m the start,
the War Department encountered overwhelming difficulties in carrying
out the board's recommendations, and five years later the ultimate
objective was still out of reach.

Clearly, the majority of Army officers viewed segregated service as
the acceptable norm. General Jacob L. Devers, then commanding general
of Army Ground Forces, gave a clue to their view when he told his
fellow officers in 1946 that "we are going to put colored battalions
in white divisions. This is purely business--the social side will not
be brought into it."[6-36] Here then was the dilemma: Was not the Army a
social institution as well as a fighting organization? The solution to
the Army's racial problems could not be achieved by ignoring the
social implications. On both counts there was a reluctance among many
professional soldiers to take in Negroes. They registered acute social
discomfort at the large influx of black soldiers, and many who had
devoted their lives to military service had very real misgivings over
using Negroes in white combat units or forming new black combat units
because they felt that black fighters in the air and on the ground had
performed badly in the past. To entrust the fighting to Negroes who
had failed to prove their competence in this highest mission of the
Army seemed to them to threaten the institution itself.

[Footnote 6-36: Remarks by Gen J. L. Devers, Armored
Conference Report, 16 May 46.]

Despite these shortcomings, the work of the Gillem Board was a
progressive step in the history of Army race relations. It broke with
the assumption implicit in earlier Army policy that the black soldier
was inherently inferior by recommending that Negroes be assigned (p. 166)
tasks as varied and skilled as those handled by white soldiers. It
also made integration the Army's goal by declaring as official policy
the ultimate employment of all manpower without regard to race.

Even the board's insistence on a racial quota, it could be argued, had
its positive aspects, for in the end it was the presence of so many
black soldiers in the Korean War that finally ended segregation. In
the meantime, controversy over the quota, whether it represented a
floor supporting minimum black participation or a ceiling limiting
black enlistment, continued unabated, providing the civil rights
groups with a focal point for their complaints. No matter how hard the
Army tried to justify the quot