Fifty-First Defense Battalion,
Fleet Marine Force, with indorsements and
attachments; Memo, CO, 51st Def Bn, for CMC, 20 Jul
44, sub: Combat Efficiency, Fifty-First Defense
Battalion. All in Ref Br, Hist Div, HQMC.]

Training for black units only emphasized the rigid segregation
enforced in the Marine Corps. After their segregated eight-week
recruit training, the men were formed into companies at Montford
Point; those assigned to the defense battalions were sent for
specialist training in the weapons and equipment employed in such
units, including radar, motor transport, communications, and artillery
fire direction. Each of the ammunition companies sent sixty of its men
to special ammunition and camouflage schools where they would be
promoted to corporal when they completed the course. In contrast to
the depot companies and elements of the defense battalions, the
ammunition units would have white staff sergeants as ordnance
specialists throughout the war. This exception to the rule of black
noncommissioned officers for black units was later justified on the
grounds that such units required experienced supervisors to emphasize
and enforce safety regulations.[4-30] On the whole specialist training
was segregated; whenever possible even the white instructors were
rapidly replaced by blacks.

[Footnote 4-30: Shaw and Donnelly, _Blacks in the
Marine Corps_, p. 31.]

Before being sent overseas, black units underwent segregated field
training, although the length of this training varied considerably
according to the type of unit. Depot companies, for example, were
labor units pure and simple, organized to perform simple tasks, and
many of them were sent to the Pacific less than two weeks after
activation. In contrast, the 51st Defense Battalion spent two months
in hard field training, scarcely enough considering the number of raw
recruits, totally unfamiliar with gunnery, that were being fed
regularly into what was essentially an artillery battalion.

[Illustration: GUN CREW OF THE 52D DEFENSE BATTALION _on duty, Central
Pacific, 1945_.]

The experience of the two defense battalions demonstrates that racial
consideration governed their eventual deployment just as it had
decided their organization. With no further strategic need for defense
battalions, the Marine Corps began to dismantle them in 1944, just as