eading toward integration of the Army. Like
Randolph and other activists, the committee quickly concluded that
segregation was a denial of equal treatment and opportunity and that
the executive order, therefore, was essentially a call for the (p. 617)
services to integrate. After lengthy negotiations, the committee
won from the Army an agreement to move progressively toward full
integration. Gradual integration was disregarded, however, when the
Army, fighting in Korea, was forced by a direct threat to the
efficiency of its operations to begin wide-scale mixing of the races.
Specifically, the proximate reason for the Army's integration in the
Far East was the fact that General Ridgway faced a severe shortage of
replacements for his depleted white units while accumulating a surplus
of black replacements. So pressing was his need that even before
permission was received from Washington integration had already begun
on the battlefield. The reason for the rapid integration of the rest
of the Army was more complicated. The example of Korea was persuasive,
as was the need for a uniform policy, but beyond that the rapid
modernization of the Army was making obsolete the large-scale labor
units traditionally used by the Army to absorb much of its black
quota. With these units disappearing, the Army had to find new jobs
for the men, a task hopelessly complicated by segregation.

The postwar racial policy of the Marine Corps struck a curious
compromise between that of the Army and of the Navy. Adopting the
former's system of segregated units and the latter's rejection of the
10 percent racial quota, the corps was able to assign its small
contingent of black marines to a few segregated noncombatant duties.
But the policy of the corps was only practicable for its peacetime
size, as its mobilization for Korea demonstrated. Even before the Army
was forced to change, the Marine Corps, its manpower planners pressed
to find trained men and units to fill its divisional commitment to
Korea, quietly abandoned the rules on segregated service.

While progressives cited the military efficiency of integration,
traditionalists used the efficiency argument to defend the racial
_status quo_. In general, senior military officials had concluded on
the basis of their World War II experience that large black units were
ineffective, undependable in close combat, and best suited for supply
assignments. Whatever their motives, the traditionalists ha