itically
impossible for the Air Force to do away with its black flying units,
and it became economically impossible in a time of shrinking budgets
and manpower cuts to operate separate flying units for the small group
of Negroes involved. It was also unfeasible, considering the small
number of black rated officers and men, to fill all the positions in
the black air units and provide at the same time for the normal
rotation and advanced training schedules. Facing these difficulties
and mindful of the Navy's experience with integration, the Air Force
began serious discussion of the integration of its black pilots and
crews in 1947, some months before Truman issued his order.

Committed to integrating its air units and rated men in 1949, the Air
staff quietly enlarged its objectives and broke up all its black
units, thereby making the Air Force the first service to achieve total
integration. There were several reasons for this rapid escalation in
what was to have been a limited program. As devised by General Edwards
and Colonel Marr of the Air staff the plan demanded that all black
airmen in each command be conscientiously examined so that all might
be properly reassigned, further trained, retained in segregated units,
or dismissed. The removal of increasing numbers of eligible men from
black units only hastened the end of those organizations, a tendency
ratified by the trouble-free acceptance of the program by all
involved.

The integration of the Army was more protracted. The Truman order in
1948 and the Fahy Committee, the White House group appointed to
oversee the execution of that order, focused primarily on the
segregated Army. There is little doubt that the President's action had
a political dimension. Given the fact that the Army had become a major
target of the President's own Civil Rights Commission and that it was
a highly visible practitioner of segregation, the equal opportunity
order would almost have had to be part of the President's plan to
unite the nation's minorities behind his 1948 candidacy. The order was
also a logical response to the threat of civil disobedience issued by
A. Philip Randolph and endorsed by other civil rights advocates. In a
matter of weeks after Truman issued his integration order, Randolph
dropped his opposition to the 1948 draft law and his call for a
boycott of the draft by Negroes.

It remained for the Fahy Committee to translate the President's order
into a working program l