e classification can be devised
to prevent easy access to sensitive material.

Thus, subterfuges were employed from time to time by officials dealing
with racial subjects. In some staff agencies, for example, documents
were collected in special files, separated from the normal personnel
or policy files. In other instances the materials were never retired
in a routine matter, but instead remained for many years scattered in
offices of origin or, less often, in some central file system. If some
officials appear to have been overly anxious to shield their agency's
record, they also, it should be added, possessed a sense of history
and the historical import of their work. Though the temptation may
have been strong within some agencies to destroy papers connected with
past controversies, most officials scrupulously preserved not only the
basic policy documents concerning this specialized subject, but also
much of the back-up material that the historian treasures.

The problem for the modern researcher is that these special
collections and reserved materials, no longer classified and no longer
sensitive, have fallen, largely unnoted, into a sea of governmental
paper beyond the reach of the archivist's finding aids. The frequently
expressed comment of the researcher, "somebody is withholding
something," should, for the sake of accuracy, be changed to "somebody
has lost track of something."

This material might never have been recovered without the skilled
assistance of the historical offices of the various services and
Office of the Secretary of Defense. At times their search for lost
documents assumed the dimensions of a detective story. In partnership
with Marine Corps historian Ralph Donnelly, for example, the author
finally traced the bulk of the World War II racial records of the
Marine Corps to an obscure and unmarked file in the classified records
section of Marine Corps headquarters. A comprehensive collection of
official documents on the employment of black personnel in the Navy
between 1920 and 1946 was unearthed, not in the official archives, but
in a dusty file cabinet in the Bureau of Naval Personnel's Management
Information Division.

The search also had its frustrations, for some materials seem (p. 626)
permanently lost. Despite persistent and imaginative work by the Coast
Guard's historian, Truman Strobridge, much of the documentary record
of that service's World War II racial history could not be loca