Retired Lt. Col. Harry Stewart Jr, a decorated World War II pilot who was a member of Tuskegee Airmen and earned honors for his combat heroism, has died. He was 100.
Stewart was one of the last surviving combat pilots of the famed 332nd Fighter Group also known as the Tuskegee Airmen. The group were the nation’s first black military pilots.
The Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum confirmed his passing. The organization said he passed peacefully at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, on Sunday.
Stewart earned the Distinguished Flying Cross for downing three German aircraft during a dogfight on April 1, 1945. He was also part of a team of four Tuskegee Airmen who won the U.S. Air Force Top Gun flying competition in 1949, although their accomplishment would not be recognized until decades later.
“Harry Stewart was a kind man of profound character and accomplishment with a distinguished career of service he continued long after fighting for our country in World War II,” Brian Smith, president and CEO of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Museum, said.
Born on July 4, 1924, in Virginia, his family moved to New York when he was young. Stewart had dreamed of flying since he was a child when he would watch planes at LaGuardia airport, according to a book about his life titled “Soaring to Glory: A Tuskegee Airmen’s Firsthand Account of World War II.” In the wake of Pearl Harbor, an 18-year-old Stewart joined what was then considered an experiment to train black military pilots. The unit sometimes known as the Tuskegee Airmen for where they trained in Alabama or the Red Tails because of the red tips of their P-51 Mustangs.
“I did not recognize at the time the gravity of what we are facing. I just felt as though it was a duty of mine at the time. I just stood up to my duty,” Stewart said of World War II in a 2024 interview with CNN about the war.
He was determined to finish and earn his wings according to the book about his life. After finishing training, the pilots were assigned to escort U.S. bombers in Europe. The Tuskegee Airmen are credited with losing significantly fewer escorted bombers than other fighter groups.
“I got to really enjoy the idea of the panorama, I would say, of the scene I would see before me with the hundreds of bombers and the hundreds of fighter planes up there and all of them pulling the condensation trails, and it was just the ballet in the sky and a feeling of belonging to something that was really big,” Stewart said in a 2020 interview with WAMC.
Stewart would sometimes say in a self-effacing way that he was too busy enjoying flying to realize he was making history, according to his book.
Stewart had hoped to become a commercial airline pilot after he left the military, but was rejected. He went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree at New York University. He relocated to Detroit and retired as vice president of a natural gas pipeline company.
