This Military Service Page was created/owned by
A3C Michael S. Bell (Unit Historian)
to remember
Young, Coleman Alexander, 2nd Lt.
If you knew or served with this Airman and have additional information or photos to support this Page, please leave a message for the Page Administrator(s) HERE.
Contact Info
Home Town Tuscaloosa, AL
Last Address Detroit, MI
Date of Passing Nov 29, 1997
Location of Interment Elmwood Cemetery - Detroit, Michigan
Young was born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama to Coleman Young, a dry cleaner, and Ida Reese Jones. His family moved to Detroit in 1923, where he graduated from Eastern High School. He worked for Ford Motor Company, which soon blacklisted him for involvement in labor and civil rights activism. He later worked for the United States Postal Service, where with his brother George started the Postal Workers union. George later went on to become Postmaster for this same facility, which handles over ten million pieces of mail each year. During the second World War, Young served in the 477th Medium-Bomber Group (Tuskegee Airmen) of the United States Army Air Forces as a bombardier and navigator. As a lieutenant in the 477th, he played a role in the Freeman Field Mutiny in which 162 African-American officers were arrested for resisting segregation at a base near Seymour, Indiana in 1945.
In 1960, he was elected as a delegate to help draft a new state constitution for Michigan. In 1964 he won election to the Michigan State Senate, where his most significant legislation was a law requiring arbitration in disputes between public-sector unions and municipalities.
The 477th was activated on 15 January 1944 at Selfridge Army Air Field, Michigan, about 40 miles from Detroit. Because the Army Air Force did not establish schools to train Blacks in the arts of navigation and bombardment until well into the war, the unit was starved for these crew specialties throughout its history. Pilots for the 477th were in greater supply, either from Tuskegee Army Air Field, or from the Mediterranean Theater. A small but significant number of the aviators in the 477th were veterans of the 99th and the 332d who had completed their combat tours and were voluntarily returning to the United States to become proficient in the B-25 and to return to combat.
The 477th, moreover, was born under a cloud, Army Air Forces Commanding General Henry H. (Hap) Arnold tried to abort the unit before it was born. It also had the misfortune to be assigned to a numbered Air Force (1st Air Force) that was commanded by an ardent racial segregationist, Major General Frank O. Hunter. He saw his role throughout the entire history of the 477th not as one of prepar4ing a unit for combat in a war with great stakes. Rather, he perceived his function as barring the Tuskegee Airmen from any respect from its leaders. Worse, and more importantly, he agreed to the illegal humiliation of the Tuskegee Airmen.
The 477th never entered combat because its commander, Colonel Robert E. Selway, was so bigoted that he drove more than 100 of the Black officers in his unit to mutiny. It was not that the Tuskegee Airmen were not capable of performing the medium bomber mission, it was that Selway who ran the 477th as a promotion mill for White aviators, would not associate socially with the Blacks in his unit (and by setting this negative example discouraged any other White from doing the same), denied the 477th the ideal conditions for training by moving the unit to an undesirable location, and segregated the men illegally. This last act provoked mutinous reaction from the Black aviators.
Selway reserved command of all four squadrons in the 477th for Whites, despite the fact that many of the Black veterans of the combat in Europe had more flying time and combat experience than some of the White commanders. It was until February that Selway had as many as 200 men in his Group, and this number included the first contingent of Black enlisted technicians. By 5 May 1944, 175 officers were assigned to the 477th out of an authorized strength of 290. The most acute shortages were in the navigator and navigator - bombardier specialties
On that same day Selway, without any advance notice to his men, ordered that people of the 477th to board trains to move to an unknown location, Selway concerned about race tensions in Detroit that had never affected his unit and despite the pressures of preparing a unit that he would lead into combat, moved the unit to Godman Army Air Field near Fort Knox, Kentucky. This base was completely inadequate for the 477th. Selfridge had four times more hanger space than Godman, seven times the acreage, five times the aviation gasoline capacity, more runways, and better flying weather. More to the point, Godman could not house the entire group at one time because it had inadequate apron and hanger space. It was a bad move and it was done for racial reasons. It seriously delayed the 477th training program and damaged morale.
