Charles E. McGee

Charles Edward McGee was born on the seventh of December 1919 at Cleveland, Ohio, the son of the Reverend Lewis Allen McGee — a Methodist Episcopal minister — and Ruth Lewis McGee. He was raised across the parsonage Methodist postings of his father in Ohio, West Virginia and Illinois through the first eighteen years of his life.

He was placed at the DuSable High School at Chicago and at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for two years between 1940 and 1942 in engineering before being called up in October 1942 to the United States Army Air Corps and assigned to the Tuskegee Army Air Field flight programme.

He completed the Tuskegee single-engine primary flight programme in June 1943 and was commissioned a second lieutenant of the United States Army Air Forces.

He was assigned in February 1944 to the 302nd Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group and deployed with the Group to the Ramitelli airfield in southern Italy. He flew across the closing year of the European war one hundred and thirty-six combat missions in the Curtiss P-40 Warhawk, the Republic P-47 Thunderbolt, and the North American P-51 Mustang — predominantly bomber-escort missions over the Italian, southern French and Balkan theatres.

He was retained in the post-war regular United States Air Force at the close of the war and was deployed to the Korean War from June 1950 with the 67th Fighter-Bomber Squadron of the 18th Fighter-Bomber Wing at the Korean theatre. He flew across the Korean War one hundred combat missions in the North American F-51D Mustang and the Republic F-84 Thunderjet.

He was deployed to the Vietnam War from December 1967 with the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron at the Tan Son Nhut Air Base, South Vietnam, and flew across the Vietnam War one hundred and seventy-three combat-reconnaissance missions in the RF-4C Phantom II. The combined three-war total of four hundred and nine combat missions was at the close of the Vietnam War the highest combat-mission count of any United States Air Force pilot.

He was awarded across the three wars the Legion of Merit with two oak-leaf clusters, the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak-leaf clusters, the Bronze Star, and the Air Medal with twenty-five oak-leaf clusters.

He retired from the United States Air Force on the thirty-first of January 1973 as a colonel after thirty years and three months of regular service.

He took the post-Air-Force career between 1973 and 1978 as the director of the airport at Kansas City Downtown Airport, Missouri.

He was promoted to brigadier general of the United States Air Force by retroactive honorary commission on the fourth of February 2020 — at the Tuskegee Airmen Eightieth Anniversary Commemoration — and was the principal surviving Tuskegee Airman of the closing years of his life.

He died at Bethesda, Maryland on the sixteenth of January 2022 of natural causes, at one hundred and two.

He is honored here as the highest combat-mission Tuskegee Airman.