This black fighter pilot broke all kinds of records. He doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page
Meet Clarence D. Lester, the forgotten Tuskegee Airman from Chicago
On July 18th, 1944, Lieutenant Clarence D. “Lucky” Lester was, once again, about to live up to his nickname and make history. The Tuskegee Airmen fighter pilot from Chicago was flying a P-51 Mustang through the clouds above Italy’s Po Valley as cover support for the B-17 Flying Fortress bound for southern Germany when the formation spotted enemy aircraft at about 29,000 feet.
“We were flying in a loose formation, about 200 feet apart and zig-zagging,” Lester recalled. “The flight leader commanded ‘hard right and punch tanks’ (drop the external fuel tanks). I saw a formation of Messerschmitt Bf 109s straight ahead, but slightly lower. I closed to about 200 feet and started to fire. Smoke began to pour out of the 109 and the aircraft exploded. I was going so fast I was sure I would hit some of the debris from the explosion, but luckily I didn’t.”
After taking down his first 109 he spotted the second. He shot it down and remembers seeing the pilot “emerge from his burning aircraft.” Finally, he lit up the third 109 about 1,000 feet above the ground. By shooting down three planes in five minutes he’d just made history.
Lester was part of the 332nd Fighter Group, a segregated unit during World War II, and was trained within the 100th Fighter Squadron, created in 1942 to train black flight cadets who graduated from the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. The award-winning pilot completed over 90 combat missions and earned his nickname by escaping dangerous missions without so much as a scratch on his aircraft. But still, some scrapes are unavoidable even for the most accomplished pilots. A JET article from November 1951 reported an incident where his F-84E Thunderjet exploded into flames.
Lester reportedly had to yank his ejection seat and parachute from the inflamed jet, which made him only the sixth pilot ever to use the ejection method and the first black member of the exclusive club of pilots who’d been shot out of a jet. They called themselves the Fraternitas Exjectio.
“Everything went the same as in training except for the real bullets,” he later said of the 1944 incident. “Real bullets! Until then, the danger of the mission had never occurred to me.”
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