Wendell Pruitt

Wendell Oliver Pruitt was born on the twentieth of June 1920 in Saint Louis, Missouri, the youngest of the ten children of Elijah and Melanie Pruitt. He came of age in the segregated Black Saint Louis of his day, attending Sumner High School before studying at Stowe Teachers College and then Lincoln University in Jefferson City, from which he graduated in 1941. While a student he earned his private pilot's license at the Jefferson City airport — a first reach toward the sky that would define him.

Accepted into the Army Air Corps flying school at Tuskegee, Pruitt was commissioned a second lieutenant in December 1942 and assigned to the 302nd Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group. Carried to the Mediterranean theatre, he flew first the P-47 Thunderbolt and later the P-51 Mustang, and joined the ranks of the Tuskegee Airmen who broke the color line of American military aviation under fire.

In June 1944, over Trieste harbour in northern Italy, Pruitt and his wingman Gwynne Walker Peirson pressed home strafing runs that struck an enemy destroyer, which sank — a feat that earned Pruitt the Distinguished Flying Cross. Paired with Lee Archer as the celebrated "Gruesome Twosome," he flew some seventy combat missions, was credited with three aerial victories, and rose to the rank of captain, gathering the Air Medal with several Oak Leaf Clusters.

Returned home to train the pilots who would follow him, Captain Pruitt died on the fifteenth of April 1945 when a training aircraft he shared with a student cadet crashed near the Tuskegee field. He was twenty-four. His name endures in the city that raised him and in the enduring honor of the Tuskegee Airmen. May his courage keep its altitude in memory, as it did in the sky.