In May 1949, the United States Air Force held its first ever Fighter Weapons Meet — the original Top Gun competition. The Chief of Staff sent a directive to every fighter group in the Air Force: send your three highest-scoring pilots. The 332nd Fighter Group, composed of Tuskegee Airmen, had the scores. They were invited. They flew to Las Vegas Air Force Base — now Nellis — in P-47N Thunderbolts, an aircraft that had already been rendered obsolete. Their competitors flew P-51 Mustangs and F-82 Twin Mustangs, superior aircraft by every technical measure. No one expected the 332nd to win. That expectation was the point.
Captain Alva Temple, First Lieutenant James Harvey, and First Lieutenant Harry Stewart flew five events over several days: aerial gunnery at 12,000 and 20,000 feet, dive bombing, skip bombing, rocket firing, and panel strafing. In skip bombing — a hair-raising maneuver performed six to ten feet off the ground, releasing a bomb so low it skipped along the surface to hit the target — Temple scored six for six. Stewart scored six for six. Harvey scored six for six. In rocket firing, Temple went six for six again. When the final scores were tallied, the 332nd Fighter Group had won the Air Force’s first Top Gun competition. They were the best combat pilots in the United States Air Force.
The award ceremony was held at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas — Bugsy Siegel’s casino, the only major hotel that would accommodate the Black airmen. When the winner was announced, the room went silent. The other pilots did not applaud. James Harvey later described the atmosphere: the competitors had not believed the 332nd was real competition. They were Black, flying obsolete aircraft, and they were not supposed to win. Harvey felt the tension clearly. “They knew who won,” he said decades later, “but did not want to recognize us.” The team was presented with a three-foot silver trophy and photographed with it at the Flamingo. Then the trophy disappeared. For fifty-five years, the Air Force’s official records listed the winner of the 1949 Fighter Weapons Meet as unknown.
The 332nd Fighter Group was disbanded in July 1949 — weeks after the competition — following President Truman’s 1948 order to integrate the armed forces. Its members were scattered to units across the Air Force. The trophy vanished into the institutional machinery of a military that had just been forced to integrate and had no interest in celebrating the achievement that had demonstrated, with documented scores and a silver trophy, that Black pilots were the best in the service. The Air Force Association’s annual almanac, which listed the winners of every Weapons Meet from 1949 forward, recorded the 1949 winner as unknown for decades. Not until 1995 — when Colonel Harry Stewart returned to Nellis Air Force Base, located the records, and presented the documentation to Air Force officials — was the 332nd Fighter Group listed as the winner in the almanac. The correction came forty-six years late.
Historian and Tuskegee Airmen chapter president Zellie Rainey Orr made it her mission to find the trophy itself. After five days of searching in 2004, she found it in the storage area of the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. It was not on display. It was not catalogued as a significant artifact. It was in storage. James Harvey, by then in his eighties, said of the trophy: “It has been in hiding fifty-five years.” The trophy was finally placed on display in 2004. In January 2022 — seventy-three years after the competition — Nellis Air Force Base unveiled a commemorative plaque honoring the 332nd Fighter Group’s victory. At the ceremony, Lt. Col. James Harvey, then 98 years old, was present. The room, this time, applauded.