469
●
(MILITARY—WORLD WAR
II.) TUSKEGEE AIRMEN.
She’s a
Swell Plane—Give Us More!
Full sheet
poster, 40 x 27 inches, linen-backed.
Washington: War Production Board, 1944
[2,500/3,500]
A wonderful poster depicting a Tuskegee
Airman, in uniform saluting and giving the
“thumbs up” sign.
469
AN AIRMAN’S EXCEPTIONAL WARTIME LETTER
468
●
(MILITARY—WORLD WAR II.) TUSKEGEE AIRMEN.
Typed Letter
Signed by Alexander “Jeff ” Jefferson.
Six closely typed pages on both sides of small
8vo sheets; the foot of page 5 looks as though a line had been cut, but it is not the case; the
text continues from 5 to 6.
[Italy, March 19, 1944
[2,000/3,000]
While this letter bears a New York City APO, the pilot. Lieutenant Alexander “Jeff”
Jefferson was writing from combat duty in Italy. In what he calls a “book-length” letter, he
describes frantic preparations for shipping out to Europe and the subsequent 26 day voyage.
Arriving in Italy, the fliers first slept on the ground in a leaky tent that housed five men, until
one was killed in a crash. Jefferson had not as yet “come into actual combat with the enemy,”
but was “flying rather regularly, though I can’t tell you the type of missions we are doing”
(night time bomber support missions), knowing that “almost every moment is potentially dan-
gerous” — such as a night landing “when my front wheel folded up on me and I slid down
the runway on the nose of the plane. . . at 100 mph. . .” He found Italy “a beautiful country”
with some fine modernistic buildings and a “high degree of civilization,” though most of the
people were “almost universally poor”, hungry and with ragged clothing, crowded into dirty,
bombed out urban areas which reminded him of “the slums of Chicago.” Jefferson enjoyed frat-
ernizing with ”officers from various countries,” and if he was troubled by any signs of racism, he
didn’t mention it to the young lady to whom he was writing.
Six months after writing this letter, having flown 18 long-range missions, Lieutenant Jefferson’s
plane was shot down by ground fire while strafing German radar stations on the coast of
Southern France. Captured by German troops, he was interned as a POW for 9 months, end-
ing up near the Dachau Death Camp where he was liberated by Patton’s Army. Jefferson
remained in the Air Force after the war, and in 2005 published the only memoir of a Tuskegee
Airman imprisoned by the Nazis. Provenance: private collection.
