FAIRMONT — You never leave a wounded bird up there, on its own.
That’s what they called them, the shot-up B-17s and B-24s, crippled by the German ack-ack fire and trying to make it back to their bases, after dropping their bombs from the lethally busy skies over Europe in World War II.
Meanwhile, those fast and deadly Messerschmitt fighter planes of the Luftwaffe would swoop in, as their pilots readied for the kill.
However, they weren’t counting on their American counterparts who were flying escort with their American P-51 Mustangs that were even faster and deadlier.
Planes that stayed right by the bullet-riddled bombers because George “Spanky” Roberts, of the Tuskegee Airmen, gave the order.
His voice would crackle tersely over the radio channel.
On the ground, he was a guy, who, despite the literal nature of his engineer’s brain, could still keep it loose and easy, when he wasn’t working.
Up in the air, though, he was the Man in Charge.
Don’t peel off, he’d snap — even though the natural inclination was to go screaming after the enemy in aerial dog fights, just like the ones depicted in war movies he used to watch from the balcony of the Lee Theater back home.
“Home” was the operative word for the pilot who was an engineer first.
We’re bringing those wounded birds home, he’d say.
That’s what we’re up here for.
That’s why we went through all this to get here.
Assuming the role (all nicknames aside)
During the first two weeks of Roberts’ run as a squadron leader, his steadfast strategy saved American bombers (and American lives) besides shooting down 13 enemy planes.
The kid from Fairmont, who was always the youngest guy in the room, was growing up fast.
Roberts by then had cultivated a mustache and was smoking a pipe — not as manifestations of ego or vanity — but to simply make himself appear older, for the benefit of command.
He graduated early from Fairmont’s all-Black Dunbar High School, and when he stepped onto the campus of West Virginia State College, one of the few colleges in the Mountain State and region he could attend, owing the color of his skin, he was just 16.
He looked even younger.
“Come here, little boy,” the upperclassmen would tease. “You look like you need a spanking.”
The nickname stayed.
West Virginia State was where he earned his mechanical engineering degree at the age of 18, and West Virginia State was where he learned to fly.
The Black school was the springboard to his admission as a Tuskegee Airman and it was also where he caught his first glimpse of Edith “Edo” McMillan, a pretty girl with long hair and long legs from McDowell County.
We’ll come back to that.
Battles, there and here
Roberts would fly more than 100 combat missions in two wars by the time he was done.
In World War II, he and his sepia-brothers in arms would shoot down 112 enemy planes and disable another 150 parked on airstrips and hidden in hangers.
The Tuskegee fighters would take out 600 railroad cars while sinking one German destroyer.
And, along the way, Roberts was slowly knocking back another enemy — this one even more stubborn.
Jim Crow.
Which is why he and his fellow pilots and other personnel were Tuskegee Airmen to begin with.
His daughter, Lanelle Brent, was amazed by her dad’s patriotism and lack of bitterness over the segregated circumstances of the whole thing.
It was the same for most soldiers of color who wore the uniform in World War II, she said.
“They came back to the same Jim Crow laws and the same prejudices that were there before they left,” she told an interviewer on KDRT, a community radio station in Davis, Calif., in 2022.
“So, in that sense, nothing had changed. But they were Americans. They were patriotic. And they were proud of their service.”
Well, there was one change.
One huge change.
When Roberts was given another command during the Korean War, he was saluted by airmen, Black and white. America’s military was finally integrated.
‘I told you’
He wasn’t a lone eagle, however.
Roberts couldn’t marry while he was a cadet in training for the Tuskegee program.
But when he proposed and Edith said yes — he followed that by telling her they would take their vows just as soon as he earned his wings.
Which, they did.
Engineer-brain once again, Lanelle laughed.
Miss McMillan was called to the stage immediately after — and a wedding commenced.
“I told you.”
“Honey, I wasn’t expecting the wedding three minutes after you got your wings.”
In the tradition of the day, Mrs. Roberts also had a glamour “pin-up” photo of herself made, which she sent to her husband after he went to war in Europe.
Call it domestic glamour.
She was eight months pregnant with Lanelle.
Her mom had a sense of humor, too, Lanelle told KDRT.
War and peace
His military career took him far away from Fairmont.
In Okinawa, Edith parlayed her degrees in French and music into a teaching position.
Her husband, meanwhile, retired as a full-bird colonel in 1968.
His final posting was at the former McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, Calif., an area of the country he and Edith especially enjoyed.
So they stayed.
He went into banking at Wells Fargo and she went back to school, earning a master’s in social work.
Spanky became active in community causes and Edo hired on as the first Black social worker for Sacramento’s public school district.
He was 65 when he died in Sacramento in 1984. Edith joined him in 2015. She was 96, keeping her love for him, and the story of Tuskegee Airmen, alive to the end.
George “Spanky” Roberts had plenty of war stories which he didn’t tell, his daughter said.
Instead, he focused on his love story, with Edith and his family.
That was reflected in his response to Emily Scott, a librarian at Dunbar High who was gathering stories from graduates of note for a commemorative story she was writing, in the wake of the Brown v. Board decision in 1954.
Dunbar would close 10 years later, as the legislation still worked through America’s school system.
Roberts didn’t recount his resume or airborne conquests in that response.
Instead, he reflected upon his community, and what it was like to engage, while not in war.
“I like people — all people,” he wrote.
“One of my favorite sayings is from the Bible: ‘Cast your bread upon the water.’ That means it’s going to eventually come back to you. If you do good, you get good in return.”
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