|
Congratulations came that Henry L. Moore had successfully passed (Score 92?) the Aviation Cadet Examination. Henry was to be advised "later" on the disposition of his appointment to flying school. It was after a fifteen-day furlough in December 1943 that the order came to be transferred to Tuskegee for pilot training, but Col. Benjamin O. Davis exercised his option to delay the assignment, which he did because, "I cannot spare a Crew Chief". The assignment came literally during a time that the group was undergoing maneuvers for embarking overseas for combat duty. The C.O. promised that as soon as these men could be spared they would be permitted to accept the Tuskegee assignment. Upon his return to Selfridge a truck was waiting to take him to the new base at Oscoda. The base there was set up to simulate the conditions the men would be facing when they landed in Italy, tents and aircraft parked on steel matting. Shipping out on January 3rd 1944 on a Victory Ship out of Hampton Roads Virginia on a cold and rainy nightwith Luther Smith a pilot of the 302nd they linked up with an Italy bound convoy. Henry says of Luther at the time. "He was a religious man and would hold prayer services on ship, but I wanted nothing to do with it at the time, though we were friends. The first three days the seas were calm but the passage was long, over 30 days as the convoy zigzagged and reversed course on many occasions to avoid the U-boats that were still a threat." Says Henry of the voyage. "We thought on several occasions that we were being torpedoed when we heard explosions. The British escorts would drop depth charges and circle the convoy to protect us and on several occasions when the ship would plow into a 30 foot wave I though we might not make it." Henry never got seasick but his upper bunkmate, Line Chief Harris did and so did many others. The ship finally pulled into the former Italian naval base at Taronto where Henry could see the impact of the British torpedo plane attacks on the Italian navy with several of its battleships and cruisers still settled on the bottom. Ironically it was the British that proved to the world the Pearl Harbor attack was possible, the same attack that led the U.S. into war. Luther Smith would later be shot down and badly wounded, though he was well cared for by his German captors. He and Henry would meet much later in life at a meeting of the Tuskegee Airmen where Henry would learn to his relief that Luther had indeed survived. Upon landing in Italy Henry says it was a day he will never forget. For the first time in his life, he says, he felt free. Having left the racist U.S. South, whose people were openly hostile, he felt a free man not to be segregated and made to feel inferior. He vowed that he might never return to the U.S.
|
