Devotion: the true story behind a film about the navy’s first Black aviator

Jesse Brown was the original top gun – a navy fighter pilot whose heroism in the Korean war earned him the Distinguished Flying Cross, the loftiest award the US military pins on high fliers. That he was also the first Black pilot to pass navy flight training puts him in rarified air.

Brown, 24, never made it home. While supporting UN ground forces engaged in the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir in December 1950, Brown suffered artillery damage to his F4U Corsair jet and crash-landed in a remote mountain valley. When his wingman, Tom Hudner, saw Brown struggling to come unpinned from his cockpit afterward, he defied orders and intentionally crash-landed his plane nearby to help Brown. But in the end Hudner, after calming a fire on Brown’s plane and hacking away at