he integration of the United States Army was not accomplished by
executive fiat or at the demand of the electorate. Nor was it the
result of any particular victory of the civil rights advocates over
the racists. It came about primarily because the definition of
military efficiency spelled out by the Fahy Committee and demonstrated
by troops in the heat of battle was finally accepted by Army leaders.
The Army justified its policy changes in the name of efficiency, as
indeed it had always, but this time efficiency led the service
unmistakably toward integration.

_Race and Efficiency: 1950_

The Army's postwar planners based their low estimate of the black
soldier's ability on the collective performance of the segregated
black units in World War II and assumed that social unrest would
result from mixing the races. The Army thus accepted an economically
and administratively inefficient segregated force in peacetime to
preserve what it considered to be a more dependable fighting machine
for war. Insistence on the need for segregation in the name of
military efficiency was also useful in rationalizing the prejudice and
thoughtless adherence to traditional practice which obviously played a
part in the Army's tenacious defense of its policy.

An entirely different conclusion, however, could be drawn from the
same set of propositions. The Fahy Committee, for example, had clearly
demonstrated the inefficiency of segregation, and more to the point,
some senior Army officials, in particular Secretary Gray and Chief of
Staff Collins, had come to question the conventional pattern.
Explaining later why he favored integration ahead of many of his
contemporaries, Collins drew on his World War II experience. The major
black ground units in World War II, and to a lesser degree the 99th
Pursuit Squadron, he declared, "did not work out." Nor, he concluded,
did the smaller independent black units, even those commanded by black
officers, who were burdened with problems of discipline and
inefficiency. On the other hand, the integrated infantry platoons in
Europe, with which Collins had personal experience, worked well. His
observations had convinced him that it was "pointless" to support
segregated black units, and while the matter had "nothing to do with
sociology itself," he reasoned that if integration worked at the
platoon level "why not on down the line?" The best plan, he believed,
was to assign two Negroes to each squad in the Arm