Louis R. Purnell Sr., 81

Original member of WW II's Tuskegee Airmen

August 19, 2001|By The Washington Post.

WASHINGTON — Louis R. Purnell Sr., a World War II fighter pilot who flew 88 combat missions as an original member of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, has died at 81.

Mr. Purnell died of cancer Aug. 10 in his Washington home.

In civilian life, Mr. Purnell was a researcher and surveyor with the Smithsonian Institution, where he retired in 1985 as a curator at the National Air and Space Museum, specializing in the acquisition of spacecraft and other artifacts of NASA missions.

But his years with the Tuskegee Airmen, the first black aircraft pilots unit in U.S. military history, were the defining period of Mr. Purnell's life.

He was one of about 500 Tuskegee pilots who flew combat missions during the war, and he served two tours of duty with the 99th Fighter Squadron and the 332nd Fighter Group, flying from bases in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. He received a Distinguished Flying Cross.

"These brave pilots fought to defend their country, a country that had initially stated that, due to their racial origin, they possessed neither the brains nor the intelligence to handle such a complicated thing as an aircraft," Mr. Purnell wrote this year in a forward to the book "Black Knights: The Story of the Tuskegee Airmen."

"I am proud to have been one of them."

Mr. Purnell was born in Snow Hill, Md., and grew up in Wilmington, Del., and Cape May, N.J. As a child, he often rode his bicycle to a nearby airfield, where he watched Coast Guard pilots practice flying.

After high school, he attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, but he left to enroll in a new pilot-training program for black men at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. The program had been undertaken at the urging of Eleanor Roosevelt and others, but support was unenthusiastic at the highest levels of the military command.

The first class of Tuskegee fighter pilots graduated three months after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into World War II, but the Army kept the unit in Alabama as subsequent classes of black cadet pilots took the same training.

Finally, in April 1943, the unit shipped out to North Africa. In the next two years of war, its men completed 1,578 combat missions, destroying enemy rail traffic, hundreds of vehicles and surveillance stations in air-to-ground strafing missions.

Sixty-six pilots were killed in aerial combat, and 32 were shot down or forced down and taken prisoner.

After leaving military service, Mr. Purnell came to Washington and graduated from Howard University with a degree in psychology.