Harry Stewart Jr., who flew 43 missions over Europe as a fighter pilot and was among the last surviving combat veterans of the Tuskegee Airmen, an all-Black squadron in the segregated U.S. military during World War II, died Feb. 2 at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He was 100.
Philip Handleman, an aviation writer and the co-author of Mr. Stewart’s 2019 memoir, “Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airman’s Firsthand Account of World War II,” confirmed the death but did not know the specific cause.
Brian R. Smith, president of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum in Detroit, said Mr. Stewart was the last of two surviving Tuskegee combat pilots, leaving just George Hardy, who is 99. There are about 20 surviving Tuskegee Airmen, Smith said.
Mr. Stewart described himself as awed since his childhood in Queens, by the airplanes that would rumble over his home, which was on the flight path to what is now LaGuardia Airport. He joined the Army Air Forces at 18 and earned his wings the next year at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama, long before he learned how to drive a car.
As part of the all-Black 301st Fighter Squadron, Mr. Stewart was assigned to Ramitelli Air Base in Italy. He and fellow squadron pilots flew in single-seat P-51 Mustang fighters as escorts to White-crewed long-distance bombers making runs in Italy, Austria and Germany. Each trip, he said, lasted anywhere from five to seven hours while flying in outside temperatures 50 to 60 degrees below zero.
“You’re trapped in the cockpit, and you cannot really move,” he told the Boston Herald, explaining how he would try any way he could to get the blood flowing. “Sometimes coming back from a mission … I would invert the plane, turn it over on its back then so actually I was hanging by my safety strap. … It was like somebody rubbing your back. I couldn’t stay in that position for too long, it was only for a second and then turn the plane back over upright again.”

On an Easter Sunday — April 1, 1945 — he and his unit had completed escort duties for a group of B24s for a bombing raid over Linz, Austria, when Mr. Stewart and other P-51 pilots decided to hunt for Luftwaffe aircraft on their own. They encountered long-nosed Focke-Wulf Fw 190s near the Austrian city of Wels and engaged in a brutal dogfight.
“Three of us got shot down,” he recalled to the Herald. “One was able to make it back to friendly territory before he crash-landed, one was killed outright when he was shot down and the third one, his plane was damaged so badly that he had to bail out.”
He said he later learned that the man, Walter Manning, was captured and lynched days later by a mob after German SS troops encouraged local paramilitaries to kidnap him from jail and hang him from a lamppost.
Mr. Stewart said he almost met the same fate, having only narrowly avoided being strafed while in a German pilot’s crosshairs. While being chased at close range, Mr. Stewart made a steep dive before pulling up on the controls at the last possible moment.
He said he saw the Luftwaffe pilot, perhaps less experienced at the controls, go into a high-speed stall and crash in a fiery explosion. (Handleman said other accounts he heard have the German pilot clipping a tree during the low-level chase with Mr. Stewart.)
For his actions in combat that day, which included participating in the downing of three German aircraft, Mr. Stewart received the Distinguished Flying Cross.
After the war, Mr. Stewart transitioned to the newly created Air Force in 1947 — a year before President Harry S. Truman desegregated the military. In 1949, Mr. Stewart and two other Tuskegee Airmen veterans demonstrated their skills in a service-wide aerial gunnery competition held near Las Vegas at what would soon become Nellis Air Force Base. Flying Republic F-47N Thunderbolts, they won first place in the propeller division.
Despite a desire to make a career in the service, Mr. Stewart said postwar budget constraints affecting the numbers of needed pilot led him to rethink his plans. He returned to civilian life in 1950 after being honorably discharged at the rank of captain and struggled to find a job in commercial aviation at a time of rampant discriminatory practices by the major airlines.
As he recounted to the Detroit News, he showed up at the Trans World Airlines office dressed “impeccably and immaculately” in response to an advertisement seeking pilots. The receptionist, he said, “looked at me and then looked away before saying, ‘We’re not taking any applicants.’ ”
“I walked away,” he added. “I didn’t want to let her see she had gotten to me and made me have this awful feeling.”
A man from human resources, who overheard the exchange, then approached to explain with what Mr. Stewart said was an attempt at sympathy: “Picture yourself as a passenger on the aircraft. How would you feel if you saw this black man in a pilot’s uniform walking down the aisle to the cockpit? It would destroy the confidence of the passengers.”
A similar encounter at Pan American left him equally dejected. Determined not to work as a street cleaner, dishwasher or garbage collector — the jobs he said were most available to Black men at the time — he became a draftsman for New York City’s municipal engineering department.

He also completed coursework for his high school diploma and graduated in 1963 with a mechanical engineering degree from New York University after years of night school. He retired as a Detroit-based vice president of American Natural Resources, a company that runs interstate natural gas pipeline systems.
Harry Thaddeus Stewart Jr., the oldest of four children of a postal worker and a homemaker, was born in Newport News, Virginia, on July 4, 1924. He was 2 when the family resettled in Queens, where he grew fascinated with flight.
“My parents told me, when I was a year or two old, they put me in a crib out on the lawn,” he told Downtown Newsmagazine. “Planes would fly over, and I would get very excited. As a teenager, I used to walk over to North Beach Airport [now LaGuardia] and watch the planes take off and land.”
After the United States entered World War II in 1941, Mr. Stewart said he read a magazine article about the first all-Black flying combat unit, the 99th Pursuit Squadron. He had quit school at 16 for a job that brought a steady paycheck but said he was determined to sign up as a military pilot after turning 18.
“These black flyers had glamour, polish, prestige,” he recalled to the Wall Street Journal. “The Army Air Forces accepted me even though I had no high-school diploma. The country needed pilots, I was gung-ho, and I had passed the battery of written tests.”
Upon joining the Army Air Forces, he was sent by train to Biloxi, Mississippi, for basic training. As soon as the train crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, the train conductor pointed at him and ordered him to the “colored car.” “It was disconcerting,” Mr. Stewart told the Journal, “but I saw it as an unavoidable hurdle to earning my wings. I swallowed hard and kept going.”
It was his first exposure to what he called years of being treated as a “second-class citizen” even while in the military. At Tuskegee Army Air Field, located near the Tuskegee Institute, the commanding officers were White, and all other personnel, including mechanics and pilots, were Black. Mr. Stewart completed his Tuskegee training on June 27, 1944, and soon went overseas.
His wife of 68 years, Delphine Friend, died in 2015. Survivors include a daughter, Lori Stewart.
Throughout his life, Mr. Stewart maintained a strong connection to his service days. He retired from the Air Force Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and was present at a ceremony at the U.S. Capitol in 2008 when President George W. Bush bestowed on a dwindling number of surviving peers the Congressional Gold Medal for their groundbreaking military service.
Major commercial carriers slowly began hiring Black pilots amid the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s. The carriers American and Delta presented Mr. Stewart with honorary captain’s wings over the past decade.
At 81, Mr. Stewart was certified to fly motorized gliders operated by the youth flight academy of the Tuskegee Airmen museum in Detroit. In that role, which he conducted for several years, he helped introduce young people to flying. (Unlike with a traditional airplane, the motorized glider’s engine can be turned off once it reaches altitude, and then flown and landed as a regular sailplane.)
“It is a matter of conscience,” he told the Detroit Free Press. “I have this license to fly, I’ve been provided with the health and the vigor and the stamina and everything else to do this type of thing, so my conscience dictates that I try to pass it on to someone else.”
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