Maritime Archaeologist Wayne Lusardi of ‘THE REAL RED TAILS’ from National Geographic TV On The Message He Hopes Viewers Take From The Documentary

They trained to go to war at a time when the United States did not want them to participate, particularly in the Air Corps. They had to overcome racial and social injustice. They had to overcome segregation, all while training to go into combat, which is arguably the most stressful sort of training you can imagine.

I had the pleasure to interview Wayne Lusardi of THE REAL RED TAILS from National Geographic TV.

Wayne Lusardi is Michigan’s state maritime archaeologist and artifact conservator with the Department of Natural Resources. For over 20 years, he has participated in the documentation of hundreds of shipwrecks located in state waters. Wayne also investigates historic aircraft wreck sites, both on land and underwater. He has led expeditions to Army and Air Force crash sites, including a Bell P-39 Airacobra flown by Tuskegee Airman Lt. Frank H. Moody. Wayne received his master’s degree in maritime history and nautical archaeology from East Carolina University in 1998 and a bachelor’s in anthropology and archaeology, with a geology minor, from Illinois State University.

THE REAL RED TAILS gives the story of the astonishing discovery of a WWII-era P-39 airplane. Narrated by Sheryl Lee Ralph, the hour long special explores the history of the Tuskegee Airmen as well as the mission to solve this 80-year-old mystery.

Can you share with our readers a little bit about your backstory?

I’m the State of Michigan’s Maritime Archaeologist. I work with the Department of Natural Resources, and I’ve been in Michigan for 22 years. Most of what I do is underwater work on shipwrecks, primarily the most iconic of all kinds of archaeological sites in the Great Lakes.

There are something like 1,500 or so shipwrecks in Michigan. There are also many airplane wrecks in the Great Lakes, including World War II training victims. I am responsible for documenting these sites, helping to protect them, interpreting them, and sometimes recovering them.

What sparked your interest in the WWII-era P-39 airplane and the story of Tuskegee Airman Lt. Frank H. Moody?

World War II Navy airplanes were lost off Chicago and lower Lake Michigan. But I didn’t really think very much about how many there were, the types of aircraft, and who they were associated with until this particular airplane, Lieutenant Moody’s P-39 Airacobra, was found in 2014.

The divers who found it, David and his son Drew Lizinski, contacted me because they wanted to do something with the wreck site. They wanted to either bring the bigger pieces together and create a kind of dive attraction or recover it, maybe recover some of it. They weren’t sure. And so, before you do anything with any kind of archaeological site like that, you have to document it.

I met with the Lizinskis right after the discovery, started looking at it, and realized that the airplane was fairly significant — not because it was a P-39 Airacobra (there were 20,000 or so made), but because of its affiliation with the Tuskegee Airmen. At that time, I really didn’t know a lot about the Tuskegee training experience here in Michigan.

I came to learn that they operated here in 1943 and 1944. Unfortunately, as with many military training exercises, there are bound to be accidents, and many of them were fatal. Fifteen of the airmen were killed here in Michigan while training in about a year and a half time frame. That sounds like a lot, and it was. Each one of them was very important. But there were almost 16,000 fatalities in the Army Air Corps in training accidents across the United States. It was a massive war effort that’s incomprehensible by today’s standards. So I started looking at the aircraft, its association with Frank Moody and the Tuskegee Airmen, and then I started generating interest across the country to bring in partners that would help me document the airplane and ultimately do the recovery operations.

Can you walk us through the challenges you faced during expeditions to locate and document the Bell P-39 Airacobra?

Almost certainly the biggest challenge of working underwater is waiting on the weather, waiting out the weather. We have a lot of wind here, particularly in the last three years, and wind in the Great Lakes means big waves, and big waves mean currents, and currents mean lack of visibility. It’s all this sort of cycle, and you really just have to kind of wait that out.

Sometimes these wind events can last for days and really make the lake unsettled. Unlike the ocean, where you get just beautiful, bigger, kind of regular swells, the Great Lakes can be very chaotic. They can be very choppy, and it’s difficult to work in that. It’s not impossible, but it is challenging, especially if you’re using instrumentation like underwater video and you don’t have the visibility.

