Tuskegee Top Gun

HISTORY This Week

The HISTORY® Channel | Back Pocket Studios

History, Society & Culture

4.5 • 4.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 January 2026

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Editor’s note: This episode originally aired January 9, 2023. Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr. passed away in February 2025 at the age of 100. Lt. Col. James Harvey III still resides in New Jersey, now 102 years old.

January 11, 2022. Lt. Col. James Harvey arrives at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for the first time in 73 years. He’s there to accept a plaque celebrating the last time he was there, for the Air Force’s first-ever weapons competition. Back then, Harvey and the other Tuskegee Airmen on his team had squared off against the best military pilots around. They tackled high-skill tests of simulated aerial warfare… and they won. But over the decades, the official record of their victory was lost or neglected. Who were these exceptional Black pilots? And what did it take to rescue their accomplishments from obscurity and bring them into the light?

Special thanks to our guests: Lt. Col. James Harvey III; and Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr., who passed away in February 2025 at the age of 100. Lt. Col. Stewart was the co-author of Soaring to Glory. Thanks also to Zellie Rainey Orr, author of Heroes in War, Heroes at Home, and to Daniel Haulman, retired historian at the Air Force Historical Research Agency and author of Misconceptions About the Tuskegee Airmen.

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Transcript

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0:23.3	Sign up for your £1 per month trial at shopify.com.uk.
0:27.7	com.com.
0:30.1	The History Channel, original podcast.
0:34.0	History this week. January 11th, 2022.
0:39.1	I'm Sally Helm.
0:42.4	Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey arrives at Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas, Nevada.
0:49.2	He hasn't been on this base in 73 years.
0:53.7	Today, he wears a burgundy suit coat with an airplane pin on it, plus a patch
0:58.5	embroidered with yet more planes, and the words Tuskegee Airmen. When he was a younger man, Harvey
1:06.6	served as a pilot in the Air Force's 332nd Fighter Group,
1:14.1	the first black airman in the United States military,
1:19.4	who fought during World War II and were named for their training ground in Tuskegee, Alabama.
1:26.6	But what really catches the eye about Harvey's outfit today is his black baseball cap.
1:31.6	It says first top gun winner, 1949.
1:39.4	That is the year that Lieutenant Colonel James Harvey last stepped foot on Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada.
1:41.7	He was there for the Air Force's first-ever weapons meet,
1:47.0	when the military's most talented pilots, the best of the best,
1:51.0	competed against each other in simulated acts of aerial warfare.
1:56.0	Harvey was on a team of three pilots, the only black pilots competing.
2:01.6	And they won.
2:05.6	But over the years that followed, the official record of their victory was either lost or neglected, or both.
	...

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