Pentagon identifies Tuskegee Airman missing from World War II

Thank you for sharing my friend CW5 Jack Cardwell that the Defense Department announced Friday that it has accounted for the first of more than two dozen black aviators known as Tuskegee Airmen who went missing in action during World War II.

Image: Capt. Lawrence E. Dickson,

Capt. Lawrence E. Dickson, a fighter pilot who had trained at the Tuskegee Army Flying School, was 24 when he went down over Austria on Dec. 23, 1944, while on a mission.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) had been investigating the possibility that human remains and other items found at a crash site in Austria this past summer were Dickson’s.
On Friday morning, the DPAA informed his daughter, Marla L. Andrews, 76, of East Orange, N.J., that the remains were those of her father.
Marla Andrews at her home in East Orange, N.J. (Photo by Bryan Anselm For The Washington Post)
“I feel great!” she said in a telephone interview. “I really do feel a relief . . . I had a good crying jag.”
Dickson is probably the first missing Tuskegee Airman found since the end of World War II, the DPAA has said.
There were 27 Tuskegee Airmen missing from the war. Now there are 26.
DPAA investigators said the crash site was a few miles from where his P-51 Mustang was reported to have gone down. Debris at the site was from a P-51. And German records report a lone P-51 crash there the same day Dickson disappeared.
Historically, the site was a match, Joshua Frank, a DPAA research analyst, said earlier this year.
Last summer, the site was excavated by the DPAA and a team from the University of New Orleans, and human remains were recovered.
Dickson was among the more than 900 black pilots who were trained at the segregated Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama during the war.
They were African American men from all over the country who fought racism and oppression at home and enemy pilots and antiaircraft gunners overseas.
More than 400 served in combat, flying patrol and strafing missions, and escorting bombers from bases in North Africa and Italy. The tail sections of their fighter planes were painted a distinctive red.
Two days before Christmas 1944, Dickson took off from his base at Ramitelli, in southern Italy, in a sleek P-51D nicknamed “Peggin,” headed for Nazi-occupied Prague.
Dickson was on his 68th mission and had already been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for meritorious service.
He was leading a three-Mustang escort of a fast but unarmed photo reconnaissance plane, according to the account of a wingman, 2nd Lt. Robert L. Martin, many years later."

Hopefully DPAA will be able to locate the remains of and identify each and every MIA from WWII including the missing Tuskegee Airmen.

FYI COL Mikel J. Burroughs LTC Stephen C. Maj William W. "Bill" Price Capt Seid Waddell CW5 (Join to see) SMSgt Minister Gerald A. Thomas SFC Joe S. Davis Jr., MSM, DSL SSgt (Join to see) SP5 Mark Kuzinski SGT John " Mac " McConnell SGT Robert George SP5 Robert Ruck SCPO Morris RamseyCPL Eric Escasio SPC (Join to see) SPC Margaret Higgins Kim Bolen RN CCM ACM SGT Gregory Lawritson CPL Craig Cheltenham

Worst ten states to live in
Alabama Mississippi Louisiana Tennessee new Mexico Texas Kansas Missouri

Rest in Peace Capt Lawrence E. Dickson.