Most of the characters were fictitious composites of real pilots. However, Benjamin "B.O." Davis was very much a real person and was depicted accurately.
The character Lewis Johns (Mekhi Phifer) recites "Strange Fruit" to his fellow recruits to describe lynchings in the South in the first half of the 20th century. "Strange Fruit" is a song sung by Billie Holiday from 1939 which in turn was a poem written by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish teacher in The Bronx in 1936, under the pen name of Lewis Allen, after he witnessed the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana, in that year.
Cuba Gooding Jr. also starred in Red Tails (2012). It picks up pretty much where this film ended, with the pilots in Europe and their plight in trying to get meaningful assignments.
The footage used when the crews are viewing the sinking of the destroyer, which also appears in the TV series Los tigres voladores (1976), is footage of a Japanese destroyer rather than a German one.
The silver color of the PT-17 biplane trainer aircraft (properly known as the Kaydet but commonly called the Stearman) is correct for the time when the Tuskegee Airmen were training. The attractive blue and yellow paint scheme displayed on most Kaydets today is from before WWII.