Thirty-three years after his death, the Air Force finally makes Eugene Bullard an officer
Eugene Bullard flew fighters for France in World War I after the U.S. Army Air Service turned him away for his race. On August 23, 1994, 33 years after his death, the United States Air Force posthumously commissioned him as a Second Lieutenant. The ceremony finally recognized the man France had knighted and whose pilots called him "L'Hirondelle noire." His own country had refused to let him fly; decades later, it finally recognized him.
Bullard's posthumous commission is a reminder of what Jim Crow cost the American military: a combat pilot it refused, who then flew and fought for France instead. The 1994 ceremony did not undo the refusal. It put it on the record, decades late.
QWhat bet led Bullard to become a pilot in the first place?
While recovering from his Verdun wounds in 1916, Bullard reportedly took up flying because of a wager with fellow soldiers, not out of a lifelong ambition. He learned to fly during his convalescence, then volunteered for the French Air Service once he was fit enough to serve again. It explains why a wounded infantryman with no aviation background ended up in a cockpit at all. From that wager came more than twenty combat missions and a place in French aviation history.
QHow many French decorations did Bullard collect over his military career?
Fourteen. The French government awarded Bullard fourteen separate decorations and medals across his service, including the Legion of Honor, France's highest order of merit. That total reflects two separate wars: his infantry and aviation service in World War I and his intelligence work in World War II. No single American medal ever matched that count, since the U.S. military did not commission him at all until 1994. The number itself is a quiet measure of how thoroughly one country recognized him while another looked away.
QWhat was Bullard wearing when a national television audience finally saw him in 1959?
His elevator operator's uniform. When Dave Garroway interviewed Bullard on NBC's Today Show on December 22, 1959, the decorated former fighter pilot and French war hero appeared not in the wings France had given him, but in the work clothes of his day job as an elevator operator in a New York building. Two years later, in October 1961, he was dead, still without an American commission to his name.
