Edward C. Gleed

Edward Coleman Gleed was born on the seventeenth of June 1916 at Lawrence, Kansas, the son of Edward Gleed Sr. — a porter on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad — and Anne Margaret Gleed. The family relocated to Kansas City, Kansas in the early 1920s, and he was raised in the Black middle-class Kansas City of the inter-war period.

He took the bachelor’s at the University of Kansas at Lawrence in 1939 — having entered Kansas in 1935 — and was admitted at the closing months of 1940 to the United States Army Air Corps officer-procurement programme on his graduate-school deferment. He was accepted in May 1942 into the Tuskegee Army Air Field flight programme and graduated from the Tuskegee primary flight programme in November 1942 in the second flight class.

He was deployed to the 99th Fighter Squadron at the North African theatre under the command of Benjamin O. Davis Jr. (placed in this archive) in early 1943 and reassigned to the new 301st Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group at Selfridge Field, Michigan in the closing months of 1943. He was deployed with the 332nd Fighter Group to the Ramitelli airfield in Italy in March 1944.

He commanded the 301st Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group at Ramitelli from July 1944 through to the close of the European war in May 1945 — the principal command operational role of his war service. The 301st Squadron under Gleed’s command flew the principal Italian-and-southern-French long-range bomber-escort missions of the 332nd Fighter Group between July 1944 and May 1945.

He was credited with two confirmed enemy-aircraft destroyed — both Focke-Wulf Fw 190s at the southern French operation of August 1944 — and three probable kills. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak-leaf clusters and the Air Medal with eight oak-leaf clusters for the operational service.

He was named in July 1945 the deputy commander of the 332nd Fighter Group under Davis Jr., and held the position through to the demobilisation of the Group in October 1945.

He was retained in the post-war regular United States Air Force at the establishment of the independent Air Force in September 1947 and served the closing portion of the Air Force segregated period at the Lockbourne Air Force Base at Columbus, Ohio under the command of Davis Jr. He was one of the principal officers of the closing-period Black-only 332nd Fighter Wing at Lockbourne and one of the principal officers transitioned at the implementation of President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981 of the twenty-sixth of July 1948 into the desegregated Air Force.

He retired from the Air Force in 1970 as a colonel after twenty-eight years of regular service.

He died at the Veterans Administration Hospital at Mountain Home, Tennessee on the eighth of June 1990 of complications of cancer, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as a deputy commander of the 332nd Fighter Group.