By Kevin Seabrooke

An investigative journalist for NPR and the daughter of one of the Tuskegee Airmen—the Black pilots who mostly flew as fighter escorts for America during WWII—the author follows the legacy of the 27 men who never came back.

Of those nearly 1,000 that flew over Europe, Thompson tells the stories of the 27 who went missing in combat, “the lives they lived, the reasons their planes went down, why the remains of all but two were never found, and the impact their disappearances had on their families and communities.”

More than 16,000 African Americans trained at Alabama’s Tuskegee Army Air Field. Some 996 of them were pilots and 352 of them were deployed to combat during WWII. The first class of cadets graduated on March 7, 1942.

The first African American fighter squadron to deploy overseas was the 99th Fighter Squadron. Later, the 332nd Fighter Group, the core of the famous “Red Tails,” was formed with the 99th, 100th, 301st, and 302nd Fighter Squadrons. The African-American 477th Bombardment Group also trained during the war, but did not see combat.

FORGOTTEN SOULS: The Search for the Lost Tuskegee Airmen (Cheryl W. Thompson, Dafina Books (Kensington Publishing Corp)-Dist. by Penguin Random House, 240 pp., Jan. 27, 2026 $30 HC)

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