Black and White Airmen: Their True History

Here is the true history of a friendship that almost wasn’t.

John Leahr and Herb Heilbrun grew up in the same neighborhood and were in the same third grade class together. They were classmates—not friends—because Herb was white and John was black.

John and Herb were twenty-one when the United States entered WWII. Herb became an Army Air Forces B-17 bomber pilot. John flew P-51 fighters. Both were thrown into the brutal high-altitude bomber war against Nazi Germany, though they never met because the army was rigidly segregated—only in the air were black and white American fliers allowed to mix.

Both came safely home but it took Herb and John another fifty years to meet again and discover that their lives had run almost side by side through war and peace. Old friends at last, Herb and John launched a mission to tell young people why race once made all the difference and why it shouldn’t anymore.

Here is the true history of a friendship that almost wasn’t.

John Leahr and Herb Heilbrun grew up in the same neighborhood and were in the same third grade class together. They were classmates—not friends—because Herb was white and John was black.

John and Herb were twenty-one when the United States entered WWII. Herb became an Army Air Forces B-17 bomber pilot. John flew P-51 fighters. Both were thrown into the brutal high-altitude bomber war against Nazi Germany, though they never met because the army was rigidly segregated—only in the air were black and white American fliers allowed to mix.

Both came safely home but it took Herb and John another fifty years to meet again and discover that their lives had run almost side by side through war and peace. Old friends at last, Herb and John launched a mission to tell young people why race once made all the difference and why it shouldn’t anymore.

VOYA

The last members of "The Greatest Generation" will someday be gone, but their stories will not be forgotten. With this book, Fleischman records another World War II story that is definitely worth remembering. The world of fighter pilots was clearly segregated during the war, as was much of civilian life. The paths of white pilot Herb Heilbrun and Tuskegee Airman John Leahr crossed many times throughout their lives: They were in the same third grade class, they worked at the same factory before the war, and they flew together on two missions during the war. But when they met in 1997, neither remembered having ever met before. The story is of a friendship that "began in 1928 and took a while to get going." Fleischman shares the tales of each man's life before, during, and after the war and talks about the close friendship that developed seventy-six years after they first met. Their story is also of the war in Europe and the war at home-the struggle that John and other African Americans fought against racism. Through John's story, readers learn of the battle that African Americans waged to be allowed to fight for their country in World War II, and how the Tuskegee Airmen dispelled the belief that African Americans were not intelligent enough to be pilots. Fleischman's descriptions of flying WWII planes will fascinate some and be a bit too much for others, but the story of these two friends is enough to keep all readers interested.

John Fleischman uses his brain as a science writer with the American Society for Cell Biology and as a freelance writer for various magazines, including Discover, Muse, and Air & Space Smithsonian. He has been a science writer at the Harvard Medical School and a senior editor with Yankee and Ohio magazines. He lives in Ohio with his wife and a greyhound named Psyche.