best for all concerned. "In general, the
Negro is less well educated than his brother citizen that is white,"
General Eisenhower told the Senate Armed Forces Committee in 1948,
"and if you make a complete amalgamation, what you are going to have
is in every company the Negro is going to be relegated to the minor
jobs ... because the competition is too rough."[24-6]

[Footnote 24-6: Quoted in Senate, Hearings Before the
U.S. Senate Committee on Armed Services, _Universal
Military Training_, 80th Cong., 2d sess., 1948, pp.
995-96.]

Competence in a great many skills became increasingly important for
servicemen in the postwar period as the trend toward technical
complexity and specialization continued in all the services.
Differences in recruiting gave some services an advantage. The Navy
and Air Force, setting stricter standards of enlistment, could fill
their ranks with high-scoring volunteers and avoid enlisting large
groups of low-scoring men, often black, who were eventually drafted
for the Army. While this situation helped reduce the traditional
opposition to integration in the Navy and Air Force, it made the Army
more determined to retain separate black units to absorb the large
number of low-scoring draftees it was obligated to take. A major
factor in the eventual integration of the Army--and the single most
significant contribution of the Secretary of Defense to that (p. 619)
end--was George Marshall's decision to establish a parity of
enlistment standards for the services. On the advice of his manpower
assistant, Anna Rosenberg, Marshall abolished the special advantage
enjoyed by the Navy and Air Force, making all the services share in
the recruitment of low-scoring men. The common standard undercut the
Army's most persuasive argument for restoring a racial quota and
maintaining segregated units.

[Illustration: BOOBY TRAP VICTIM _from Company B, 47th Infantry,
resting on buddy's back, awaits evacuation_.]

In the years from 1946 to 1954, then, several forces converged to
bring about integration of the regular armed forces. Pressure from the
civil rights advocates was one, idealistic leadership another. Most
important, however, was the services' realization that segregation was
an inefficient way to use the manpower provided by a democratic draft
law or a volunteer system made democratic by the Secretary of Defense.
Each servi