His passing last Friday received only cursory notice in the Alabama media. Fortunately,
The NY Times obituary for Lt. Colonel Friend includes the story of his leadership of project "Blue Book", an investigation into UFO's, and his amazing service during three wars: WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.
He also worked in the Titan, Atlas and Delta
rocket programs.
By some accounts, his death leaves only 11 surviving Tuskegee Airmen.
Robert J. Friend, Tuskegee Pilot Who Led U.F.O. Project, Is Dead at 99
Image
Lt.
Col. Robert J. Friend, retired, in an undated photo with a model of a
single-engine plane he flew during World War II. He named it Bunny,
after his girlfriend and future wife.CreditCreditvia the Friend family
Robert
J. Friend, one of the last surviving Tuskegee Airmen, who defied racism
at home and enemy fire over Europe and who later oversaw the federal
government’s investigation into U.F.O.s, died on Friday in Long Beach,
Calif. He was 99.
The cause was sepsis, his daughter Karen Friend Crumlich said.
Refused
enlistment in the Army Air Forces because he was African-American, he
was among the 355 pilots who served in the all-black unit known as the Tuskegee Airmen,
flying single-engine planes into combat in the Mediterranean theater
during World War II. His death leaves 11 surviving pilots from the unit.
Remaining
in the military in what became the Air Force and rising to lieutenant
colonel, he directed Project Blue Book, the government’s secret study of
unidentified flying objects, assessing whether they posed a threat to
national security or might advance scientific research. He held the post
from 1958 to 1963.
When, after 20
years, the project ended in 1969, about 700 of more than 12,000
sightings had been classified as unidentified. But the study concluded
that the objects posed no danger and displayed no perplexing
technological attributes.
Speaking at the National Atomic Testing Museum
in 2017, Lieutenant Colonel Friend, by then retired, expressed
skepticism, for practical reasons, that aliens from outer space had ever
landed on Earth.
Members
of the Tuskegee Airmen in the 1940s. Robert Friend is in the middle
row, second from left. The pilots were barred from serving with their
white counterparts.Creditvia the Friend family
Image
Members
of the Tuskegee Airmen in the 1940s. Robert Friend is in the middle
row, second from left. The pilots were barred from serving with their
white counterparts.Creditvia the Friend family
“Do
I believe that we have been visited? No, I don’t believe that,” he
said. “And the reason I don’t believe it is because I can’t conceive of
any of the ways in which we could overcome some of these things: How
much food would you have to take with you on a trip for 22 years through
space? How much fuel would you need? How much oxygen or other things to
sustain life do you have to have?”
But unlike many of his colleagues, he favored further research.
“I,
for one, also believe that the probability of there being life
elsewhere in this big cosmos is just absolutely out of this world — I
think the probability is there,” he said.
Long after Project Blue Book had ended, it commanded scrutiny again after The New York Times disclosed in 2017
that the government’s research into unidentified objects had continued
under a secret effort called the Advanced Aerospace Threat
Identification Program. The disclosure inspired the “Project Blue Book” series on the History channel last year.
Robert
Jones Friend was born on Feb. 29, 1920, in Columbia, S.C., the oldest
of four children. His father, William A. Friend, was an immigrant from
Ecuador who had served in the American Army in World War I and who
married Nella Mae Jones Liner, Robert’s mother.
An
airplane enthusiast even as a child, Mr. Friend joined the Civilian
Pilot Training program as a sophomore at the historically black Lincoln
University in Oxford, Pa.
Robert
Friend spent part of World War II serving in Italy. He had been an
airplane enthusiast since childhood when he was accepted as a cadet with
the Tuskegee Airmen in 1941.Creditvia the Friend family
Image
Robert
Friend spent part of World War II serving in Italy. He had been an
airplane enthusiast since childhood when he was accepted as a cadet with
the Tuskegee Airmen in 1941.Creditvia the Friend family
As
a nonwhite, he was rejected for flight training by the Army Air Forces
but accepted as an air cadet in the 99th Pursuit Squadron, a unit for
black men begun in June 1941 and unofficially named for their training
site at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.
Lieutenant
Colonel Friend was assigned to the 322nd Fighter Group and flew 142
missions in P-47 and P-51 Mustang fighters. He named his single-seater
plane Bunny, after his girlfriend and future wife, and decorated the
nose, rudder and wing tops with the distinctive color that inspired the
airmen’s nickname, the Red Tails.
He became the primary wingman to the fighter group’s commanding officer, Col. Benjamin O. Davis Jr., who later became the first black general in the Air Force.
Lieutenant Colonel Friend recalled at least two perilous missions, both in 1944.
Bullets
from his 50-caliber machine guns struck an oil barge in Germany,
detonating an explosion that nearly downed his own plane. A few days
later, flying at night in foul weather, with his plane hobbled by
mechanical flaws, he bailed out over a mountainous part of Italy. As he
hit the ground he spotted a woman running toward him brandishing a
knife.
It turned out, he told The Washington Post, that she was desperate only for the silk from his parachute.
Mr.
Friend and his fellow airmen were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
After the war, he studied astrophysics at the Air Force Institute of
Technology and business at the University of California, Los Angeles.
During
his 28-year military career, he also served as an operations officer
during the Korean and Vietnam wars; worked on the Titan, Atlas and Delta
rocket programs; and became an executive of two aerospace companies,
Stanford Mu and Fairchild Stratos.
His marriages to Doris (Bunny) Hall and Kathryn Ann Holland ended in divorce. His third wife, Anna (Rice) Friend, died in 2010.
His
survivors include two children from his first marriage, Thelma Hoffman
and Robert Jr.; three children from his second marriage, Michael, Debra
Carter and Dana Friend; a daughter from his third marriage, Karen
Crumlich; an adopted daughter, Clara Ann Browning, from his third wife’s
previous marriage; 18 grandchildren; 32 great-grandchildren; and 14
great-great-grandchildren. His son Darryl, from his second marriage,
died in 2002 while on active duty in the military.
The
adversity Lieutenant Colonel Friend encountered during the war came not
just from the enemy. He, like the others in his unit, had to deal with
the racism of fellow Americans. On one occasion, in Sicily, white
servicemen refused to share their quarters with African-Americans, he
told The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., in 2017.
But
he did not think of himself as a racial trailblazer so much as simply a
pilot fighting for his country, he said. “I never felt that I was
anything but an American doing a job,” he said.
No comments:
Post a Comment