Lee Archer

Lee Andrew Archer Jr. was born on the sixth of September 1919 at Yonkers, New York, the son of Lee Andrew Archer Sr. — a Yonkers porter and railway employee — and Maude Archer, a domestic. The family moved to Harlem in 1928 and he was raised at the corner of 134th Street and Lenox Avenue across the inter-war period of the Harlem Renaissance.

He was placed at six at the Harlem Public School 121 and at Dewitt Clinton High School at the Bronx, completing the secondary education there in 1937. He took two years at the New York University College of Arts and Sciences from 1937 to 1939 in social-sciences and was unable to complete the bachelor’s for lack of tuition funds.

He was admitted in March 1942 to the United States Army Air Corps and assigned to the Tuskegee Army Air Field for advanced flight instruction. He completed the Tuskegee single-engine primary flight programme in July 1943 — first in the class of fifty-two cadets.

He was deployed with the 302nd Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter Group to the Ramitelli airfield in southern Italy in February 1944 and served the 302nd Fighter Squadron at the Italian, southern French and Balkan theatres from February 1944 through to the close of the European war in May 1945.

He flew across the operational period one hundred and sixty-nine combat missions and was credited with five confirmed enemy-aircraft destroyed — three Messerschmitt Bf 109s and two Focke-Wulf Fw 190s — across two bomber-escort missions of the autumn of 1944. The fifth victory of the twelfth of October 1944 over the southern Hungarian airfield at Lake Balaton elevated him to the formal ace status under the Army Air Forces five-victory threshold.

The Army Air Forces postwar archival research conducted by the United States Air Force Historical Research Center across 2007–2009 confirmed Archer as the only confirmed Black fighter ace of the United States Army Air Forces in the Second World War — the principal earlier candidate Joseph Elsberry having been confirmed at four confirmed victories with one disallowed kill on review.

He was awarded across the operational period the Distinguished Flying Cross with two oak-leaf clusters, the Air Medal with eighteen oak-leaf clusters, and the French Légion d’honneur in 2008.

He was retained in the post-war regular United States Air Force and served the closing portion of the Air Force segregated period at Lockbourne Air Force Base, Ohio under Davis Jr. (placed in this archive).

He retired from the Air Force in 1970 as a lieutenant colonel after twenty-eight years of regular service. He took the second career between 1970 and 1990 as a senior officer at the General Foods Corporation at White Plains, New York, rising to vice-president of strategic planning.

He died at Manhattan on the twenty-seventh of January 2010 of complications of cardiac arrest, at ninety.

He is honored here as the only Black ace of the Army Air Forces.