against Germany in 1914, Bullard entered the Foreign Legion. He saw combat in the Somme, at Artois Ridge and Mont-Sant-Eloi. He was wounded in March 1916 at Verdun, where his actions earned him the Croix de Guerre and the Medaile Militaire.
After recovering from his wounds he applied to the French Flying Corps, reportedly as part of a bet with a fellow soldier. He was a corporal, but the French had no problems with enlisted fliers. Bullard made the cut, and when he earned his wings in Tours, France, in 1917, he became the first combat pilot of African descent in history. Eventually he was assigned to the flying squadron made up of American flyers, the Lafayette Escadrille. He flew Spad V11s, one of the earliest fighter planes with machine guns synchronized to fire between the rapidly spinning propeller blades, and Nieuports -- a plane built for racing before converted to air combat during The Great War.
On at least one of his planes he had painted a bloody heart pierced by a knife, and the words "Tout le Sang qui coule est rouge" -- All blood runs red, according to a 2005 article on Bullard in Air & Space Journal. That would later be the title of his memoir. By all accounts he had two kills, but could not be officially credited with one because it went down behind the German lines.
But for all his combat experience and aviation skills, Bullard's days as a pilot ended when the U.S. entered the war. He took and passed the physical, according Craig Lloyd, author of Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris, but soon found the American military was not taking on African-Americans.
Watch the Black History Month slideshow:
"He was told that because he had a fight with a French officer he couldn't be accepted," said Lloyd, a retired history professor from Columbus State University in Georgia. Bullard never disputed the fight with the French officer. It was he who actually reported the episode to the American officer, Edmond Gros, who ultimately kept Bullard out of the American unit.
Not only was Bullard not brought into the U.S. Army's Air Service, but he soon was transferred out of the French Flying Corps. Craig believes that probably was owed to the French wanting to placate its American ally.
"It would have embarrassed the United States to recognize Bullard when the U.S. was trying to maintain Jim Crow," Lloyd said.
That determination to deny Bullard recognition outlived even the war. Nearly a decade later, Gros contacted French officials in a bid to keep Bullard's name off a Paris memorial dedicated to its WWI fliers, Lloyd said.
After the war, Bullard stayed on in Paris, where he first managed and eventually owned a jazz club, where he came to know Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong and Josephine Backer, among others. He reportedly gave a young Langston Hughes a job as a dishwasher, while Ernest Hemingway, another acquaintance, is said to have based a minor character in The Sun Also Rises -- a drummer -- on Bullard.
He would remain in France until World War II, where he served with the French underground, including its intelligence operation, and ultimately in the defense of Orleans, where he was wounded and evacuated south to Spain, and eventually making his way back to the United States. For all his "Young Indiana Jones"-like adventures, however, Bullard never achieved the kind of fame in his home country that he enjoyed in France.
Neither his own memoir nor the biographies produced on him -- The Black Swallow of Death in 1972 and Lloyd's, published in 2000 -- have grabbed a great deal of public attention. The closest Bullard has come to being widely presented to an American audience was in the 2006 Flyboys, a fictional account of the Lafayette Escadrille. But he was only a secondary character in the movie and his name was changed to Eugene Skinner.
In the United States, Bullard eventually got a job as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center in New York City, where few of the people he took up and down each day knew his background. But, as Davis points out, the French never forgot Bullard.
"He's well known over there," he said. "He was highly recognized by" the French government.
The French brought Bullard over to Paris in 1954 to take part in a relighting of the eternal flame for the French Tomb of the Unknown at the Arc de Triumph and it made him a knight in the French Legion of Honor in 1959. And when then-French President Charles DeGaulle visited New York in 1960, he embraced Bullard as a hero of France, William I. Chivalette, curator at the Air Force Enlisted Heritage Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., wrote in his 2005 Air & Space Power Journal article.
And when Bullard died in October 1961 he was buried in Flushing Cemetery in New York with military honors by the Federation of French War Officers.
It would be more than 30 years before the U.S. Air Force -- the service descended from the branch that rejected Bullard more than 70 years earlier -- rendered its own highest recognition of his achievements. On Aug. 23, 1994, it posthumously commissioned Bullard a lieutenant.
February 19, 2009
Military.com|by Bryant Jordan
He's probably the most famous African-American combat pilot that you've never heard of.
His name was Eugene Bullard, and he didn't fly in Vietnam or Korea or even with the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame.
Bullard, a Georgia native whose father had once been a slave, flew in World War I. And he flew for the French.
"A lot of Americans don't [know of Bullard] because his part in aviation history came to be known, I think, only in the late 1950s and early '60s, shortly before he died," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Russell Davis, president of Tuskegee Airmen Inc., the official organization that honors America's black WWII airmen. "He set a pretty high standard. He also proved that African-Americans could fly and were human beings like everyone else."