You just kind of have to wait it out. So, weather is the number one challenge. Associated with that too is just the cold water. The Great Lakes are cold most of the time, and particularly for crew members that I have from places like South Florida and Texas who come up here and are used to diving in 90-degree water.

When they get here and it’s only in the fifties, it’s very cold, and it really limits the bottom time just because of the comfort and the danger associated with potentially becoming hypothermic, even underwater. So again, that’s sort of a weather-related thing, the water temperature. And then it’s just a matter of scheduling.

We have a very tight schedule here in the Great Lakes. We only have a couple or three months of really good diving season, so you have to pack a lot into that very short time frame. And then if you get blown off the lake because of the weather, it sets everything back. So those are probably the biggest challenges.

What can viewers expect to learn from the National Geographic documentary, THE REAL RED TAILS?

I hope that viewers watching THE REAL RED TAILS learn that they were an incredible group of men and women who overcame unimaginable obstacles. They trained to go to war at a time when the United States did not want them to participate, particularly in the Air Corps.

They had to overcome racial and social injustice. They had to overcome segregation, all while training to go into combat, which is arguably the most stressful sort of training you can imagine. It was a double war for these men and women, where they were fighting not only the Axis powers in Europe but also for equal rights and against segregation within the armed services.

It was incredible — their ability to overcome these conflicts and obstacles was amazing. I hope that’s something really portrayed in this. The other thing is just the simple process of going through the training exercises. A lot of folks know a lot about World War II, but they think it happened elsewhere.

It happened in Europe. It happened in the Pacific, and they don’t really think of all the preparation and mobilization of this country for that war effort. That included training tens of thousands of pilots here in the United States, including the Tuskegee Airmen in Michigan.

How does the significance of the Bell P-39 discovery compare to your previous archaeological endeavors?

It is a very important site. It’s not necessarily important because of the aircraft, but because of the aircraft’s association with the Tuskegee Airmen and the training operations that were conducted here on the Great Lakes.

The United States Army Air Corps started training pilots in Michigan out of Selfridge Field near Detroit in 1917 during the First World War. At that time, it was the farthest northern military airfield in the US, and it was very specifically selected because of the geographical and climatic conditions that were an easy transition to the European theater of operations.

In other words, you can learn how to fly an airplane in a warm, dry environment like Arizona, but that’s not going to help you when you go to Europe. Whereas when you learn in Michigan, you’re dealing with the same kinds of conditions that you’re going to encounter in the European theater. So, it was kind of a no-brainer for the Army to start training pilots here.

That was no different for the Second World War. The first couple of years the Tuskegee Airmen trained, they stayed in Alabama at Tuskegee. It wasn’t until the deployment of the 99th Fighter Squadron to North Africa, then Sicily and Italy, that the subsequent classes at Tuskegee would receive advanced training in other places around the country, including here at Selfridge Field and airfields in Michigan.

Unfortunately, accidents occurred, and because I’m an underwater archaeologist, I focus primarily on the accidents that occurred over the water. There were five airplanes operated by Tuskegee Airmen that ended up in Lake Huron or in the interconnecting waterways, and two of those have been found, including Lieutenant Moody’s.

Even though the Bell P-39 Airacobra, of which about 20,000 were manufactured in Buffalo, New York, was common, there are only a handful left. Most of them were scrapped by the end of the war, lost in combat, or lost in training accidents. So, there are only a few left. There are none that I’m aware of outside of the two we have here in Michigan that were directly affiliated with the Tuskegee training presence here. They are very special in regard to how they were associated with these airmen and how they were lost in these training accidents here in the lakes.

Could you elaborate on the preservation challenges faced in recovering and conserving artifacts from the Bell P-39, submerged for over 80 years?

The archaeological sites, particularly shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, are incredibly well preserved because of the fresh, cold water. You don’t have the salt like you would in a marine environment, which is very corrosive. And you don’t have the critters found in an ocean environment that like to ingest wood and other organic materials. So, you can often see a shipwreck here that looks just like a kid would envision a shipwreck to look, with the mast still standing, the rigging in the mast, the steering wheel, and the whole works.

