d reached
the wrong conclusion from their data. They were correct when they
charged that, despite competent and even heroic performance on the
part of some individuals and units, the large black combat units had,
on average, performed poorly during the war. But the traditionalists
failed, as they had failed after World War I, to see the reasons for
this poor performance. Not the least of these were the benumbing
discrimination suffered by black servicemen during training, the
humiliations involved in their assignments, and the ineptitude of many
of their leaders, who were most often white.

Above all, the postwar manpower planners drew the wrong conclusion
from the fact that the average General Classification Test scores of
men in World War II black units fell significantly below that of their
white counterparts. The scores were directly related to the two
groups' relative educational advantages which depended to a large
extent on their economic status and the geographic region from which
they came. This mental average of servicemen was a unit problem, for
at all times the total number of white individuals who scored in
low-aptitude categories IV and V greatly outnumbered black individuals
in those categories. This greater number of less gifted white (p. 618)
servicemen had been spread thinly throughout the services' thousands
of white units where they caused no particular problem. The lesser
number of Negroes with low aptitude, however, were concentrated in the
relatively few black units, creating a serious handicap to efficient
performance. Conversely, the contribution of talented black servicemen
was largely negated by their frequent assignment to units with too
many low-scoring men. Small units composed in the main of black
specialists, such as the black artillery and armor units that served
in the European theater during World War II, served with distinction,
but these units were special cases where the effect of segregation was
tempered by the special qualifications of the carefully chosen men.
Segregation and not mental aptitude was the key to the poor
performance of the large black units in World War II.

[Illustration: AMERICAN SAILORS _help evacuate Vietnamese child_.]

Postwar service policies ignored these facts and defended segregation
in the name of military efficiency. In short, the armed forces had to
make inefficiency seem efficient as they explained in paternalistic
fashion that segregation was