When Charles E. McGee left the Air Force for civilian life, the decorated veteran told his new colleagues, “You gotta quit calling me colonel.” At the time, it was out of humility, a quality McGee had in spades. But by the time he died last week at age 102, it also would’ve been inaccurate: In December 2019, President Donald Trump signed into law Congress’s defense spending bill, which contained an honorary promotion to brigadier general for McGee, who had just turned 100.
As Tom Rogan wrote at the time in the Washington Examiner, it was an appropriate reward “for a patriot who helped write a chapter in American military history.” McGee was one of the last surviving members of the pathbreaking all-black air unit in World War II, the Tuskegee Airmen, whose mission was to escort U.S. bombers from Italy to strike Germany by flying between the bombers and the Luftwaffe fighters dispatched to stop them. He also flew combat missions in the Korean War and Vietnam War before retiring with 409 flying missions, among the most in this country’s history.
Charles McGee was born in Cleveland on Dec. 7, 1919, the second of Lewis and Ruth McGee’s three children. In 1942, he married Frances Nelson and then went off to join the Airmen, though Frances would still be part of his war story: “On Aug. 23, 1944, while escorting B-17s over Czechoslovakia, Mr. McGee, by then a captain, had peeled off to engage a Luftwaffe squadron and, after a dogfight, shot down a Focke-Wulf Fw 190,” the New York Times recounts. “On the forward fuselage of his P-51, his wife’s nickname, ‘Kitten,’ had been inscribed.”
McGee’s trip from Illinois, where he was in school, to Alabama, where his training would take place, was itself like crossing into another country. He told an interviewer for HistoryNet in 1999 that it wasn’t simply black-white relations that were tense. Southern blacks weren’t especially welcoming to northern blacks, afraid of what an outsider wouldn’t know about life in the South. “When you were a black man from the North, you especially had to be careful what you said and did,” he said. “You learned to be extra careful when stopping to fill up your car, and even avoid some filling stations. To a degree, the southern blacks were concerned about how a northern Negro was going to act, and a lot of conversations dealt with what you needed to know and where to go to keep out of trouble. One of my classmates happened to be from a well-to-do family who owned a drug store in Montgomery, Alabama, and he helped steer me into the black community, because you didn’t go into the downtown area very much.”
McGee stayed in the Air Force after the Second World War, knowing he’d continue to have to deal with racial prejudice but choosing national service anyway. In 1948, President Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the military, a gradual process that would accelerate integration. Truman believed that having Americans put their lives in each other’s hands formed a bond no matter the race of the soldiers and airmen. That was certainly something McGee had experience with: The Airmen had a far-better-than-average record in protecting bombers. As he later wrote: “We painted our Mustangs’ tails red so the Germans knew who they were dealing with! The bomber pilots we protected — all of whom were white — called us the ‘Red Tail Angels.’”
In 1972, he became the first black commander of Kansas City’s Richards-Gebaur Air Force base, where he had earlier been stationed. After his service, he earned his degree and worked as manager of the Kansas City Downtown Airport and the Kansas City Aviation Department’s Aviation Advisory Council. He’ll have a terminal at that airport renamed in his honor. And as the local ABC affiliate KMBC noted, McGee even flipped the coin at the 2020 Super Bowl, in which the Kansas City Chiefs won their first championship since the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. According to KMBC, in addition to McGee’s own three children, he leaves behind 10 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren — and one great-great-grandchild.
Seth Mandel is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.