Although the 477th was authorized 128 navigators and navigator-bombardiers, by 14 October 1944, more than nine months into the program, only 23 had arrived and only half of the authorized 176 pilots had been assigned. The air crews constantly repeated routine proficiency missions, but could undertake no combat crew training. This fact lowered morale. The 477th meanwhile had an exceptional safety record. Their first aircraft accident, a landing mishap during a squall, came after the 14,000 flying hour mark. General Hunter twice commended the unit for its "exceptionally low accident rate." Between mid October and mid-January 1945, 84 new bombardiers and 60 new pilots arrived, but the unit was not fully manned and the bombardiers ere only partly trained. By mid-January, despite the fact that the 477th was not fully manned, combat crew training began. But then the winter weather closed in and flyable hours were reduced by 60 percent. Despite the poor flying weather, the unit in its first year accumulated 17, 875 flying hours with two minor accidents, neither attributable to crew error.
World War II
From Month/Year
December / 1941
To Month/Year
December / 1946
Description Overview of World War II
World War II killed more people, involved more nations, and cost more money than any other war in history. Altogether, 70 million people served in the armed forces during the war, and 17 million combatants died. Civilian deaths were ever greater. At least 19 million Soviet civilians, 10 million Chinese, and 6 million European Jews lost their lives during the war.
World War II was truly a global war. Some 70 nations took part in the conflict, and fighting took place on the continents of Africa, Asia, and Europe, as well as on the high seas. Entire societies participated as soldiers or as war workers, while others were persecuted as victims of occupation and mass murder.
World War II cost the United States a million causalities and nearly 400,000 deaths. In both domestic and foreign affairs, its consequences were far-reaching. It ended the Depression, brought millions of married women into the workforce, initiated sweeping changes in the lives of the nation's minority groups, and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life.
The War at Home & Abroad
On September 1, 1939, World War II started when Germany invaded Poland. By November 1942, the Axis powers controlled territory from Norway to North Africa and from France to the Soviet Union. After defeating the Axis in North Africa in May 1941, the United States and its Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943 and forced Italy to surrender in September. On D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allies landed in Northern France. In December, a German counteroffensive (the Battle of the Bulge) failed. Germany surrendered in May 1945.
The United States entered the war following a surprise attack by Japan on the U.S. Pacific fleet in Hawaii. The United States and its Allies halted Japanese expansion at the Battle of Midway in June 1942 and in other campaigns in the South Pacific. From 1943 to August 1945, the Allies hopped from island to island across the Central Pacific and also battled the Japanese in China, Burma, and India. Japan agreed to surrender on August 14, 1945 after the United States dropped the first atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Consequences:
1. The war ended Depression unemployment and dramatically expanded government's presence in American life. It led the federal government to create a War Production Board to oversee conversion to a wartime economy and the Office of Price Administration to set prices on many items and to supervise a rationing system.
2. During the war, African Americans, women, and Mexican Americans founded new opportunities in industry. But Japanese Americans living on the Pacific coast were relocated from their homes and placed in internment camps.
The Dawn of the Atomic Age
In 1939, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President Roosevelt, warning him that the Nazis might be able to build an atomic bomb. On December 2, 1942, Enrico Fermi, an Italian refugee, produced the first self-sustained, controlled nuclear chain reaction in Chicago.
To ensure that the United States developed a bomb before Nazi Germany did, the federal government started the secret $2 billion Manhattan Project. On July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert near Alamogordo, the Manhattan Project's scientists exploded the first atomic bomb.
It was during the Potsdam negotiations that President Harry Truman learned that American scientists had tested the first atomic bomb. On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay, a B-29 Superfortress, released an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan. Between 80,000 and 140,000 people were killed or fatally wounded. Three days later, a second bomb fell on Nagasaki. About 35,000 people were killed. The following day Japan sued for peace.
President Truman's defenders argued that the bombs ended the war quickly, avoiding the necessity of a costly invasion and the probable loss of tens of thousands of American lives and hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives. His critics argued that the war might have ended even without the atomic bombings. They maintained that the Japanese economy would have been strangled by a continued naval blockade, and that Japan could have been forced to surrender by conventional firebombing or by a demonstration of the atomic bomb's power.
The unleashing of nuclear power during World War II generated hope of a cheap and abundant source of energy, but it also produced anxiety among large numbers of people in the United States and around the world.
