An Army film produced in 1945 on the Tuskegee airmen begins with footage of a fighter taxiing behind a narrator’s familiar voice.
“It’s morning,” says the unmistakable voice of then-Army captain Ronald Reagan, who always enjoyed his ‘morning’ metaphors. On screen, fighters take to the air. “Twenty miles from the enemy,” Reagan says.
The 10-minute Army-produced film is a kind of first draft of history on the Tuskegee Airmen, the famed World War II flyers who were in the news last month when the Air Force removed — and then partially replaced — videos on the unit from its boot camp. But the National Archives video on those airmen is worth watching, both for what it says and for what it doesn’t say. Along with some vintage footage of training, the film is narrated by future-President Ronald Reagan, back when he was an Army officer making films for what was then the War Department.
The short film, “Wings For This Man,” was produced in 1945 by the Army’s First Motion Picture Unit, an active duty Army unit based in Hollywood during World War II that produced more than 400 recruiting and informational films designed to drive support for the war. And “Wings For This Man” is, obviously, well-polished government propaganda: relentlessly positive, full of guileless admiration and quick to define World War II as a clash of morals that America would inevitably win.
Still, it’s what the film doesn’t say for its full 10 minutes that jumps out.
The onscreen images are mostly stock flying footage cut to look like a combat sequence, along with some genuine gunsight film from real missions. But there’s actual historical footage, too, like a large-scale ceremony at the Tuskegee training unit’s third anniversary and what look like post-flight interviews with two flyers after a mission.
Reagan’s voice is a constant presence in the short film as a narrator. But he never says out loud the obvious truth of almost every frame: that the Tuskegee Airmen were Black pilots while the military and the nation was wholly and unbreakably segregated. (It wasn’t until 1948 that the military was desegrated after President Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981.)
Instead, he describes the flyers as a team of middle-American ‘common men,’ brought together to win a war, piling on with plenty of schlocky, say-mac-what’s-the-big-idea ‘40s dialogue.
“Three years ago there was only an idea and ideas are powerful things,” Reagan says. In training, he says, “a chemistry student, a welder, a shoe salesmen, must learn how to fly. A group of average Americans must become a team of fighting men with wings.”
To join the war, he continues, “they changed clothes, they changed jobs, they took a train into the future.”
Unmentioned, of course, is that, had the nation or even just the Army Air Corps, truly valued performance and bravery over a pilot’s race, it would not have had to set up an isolated base in Alabama to train Black pilots. It would have just trained them with white pilots.
But it’s hard to watch “Wings For This Man” without concluding that Reagan, 30 years before “the Reagan Revolution,” was adding an intentional note of subversion for his U.S. audience. To cut their airfield in Alabama, Reagan says, “more than trees had to be cleared away. There was misunderstanding and distrust and prejudice to be cleared away.”
In the cockpit, the pilots were in “a new world up here,” Reagan says, as Beethhoven’s “Ode to Joy” plays in the background.
Perhaps Reagan’s most notable passage comes toward the end, when he firmly divides the world into two sides — the Axis powers versus the American way — and puts the segregation and racism behind the Tuskegee project squarely into the Axis’ camp.
“Here’s the answer to Hitler and Hirohito,” Reagan says. “Here’s the answer to the propaganda of the Japs and Nazis. Here’s the answer: Wings for this man.”
It’s almost as if the future President wanted to say that diversity is a strength.
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