That was also the case for aircraft. When the Navy warbirds that were lost during World War II started to be discovered in the 1960s and 1970s, some of them were so pristine, lying on the bottom of Lake Michigan, that they were recovered and put back into flying status. They were that well-preserved in the fresh, cold water.

All of that has changed now because of the introduction of invasive mussels. The quagga and zebra mussels came over from Europe in ship bilge water and unfortunately infested the entirety of the lower Great Lakes, with the exception of Lake Superior. When they colonize and attach to things like airplanes, they create a very corrosive environment for aluminum.

So, the aluminum is literally being rotted away. Instead of finding these shiny, new-looking airplanes like you would have found in the lakes 40 or 50 years ago, you’re finding airplane skin that looks like Swiss cheese. It’s very corroded because of the invasive mussels, and it’s a challenge to stop that corrosion.

The 20th-century materials, like aluminum alloys used in aircraft, as well as rubbers, plastics, and other kinds of materials used in 20th-century war-making objects like airplanes, pose a challenge. We don’t fully understand the long-term effects of conservation processes on these materials. So, some of it is experimental and some of it involves adapting conservation efforts to preserve these materials, even though they were lying in fresh water. They are experiencing these problems primarily because of the mussels.

How has your academic background shaped your methodologies in uncovering and preserving historical artifacts?

A lot of the archaeological practices that we use in recording underwater artifacts are the same as those you would see in a terrestrial setting. We use many of the same tools and methodologies. As an archaeologist, what I’m doing is systematically searching for the components of this airplane.

It’s spread out over almost half a mile on the lake floor in about 10 meters of water, and it’s fragmented. Some of the pieces are very large, like the wings, which are more or less intact from tip to tip, spanning about 32 feet. The engine was about 400 feet away, the tail was about 300 feet away, and then everything else is broken and scattered all over the lake bottom.

We’re using different kinds of methodologies to detect the pieces and parts. We’re using sonar to acoustically map the lake floor and have employed a variety of sonar equipment. We’re using metal detectors to find what lies beneath the lake floor, and we’re doing visual surveys with archaeologists and divers. Then, we’re systematically mapping everything; we want to know exactly where every single piece and part from that airplane came from and what it was associated with on the lake floor.

Because of that very careful mapping, we’re learning exactly how the airplane came to be in that spot and how it disarticulated even before crashing into the lake. It started coming apart in the air and then spread out over the subsequent 80 years of submersion in the lake. This all has to do with very careful documentation.

What do you hope audiences take away from THE REAL RED TAILS, and how might this discovery influence our understanding of WWII aviation history?

The biggest takeaway is the magnitude of the war, how many pilots were involved in accidents here in the United States, and how important some of these archaeological sites are on U.S. soil. The Second World War didn’t happen in faraway places necessarily. There are a lot of sites directly related to it right here in Michigan, in the Great Lakes, and across the United States. I think that’s very important. The U-Boat War, for example, happened up and down the East Coast.

There were Japanese bomb balloons that dropped all over the United States, particularly in the western states. There were invasions of the Aleutian Islands, and things like that. So, the war was here on mainland North America more than we really learn in our grade school history classes. Another thing is that the Tuskegee Airmen themselves were great contributors to this war effort.

There were only a thousand of them who were pilots, but there were about 15,000 or so support personnel. They did their part like millions of other young men and women who wanted to help this country. They served this country, and sometimes they died for this country. A lot of that happened here in Michigan and across the Great Lakes. It’s something that we should remember and really honor their sacrifice.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Sharing this is a story not about me. This is an incredible story, and I’m incredibly honored to just be a part of it and to help disseminate it to everyone. It’s really Lieutenant Moody’s story. It’s about Frank Moody, who was just a young man that gave his life in service to this country. Many men and women like him across the country were fighting and overcoming these obstacles all for the common good. The remains that I can study, lying on the lake floor, are something that I can help preserve. I’m just very awed and honored to be part of this in a wonderful way.

How can our readers find out more about THE REAL RED TAILS?

THE REAL RED TAILS premieres on June 3, 2024 at 9/8c on National Geographic TV.

Thank you for your insights and expertise, Wayne.