Bullard's story is the stuff of high adventure. Born in 1894, he grew up in an American South where lynchings were not uncommon but justice for blacks certainly was. He had only a few years of grade school education behind him when he left home, working odd jobs here and there until finally, in 1912, he stowed away on a German ship bound for Scotland, according to a memoir he wrote in his last years.
He eventually reached France, where he worked in vaudeville and became a prizefighter. And when France went to war against Germany in 1914, Bullard entered the Foreign Legion. He saw combat in the Somme, at Artois Ridge and Mont-Sant-Eloi. He was wounded in March 1916 at Verdun, where his actions earned him the Croix de Guerre and the Medaile Militaire.
After recovering from his wounds he applied to the French Flying Corps, reportedly as part of a bet with a fellow soldier. He was a corporal, but the French had no problems with enlisted fliers. Bullard made the cut, and when he earned his wings in Tours, France, in 1917, he became the first combat pilot of African descent in history. Eventually he was assigned to the flying squadron made up of American flyers, the Lafayette Escadrille. He flew Spad V11s, one of the earliest fighter planes with machine guns synchronized to fire between the rapidly spinning propeller blades, and Nieuports -- a plane built for racing before converted to air combat during The Great War.
On at least one of his planes he had painted a bloody heart pierced by a knife, and the words "Tout le Sang qui coule est rouge" -- All blood runs red, according to a 2005 article on Bullard in Air & Space Journal. That would later be the title of his memoir. By all accounts he had two kills, but could not be officially credited with one because it went down behind the German lines.
But for all his combat experience and aviation skills, Bullard's days as a pilot ended when the U.S. entered the war. He took and passed the physical, according Craig Lloyd, author of Eugene Bullard: Black Expatriate in Jazz-Age Paris, but soon found the American military was not taking on African-Americans.
Watch the Black History Month slideshow:
"He was told that because he had a fight with a French officer he couldn't be accepted," said Lloyd, a retired history professor from Columbus State University in Georgia. Bullard never disputed the fight with the French officer. It was he who actually reported the episode to the American officer, Edmond Gros, who ultimately kept Bullard out of the American unit.
Not only was Bullard not brought into the U.S. Army's Air Service, but he soon was transferred out of the French Flying Corps. Craig believes that probably was owed to the French wanting to placate its American ally.
"It would have embarrassed the United States to recognize Bullard when the U.S. was trying to maintain Jim Crow," Lloyd said.
That determination to deny Bullard recognition outlived even the war. Nearly a decade later, Gros contacted French officials in a bid to keep Bullard's name off a Paris memorial dedicated to its WWI fliers, Lloyd said.
After the war, Bullard stayed on in Paris, where he first managed and eventually owned a jazz club, where he came to know Sidney Bechet, Louis Armstrong and Josephine Backer, among others. He reportedly gave a young Langston Hughes a job as a dishwasher, while Ernest Hemingway, another acquaintance, is said to have based a minor character in The Sun Also Rises -- a drummer -- on Bullard.
He would remain in France until World War II, where he served with the French underground, including its intelligence operation, and ultimately in the defense of Orleans, where he was wounded and evacuated south to Spain, and eventually making his way back to the United States. For all his "Young Indiana Jones"-like adventures, however, Bullard never achieved the kind of fame in his home country that he enjoyed in France.
Neither his own memoir nor the biographies produced on him -- The Black Swallow of Death in 1972 and Lloyd's, published in 2000 -- have grabbed a great deal of public attention. The closest Bullard has come to being widely presented to an American audience was in the 2006 Flyboys, a fictional account of the Lafayette Escadrille. But he was only a secondary character in the movie and his name was changed to Eugene Skinner.
In the United States, Bullard eventually got a job as an elevator operator at Rockefeller Center in New York City, where few of the people he took up and down each day knew his background. But, as Davis points out, the French never forgot Bullard.
"He's well known over there," he said. "He was highly recognized by" the French government.
The French brought Bullard over to Paris in 1954 to take part in a relighting of the eternal flame for the French Tomb of the Unknown at the Arc de Triumph and it made him a knight in the French Legion of Honor in 1959. And when then-French President Charles DeGaulle visited New York in 1960, he embraced Bullard as a hero of France, William I. Chivalette, curator at the Air Force Enlisted Heritage Research Institute at Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala., wrote in his 2005 Air & Space Power Journal article.
And when Bullard died in October 1961 he was buried in Flushing Cemetery in New York with military honors by the Federation of French War Officers.
It would be more than 30 years before the U.S. Air Force -- the service descended from the branch that rejected Bullard more than 70 years earlier -- rendered its own highest recognition of his achievements. On Aug. 23, 1994, it posthumously commissioned Bullard a lieutenant.
