the
various offices of the Army staff. Although these agencies have
abandoned the system of classifying all documents by a decimal-subject
system, the system persisted in many offices well into the 1960's,
thereby enabling the researcher to accomplish a speedy, if unrefined,
screening of pertinent materials. Even with this crutch, the
researcher must still comb through thousands of documents created by
the Secretary of War (later Secretary of the Army), his assistant
secretary, the Chief of Staff, and the various staff divisions, (p. 627)
especially the Personnel (G-1), Organization and Training (G-3), and
Operations Divisions, together with the offices of The Adjutant
General, the Judge Advocate General, and the Inspector General. The
War Department Special Planning Division's files are an extremely
important source, especially for postwar racial planning, as are the
records of the three World War II major commands, the Army Ground,
Service, and Air Forces. Although illuminating in regard to the
problem of racial discrimination, the records of the office of the
secretary's civilian aide are less important in terms of policy
development. Finally, the records of the black units, especially the
important body of documents related to the tribulations of the 92d
Infantry Division in World War II and the 24th Infantry Regiment in
Korea, are also vital sources for this subject.

The records managers in the Office of the Secretary of Defense also
used the familiar 291.2 classification to designate materials related
to the subject of Negroes. (An exception to this generalization were
the official papers of the secretary's office during the Forrestal
period when a Navy file system was generally employed.) The most
important materials on the subject of the Defense Department's racial
interests are found in the records of the Office of the Secretary of
Defense. The majority of these records, including the voluminous files
of the Assistant Secretary (Manpower) so helpful for the later
sections of the study, have remained in the custody of the department
and are administered by the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary
of Defense (Administration). After 1963 the Office of the Deputy
Assistant Secretary (Civil Rights) and its successor organizations
loom as a major source. Many of the official papers were eventually
filed with those of the Assistant Secretary (Manpower) or have been
retained in the historical files of the Equ