All the Tuskegee Airmen flew pursuit planes and many of them were already overseas in Italy when Irons and Wilkerson arrived.
“They had proven themselves,” Irons said. “The military figured blacks could fly bombers too.”
The B-25, the type of bomber to which most blacks were assigned, required a five-man crew, consisting of two pilots, a navigator, a bombardier and a flight engineer. Irons was sent to Texas to become a flight engineer.
“It was my first Christmas away from Chicago Heights, away from my family and away from my best friend Wilk,” Irons remembered.
In Tuskegee, Wilkerson was training to be a pilot. In Texas, Irons was in school all day, learning every inch of the plane. But Irons remembered learning just as much about segregation as he did about the Boeing B-17.
“Being black and in Texas, we had to stay in Section O, which was where all the black soldiers stayed,” Irons said. “If we went to the PX (post exchange), we could only go to the black section. If we went to the movies, we had to sit in a section for blacks. It didn’t feel great, but we overcame it. It made us that much stronger.”
https://patch.com/illinois/chicagoheights/louis-melvin-irons-from-chicago-heights-to-tuskegee-and-back