Warren Ludlum, a World War II bomber pilot, told the Associated Press news service in an interview last week that his bomber was shot down while being escorted by fighters flown by the Tuskegee Airmen. He went on to say that one of the mission’s Tuskegee Airmen—Starling Penn—was himself shot down and spent time in the same POW camp. One of the two historians who ignited a firestorm over their claim that the Tuskegee Airmen did not have a perfect no-bombers-lost record—William Holton of Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.—confirmed Penn’s fate.
One of the Air Force and Navy’s most common air-to-air missiles is falling short of a key readiness metric, and the services are ramping up stocks of a vital air-to-ground missile, according to recent Pentagon reports.
