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Instead, he played piano at enlisted men’s clubs in Japan and Hawaii, composing ditties deriding officers and senior noncoms in his unit.

While relatively secure from civilian harassment in their barracks, mess halls and training exercises, the Tuskegee Airmen were still subjected to discrimination by white officers and noncoms on and off the base.

The neatly dressed soldier shrugged and asked the noncom who worked with him.

A year later, as American troops clung to the Italian beachhead at Anzio in some of the war’s bloodiest fighting, the sergeant and two other noncoms in his unit won battlefield commissions as second lieutenants.

A colonel came down the beach with his entourage, exhorting the noncoms and junior officers to re-form and improvise squads.