George Hardy, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who was one of the last surviving combat veterans of the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black squadron in the segregated U.S. military during World War II, and who subsequently flew 45 mission in the Korean War and 70 in the Vietnam War, died Wednesday in Sarasota, Florida. He was 100.

His death, at his home, was announced by the national office of the veterans organization Tuskegee Airmen Inc.

Hardy, a Philadelphia native, was 19 and had never even driven a car when he began aviation cadet training in September 1944 at Tuskegee Army Air Field in Alabama. By early the next year, in the closing months of the war in Europe, Hardy, then a second lieutenant, was assigned to an Army Air Forces base in Italy, from which he flew 21 missions accompa

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